The problem is that the explosive growth of the global economy has not brought a corresponding increase in global well being.  To the contrary, in large degree the opposite has occurred.

In conventional economic terms, the gap between the well off and everyone else has broadened, both between countries and within individual ones. At the same time, the quest for this global expansion had brought about degradation of the habitat at an accelerating pace.

Whether or not these trends are necessary in theory, they have occurred in practice; and the inner dynamic of corporate globalism is such that they are not likely to change.  That much is the accepted critique in the leftward camp.  But the problem actually goes deeper. and this part is crucial. Increasingly the system is failing on its own terms.  It is not delivering well being even to those it statistically benefits.

The reason is that much that goes under the euphemistic terms “growth” and “progress” actually is regress in statistical disguise. This goes far beyond the manufactured wants of the 1950s and ‘60s, of which John Kenneth Galbraith wrote.  It goes beyond too the new research on human happiness, and how stuff does not increase it beyond a certain – and relatively modest – amount.

We are looking now at an economic process that creates actual pathologies that people then resort to more buying to solve.  This is not a trip to the mall, however superfluous, however prompted by advertising, and however little it might add to actual happiness.

It is buying that most people gladly would forsake if they could, but which this thing we call “the economy” pretty much compels them to do.

For example, one of the fastest growing parts of the U.S. economy is medical care.  Much of that growth in turn is a response to the epidemic of market-related disease in the form of cancer, obesity, stress and the like.  Create the problem and then sell a remedy for it.

This is not economy but diseconomy – prosperity with an ironic twist. It is an iatrogenic spiral that is playing out in an ever-enlarging swath of the economy at large.

The thing we most need is need itself; and it is the thing the US now produces most prolifically and best. We are paying a toll not just in individual health, but also in the breakdown of the social economy that serves needs the corporate market can’t.   Community breakdown has become systemic; as have, paradoxically, loneliness and isolation in this most wired age.  Stress has become the trademark affliction of an age of unmatched prosperity as reckoned in conventional terms.

Ecological depletion increasingly is matched by a psychological and social kind.  All of this complicates the challenge of addressing inequality, and in a fundamental way. The presumed remedy, for much of the last century, has been to grow the economy faster.   This, along with redistributive policy, would bring prosperity to the masses and solve whatever ailed the middle class.

But built-in problems of distribution aside, the old theory can’t work, because an increase of economic dysfunction just means more of it. The actual content of the economy no longer corresponds to the tendentious abstractions used to describe it. Increasingly goods are no longer good and services no longer serve. A redistribution of illth isn’t doing anyone any favors.

This is a problem for which conventional economic reasoning has no answers, because that reasoning has no way even to cognize it.  There is not even a language – no term for illth for example — in the textbook script.  The possibility that monetary expenditures can be anything but benign does not exist.  There are externalities, which are unfortunate consequences for those not party to a transaction.  But there is no corresponding concept of internalities; which is to say, unfortunate consequences for the buyer him or her self.

This is something new in the history of market economics – namely, systemic diminishing returns. It is not just a particular product or industry that is reaching the limits of its own utility, but the system as a whole.  This goes way beyond inequality of distribution to the nature of that which is to be distributed more adequately.

Statist remedies are no more an answer than are the conventional liberal ones, because those have delivered the worst of both worlds – material inadequacy, mal-distribution, and externality up the kazoo. They are a worse path to the old goal rather than a better path to a new one. The old question was whether to have more or less government.  Ultimately it went to the ownership of the means of production.

The new question goes deeper, to the nature of production in an era in which need itself is the engine that drives the economy onward, with grim consequences for the earth and for those who inhabit it.

Production of the traditional kind must continue of course.  But more and more there is a parallel need not to produce in the conventional sense; but rather to rely more on the innate productivity of nature and society outside of both market and governmental structures. At the same time there is a need to turn that natural productivity into a means of sustenance for the most needy, as well as greater well being for all.

It sounds contradictory, even absurd.  It is that, given the assumptions and strictures of conventional economic thought.  But once those yield, new things become possible.  It becomes possible for example to introduce a new/old kind of property into the economic script — common property, which is neither public nor private in the conventional sense.

Property is not neutral.  Different kinds of property are encoded to achieve different results. Common property can be encoded in a way that helps reconcile what appear to be the conflicting aims of greater adequacy for the poor and husbandry of the habitat for the long haul.  It can start to replace the diseconomy of illth with a new kind of productivity. The result can be an economy that helps to replenish psychological and social resources rather than continually depleting them.

Part II The Commons Wealth Solution

A. Inequality or Something Else?

Inequality is not the problem in and of itself. If Jack makes twice as much as Joe does, or even ten times as much, that is not a problem for Joe so long as Joe and his family have enough, and so long as their lives are not worse because Jack and others like him have so much more.

But too many Joes of the world do not have enough; and contrary to the accepted view, the increasing gap between the Jacks and themselves makes it less likely that the inadequacy will be erased.  The gap leads moreover to a host of pathologies even for those who are not deprived in material terms.

There are many manifestations, from the malfunctioning of democracy to an erosion of individual health.  Perhaps most basic is the broken feedback loop that diminishes the possibility that such problems will be addressed. When those of greatest influence are cut off from the problems they create for the rest of us, those problems are likely to persist.

The inconvenience of capital gains taxes has been the object of much legislative solicitude in recent years.  The problem of usurious credit card interest rates for ordinary Americans has gotten just about none.  Estate taxes have been the object of incessant whining and wailing.  The lack of an estate – taxable or otherwise – on the part of a majority of Americans, gets little attention if any.

This is broken feedback, and a symptom of what happens when the gap between the most influential persons in a society and everyone else becomes too endemic and large.  To put this another way, the reason to address inequality is not gratuitous leveling or class envy.  The aim is sufficiency for all  rather than absolute equality; and also social and ecological health of a kind that has legs for the long haul.

B. Redistribution vs Pre-distribution

There is a pervasive belief that the concept of social supports took root in the US during the New Deal.  In some quarters, this belief comes with an angry corollary; namely that the result was dependency and servitude that have afflicted the national character ever since.

This is total myth.  Systemic social supports go back to the first New England colonies, and beyond that to the England from which those settlers came.  But these were different from the New Deal version, because economic circumstances were different. They were based not on the redistribution of income, but rather on the pre-distribution of the wealth – common wealth – from which the entire society drew.

In other words, provision for the needy was built into the prevailing notions of property itself.  In England it took the form of the commons, which was the portion of the domain available to those who were not owners for agriculture, hunting, fishing, foraging and the like.  This was not a handout but rather a traditional right for the property-less to obtain their sustenance through their own toil.

The early colonists brought a version of this system with them to the New World.  It was not common field agriculture, but rather the conviction that forests, streams, waterfronts and the like were to some degree common for purposes of sustenance, even if a private owner held legal title to them.  This was not the view of a radical fringe.  James Madison introduced the bill in the Virginia state legislature that declared unfenced forests a commons for this purpose.

Vestiges of this view persisted to some degree.  The Morrill Act for example dedicated specific portions of the public domain to the support of land grant colleges. But on the whole the role of the commons declined, and not always for admirable reasons.  In the South for example the woodland commons had supported the slaves during their long bondage.  After emancipation the white ruling class sought to re-subordinate the former slaves by closing that commons and thereby take away a source of their economic independence.

But the main reason was that the nation became urban, and no one ever figured out how to translate the traditional economic role of the commons to an urban setting.  The New Deal was in part a gesture in this direction.  As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out, the New Deal really was a belated response to urbanization.  On the farm families had a built-in safety net.  When the cash economy crashed there was a measure of self-sufficiency.  There also was a refuge for those from the city \who had fallen on hard times. (One sees this today in a country such as the Philippines.)

But as fewer Americans lived on the farm or had parents who did, this safety net ceased to exist.  The financial supports of the New Deal were a rough substitute.  But they went only so far.  They filled in to some degree for the family farm; but they didn’t replace the common woodland that stood beyond it.   There was a redistribution of income; but not much by way of pre-distribution of common wealth.

This is the unfinished business, and something the Founders of this country – the more reflective ones at least – knew was coming.  As William Appleman Williams points out in The Contours of American History, Madison brooded over the problem of economic equity in a republic.  The West would provide an outlet of opportunity; hence the crucial role of expansion in their general outlook.  But what would happen when that space filled up?

Madison knew that expansion merely put off the day of reckoning.  But there was no other answer, at least within the framework of the Founders’ thought.  (Thomas Paine had some thoughts on the subject.)  This is a main reason that the closing of the frontier a century later was so traumatic.  Now, the closing of the ecological frontier a century after that, combined with the systemic diminishing returns of the corporate market, and its gradual descent into an iatrogenic spiral, have made the solution of that conundrum not only imperative, but also – unlikely as this may seem – more possible.

C. Pre-Distributive Economics

1. Monetized Common Wealth

a. Atmosphere and other natural resources – income from conservation

b. Site values, parking space and other social resources – recapture of socially-created value

c. Copyrights, patents, airwaves –  replenish the common pool.

2. Direct Sustenance from the Natural Commons –

a. Hunting and fishing,

b. Community gardens

3. Direct Sustenance from the Social Commons

a. Time Dollars and reciprocal exchange

b. Neighborhoods, main streets and the social synergies of design

I’d been hearing about Wal-Mart’s efforts to mend its ways, offering energy efficiency, zero waste, organic cotton, and even organic food. It all seemed so unlikely—a little like walking into Fox News’ offices and finding a wing devoted to The American Prospect—that I wanted to see for myself. (My son, who is 8, was more interested in the Wal-Mart exclusive Nerf gun.)

Not much has changed since our last visit several years ago, visibly at least. There are some T-shirts made with organic cotton; I buy one to send a market message. The display of compact fluorescent bulbs is impressive. Beyond that, the new offerings aren’t the dramatic shift the publicity suggests. But most of Wal-Mart’s new efficiencies, such as fuel savings in the truck fleet and recycling of store scrap, are not obvious to shoppers yet, anyway.

There is little doubt, moreover, that more environmentally friendly product changes are coming. All of which creates dissonance of the first order and a conundrum for those who care about the human prospect. Localism, at a company that enshrined the “China price”—the price that other suppliers have to match—and at which instructions regarding shelf placement come down from the corporate headquarters in Bentonville? Conservation, at the global giant whose very being is premised upon hyper-consumption, sprawl, and waste? (My son, whose friends buy toys here, says Wal-Mart’s motto should be “Costs less, breaks sooner.”)

Kierkegaard urged us to cultivate a healthy sense of paradox, but this truly is a stretch. We think about Stonyfield Farm yogurt in Wal-Mart’s refrigerator cases and Seventh Generation detergent on the shelves. Then we think about the traffic and the employees whose kids are on public assistance (over 40 percent in some states) because the company pays so little. We also think about the local merchants this chain and others have displaced and the sheer power of this behemoth to bend the world to its will.

But what if that bend were in the direction of ecological efficiency? Would the power still be so bad? Gary Hirshberg, the CEO of Stonyfield Farm recalls a gathering of manufacturers in China. When the Wal-Mart representative spoke, Hirshberg says, it was as if they were hearing their master’s voice: “You could have heard a pin drop.” The U.S. president doesn’t get that kind of respect.

There is a camel’s nose and a tent here, but it is not clear which is which. Most remarkable, though, is that we are talking about Wal-Mart and compact fluorescents to begin with. Not that long ago, the focus would have been the company’s Third World–style labor practices and superstores that put local merchants out of business. Wal-Mart’s embrace of ecology, sincere as it may be, was not uncontrived. Rather, it has been part of a larger public-relations effort to upstage those troublesome questions.

The effort has substantially succeeded. By Wal-Mart’s own reckonings, in 2006, it ranked in the sub-basement among retail outlets in “global reputation.” Today, it is near the top, and some of the nation’s major environmental groups are standing at its side. This gives the conundrum yet another twist. Is the complicity of the Environmental Defense Fund and others the latest evidence of the failure of the environmental movement to conceive of an ecology in which people truly matter—ordinary workers in particular? Or is it a necessary “bargain with the devil,” as one green activist put it, that will hasten environmental breakthroughs, problems and all?

* * *

Rohnert Park is Part of the Santa Rosa sprawl and a last outpost of affordable housing in what is called the North Bay. Many service workers from neighboring Marin County live up here. Not coincidentally, this Wal-Mart is the last until the other side of San Francisco.

In between is prime retail territory, but for most of Wal-Mart’s history, that fact didn’t much matter. The hinterlands offered plenty of room as well as accommodating county councils and workforces that knew their place. By the early 2000s, however, that game was over. New Wal-Mart stores were cannibalizing existing ones, and the only path of domestic growth lay in the cities. That meant zoning and permit battles, messy racial and ethnic politics, and also environmental sensibilities the company used to be able to ignore.

Wal-Mart’s record wasn’t going to help. Recent lawsuits had made it a synonym for abuse of workers. (The case charging blatant discrimination against women was filed in San Francisco in 2001. The company epitomized sprawl and waste and the flight of factory jobs to China. The consulting firm McKinsey & Company had found in 2005 that somewhere between 2 percent and 8 percent of Wal-Mart customers had stopped shopping there for such reasons. Smaller rivals such as Costco and Target were prospering on these troubles.

Wal-Mart went to Edelman, a tony global flack house that specializes in what it calls “reputation management.” (Previous clients included tobacco companies and the American Petroleum Institute.) It was not long before the Astroturf appeared, in the form of a group called Working Families for Wal-Mart. The group supposedly sent a couple—“Jim and Laura”—on the road to talk with Wal-Mart employees and blog about the conversations, which were unfailingly positive.

It came out later that Wal-Mart itself had paid for the excursion and that “Laura” was the sister of an Edelman employee who was working at Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville. Richard Edelman, the company chair, clarified the situation thus: “I do believe that it is a real group of real people, as far as I know.”

Other gambits were more successful. Then-CEO Lee Scott appeared at a press conference in 2007 with Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union to support universal medical insurance. The company also supported the extension of the Voting Rights Act. (This didn’t stop it from lavishing campaign cash upon Republicans who opposed both.) Edelman enlisted right-wing bloggers to spin the company’s post–Hurricane Katrina good deeds: Corporations work and government doesn’t.

Wal-Mart enabled customers to buy some 300 generic drugs for $4 a prescription. Recently, the company—or more precisely, Edelman—scored a coup when it got Michelle Obama to announce a joint healthful food initiative. It did not escape notice that the partnership came just as Wal-Mart was gearing up for battle over its expansion plans in New York City, nor that one part of the healthful eating program was building Wal-Mart stores in inner-city “food deserts”—communities lacking quality grocery stores.

As it pursues its reputational management, Wal-Mart has not just its own considerable resources but also those of the company foundation, which shares the corporate website. The foundation has invested strategically in such groups as the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the National Council of La Raza, the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and National Public Radio, all of which have received half a million dollars or more. (The Wal-Mart Foundation also gave $10,000 to the 10th anniversary gala of Demos, with which the Prospect is affiliated.)

The foundation also has attended to the small-town base. An example is Wal-Mart Teacher Rewards, through which 10 teachers in selected schools— some 40,000 teachers in all—get $100 each for classroom supplies. The credits and Sam’s Club. Typically, local papers run glowing accounts, with pictures of happy teachers. The effort would be more impressive, though, if Wal-Mart didn’t challenge its property-tax assessments in localities like these.

A 2007 study by Good Jobs First found that each year, the company makes formal appeals on more than a third of its stores and on 40 percent of its distribution centers. These have resulted in tax reductions that averaged $40,000 and $289,000, respectively. A county assessor in Arkansas named Dan Hurst Jr. who resisted these efforts told The New York Times that starting in 2003 Wal-Mart sent a trio of lawyers and a couple of accountants to beat him down, to no avail, as it turned out.

Hurst said he knew Sam Walton, the late company founder, personally. “I’m sure he would not approve,” Hurst said, of these attempts to take back money “that goes for our kids’ schools.”

The local stories generally did not mention such tempering considerations. More important, by 2009, the high-level narrative was changing, too, from fallen giant to corporate rebirth. The fulcrum of this shift had a tantalizing unlikeliness. “The company that democratized consumption,” The New York Times enthused in January 2009, with historical liberties, “has begun to democratize environmental sustainability as well.”

* * *

The start of Wal-Mart’s environmental push in 2005 did not suggest deep commitment. Activist groups were targeting the company. Management wanted to forestall more bad publicity. The Edelman executive on the Wal-Mart account was Leslie Dach, who had worked at the Audubon Society and then the Environmental Defense Fund before he went into Democratic politics—serving Edward Kennedy’s staff in 1980 and then Michael Dukakis’ in 1988—and later corporate public relations. Dach has since joined Wal-Mart full time, where, among other promotional duties, strategies is to “co-opt your would-be attackers.” In late 2004, Wal-Mart’s top management duly hosted a group of the company’s critics in Bentonville, and then-CEO Scott promised to explore their recommendations. As his managers dug in, they discovered an unexpected affinity. When you stripped away the eco-talk, this really was about cutting waste and getting the maximum value from every ounce of resources.

This was Wal-Mart’s wheelhouse, practically its self-definition. The company had been squeezing workers from the beginning. Now, it could demand more productivity from energy and materials as well. It could bully the supply chain as before, only in a different way—and one that made environmental groups euphoric. A number of the major organizations—the Rocky Mountain Institute, the World Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund, and others—signed on as advisers.

There was a rich irony. For years, such groups had sought to tilt the economy toward environmental ends through arcane pricing schemes—energy taxes, carbon trading, and the like. They had lectured on the evils of the old, regulatory “command and control” approach, as opposed to this elegant new “market based” model. Now, they were at the epicenter of the corporate market, at the ear of its retail monarch, and it turned out to be another version of command and control.

What Wal-Mart wanted it got, and because the retailer dealt with almost 60,000 suppliers, its potential impact was hard to overstate. “Being able to say to farmers in the Central Valley, ‘If you do this, we will buy your stuff’—that’s how you change the world,” says Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm.

An early example of green efficiency was Wal-Mart’s decision to carry only extra-concentrated laundry detergents. From a business standpoint, the smaller packages meant more units per shipping palette and thus, lower transportation costs. From an ecological standpoint, the reduction in water use alone would equal about 100 million showers a year. “Lee [Scott] pushed me,” says A.G. Lafley, former-CEO of Proctor and Gamble, “and we totally, totally changed the way we manufacture liquid detergents, and now around the world.”

If Proctor and Gamble could be brought to heel, anything was possible. Efficient LED lights in parking lots and in freezers, where they would emit less heat. Packaging for vegetables made of plant-based plastic. Pet beds and litter pans made from old plastic hangers and bottles. Rebecca Calahan Klein, who, as head of the Organic Exchange, helped guide Wal-Mart into organic cotton (and who was not paid by Wal-Mart), observes that, unlike many other companies, Wal-Mart embraced this work for real. Managers were evaluated in part on their ability to wring productivity from energy and materials. “The commitment came from the top,” Klein says.

* * *

Critics express a wary and sometimes grudging respect for Wal-Mart’s environmental efforts. Former CEO Scott “got religion,” says Michael Marx, executive director of Corporate Ethics International, who helped organize the campaign that Scott was trying to deflect. He adds a caveat, though. Wal-Mart “was willing to do the things that clearly made money.” The problems lie outside that self-defined realm.

For one, the vaunted ability to drive the supply chain has a double edge, especially where workers are concerned. When Wal-Mart added groceries in Southern California, the existing stores there, such as Albertsons and Safeway, had to demand major concessions. Wal-Mart drives the market not just for products but for wages as well.

It also drives toward a scale that corresponds to its own. Stonyfield Farm may have to buy powdered organic milk from New Zealand to meet the demand from Wal-Mart as well as from Whole Foods. Wal-Mart “pushes us to factory farms,” Marx says. “The humane, organic factory farm does not exist.”

Wal-Mart’s deliberate co-opting of major environmental groups, moreover, has diminished an important counterweight. Someone needs to verify claims and point to problems not addressed. The big environmental groups should maintain a capacity for “arm’s length critical analysis,” says Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and author of Big Box Swindle. Instead, they have become “so much in Wal-Mart’s pocket.” When I contacted the Rocky Mountain Institute, founded by Amory Lovins, a spokesperson said there would be no comment on Wal-Mart because of a “client relationship.”

Much lies outside the company’s own ecological cost cutting: the parking lot and traffic, the sprawl and waste, the fate of the employees and the social ecology generally. One estimate found that Wal-Mart’s own growth could cancel out the efficiencies that it achieves. In fairness, Wal-Mart is not alone in all this. I asked Marx whether Target is really any better. “Not at all,” he replied. Target’s progress has been largely in Wal-Mart’s “slip stream.”

Conscientious environmentalists are wrestling with these tensions. Jeffrey Hollender, the founder and former CEO of Seventh Generation, the household-products company, agonized before he finally agreed to sell in selected Wal-Mart stores. When I asked how he justified it, his response was much like that of Rebecca Calahan Klein and others with whom I spoke. A pause, a sigh, and then reflections on the theme of doing what you can with the world as it is.

“The business model of Wal-Mart was not designed by Wal-Mart,” Hollender said. “It was adapted by them as it has been by most American corporations.” Wal-Mart simply does a better job of playing the game (and, of course, using its weight to keep the rules the way it likes them), he added. “We need to put as much energy into understanding the disastrous design of the economic system as we do in challenging individual practitioners of that system.”

Jonathan Rowe was author of several books, a longtime contributing editor to The Washington Monthly, and a contributor to RemappingDebate.org. He died after a short, acute illness on March 20, just as this article was going to press.

Put all this into a small town setting that pits us against friends and neighbors, and it might prompt musings about pre-retirement in Guam. There are warning signs already. The situation could go downhill fast, unless our better natures prevail.

Probably you know the story by now. A group of parents whose kids are at or nearing school age want to create a charter school within the West Marin School. It appears that the separate school would be based on the Waldorf approach, possibly with a bilingual component. It would be funded with moneys that would come off the top of the Shoreline District budget. Only a certain number of kids, as yet undetermined, would get to go.

On the positive side, the proponents are both idealistic and determined. They have done a great deal of work, and embody what could be a healthy impulse to local schooling. On the down side, they are disconnected from what actually is happening at West Marin School, and haven’t thought through the consequences of their idea. At a community briefing at the Dance Palace last week, the proponents went from a video critique of schools in general by a British educational consultant, directly to their charter plan.

There was nothing in between. I got the sense that West Marin School does not exist for them as an actual place, but rather as a projection screen for the failures of schools and society in general. There was also an unfortunate insinuation about the rest of us. As in, “We think West Marin School is doing a wonderful job. But we want our kids to be creative.” Or words to that effect.

Waldorf is a big topic. Some kids thrive in it, others don’t. The conceptual underpinnings can be captivating; the cultish tendencies around them, less so. But philosophy is not the point. I once spent a couple of days with John Taylor Gatto, the legendary New York City teacher who quit and became a leading advocate of home schooling. John was teaching at a junior high school at the edge of Harlem at the time. He had to shove file cabinets against the doors before class, to keep intruders out.

Then he worked his magic. Somehow, he made American history come alive to kids who didn’t otherwise feel much connection to it. This was not because of a particular philosophy—he didn’t have one. It was rather because teaching for John was a passion, almost a primal need; and because he had an instinct for his kids and for the possibilities of the moment.

In the end it comes down to committed teachers, and West Marin has many excellent ones, especially in the early grades that are most at issue. A number of these teachers were at the meeting last week, and it was painful to watch them get a lecture on the need for creativity in the classroom. Shall we next admonish Alice Waters on the importance of local and organic food?

We almost lost a couple of our best last spring because of budget cuts. It took a grueling battle to save them, and we are bracing for another fight this year. California’s $15 billion deficit isn’t going to help. Nor would a new charter school that took a chunk off the top of the Shoreline District budget. Yet we are told that the Shoreline Board will have to approve a charter petition regardless, if it meets
the legal requirements.

If West Marin School had 500 students and ample funds, I suspect most of us would say, “Let the flowers bloom.” But a small school in a small community is different. The West Marin School is a rich demographic ecosystem—rich but fragile. The sons and daughters of doctors and landscape workers, native English speakers and kids who start school speaking hardly any, learn and play together.

There are problems of course. But on the whole things work surprisingly well.

One of my proudest moments as a parent was the day my son came home from first grade and told us he was trying to play with a classmate in Spanish, because that boy had trouble with English.

The energies are symbiotic. For example, several days a week, while the native English speakers learn Spanish, the kids from Spanish speaking households get extra help in English. Classes generally are small and friendships are important. Start to pull pieces out, separate the kids, and the whole starts to collapse.

The other evening at the library I saw a girl in our son’s third grade class whose home had burned not long before; the family is still looking for a place to live. There she was with her mother, doing homework. We see that tenacity a lot. Families are struggling against language and other challenges, and I cannot support anything that might take resources from them. (Yes, some Latinos could get into the new charter. But a greater number likely would be left out.)

About ten days later, the community gathered at the Dance Palace for a fund- raiser for that same family. There was food, music, festive spirits, and I was thinking, how about this as a model for improving the schools? Why not be additive rather than subtractive? We could leave our shoes—our opinions and preconceptions, angers and resentments—at the door, and deal with the problems that confront our kids and their school as they actually are.

Perhaps we could add Waldorf concepts, and even language immersion. (State law is tough on “bilingual” ed, but there is always room between the lines.) We could raise money for special programs. We also could include ELAC, the Latino parents group, from the start. Their kids are half the school. They certainly should have a voice.

No one would get everything they wanted. But that’s the difficult glory of a public school, and learning to get along is part of education too.

In place of wealth, the economic machinery increasingly turns out what John Ruskin, the 19th Century essayist on art and economics, called “illth,” which is accumulation that fosters ill results rather than towards weal, or well-being.This is not just a matter of distribution, which is the traditional concern of the Left. Inequitable distribution is a major problem, to be sure, and becoming more so. But to redistribute illth is not necessarily to do anyone a great favor.

The destructive tendencies of the modern corporate market are much noted, in a scattered and fragmentary way. The environmental movement, “smart growth” advocates, Wal-Mart critics, opponents of the corporate cooption of university research, and of patents on genes – each has a piece of the story. Each speaks from an awareness that the market is going too far.

Yet there is no contemporary master narrative that unifies such movements; nor a challenge to market fundamentalism that does not carry echoes of old, discredited ideology. The economic problem is not markets per se. To the contrary, markets can be spontaneous and flexible; and can provide an outlet for enterprise and creativity. Most of us would not want to live without them, in some form. The problem is that the modern corporate market—which is very different from small scale local ones — has exceeded the boundaries of its own usefulness. Much of what is called “growth” today actually is a form of cannibalization, in which the market consumes that which ultimately sustains us all.

The Economic “We” replaces “Me”

Over the past two centuries, a central challenge of humanity has been to fill the void of material scarcity, and we have succeeded to some extent;. There is now enough food and other products to meet most human needs if they were distributed more adequately. That’s the challenge of the current century; and it’s not just a question of rejiggering the market. It also means reconstructing of the commons, both natural and social, which is the fundamental source of sustenance and well-being. The air, water and sunshine; libraries and language and the legacies of science – without these and much else like them, there will be scarcity and collapse no matter how hard the market churns.

The commons exists outside the typical definitions of the market and the state. It is not simply a negative to the market’s positive; it is a parallel economy that does real work—often the most important work. Without clean air to breathe, for example, or a common fund of knowledge to serve as feedstock for invention and the arts, human society would grind to a halt, as would life itself. Yet the commons is functionally invisible today. Economists disparage it as a relic of benighted times, and extol private property rights as the key to human progress. The media pretty much ignores the commons, except for bits and pieces, and politicians do as well.

The reigning mental map looks something like this: a prolific market on one side, a repressive – though sometimes necessary – government on the other, families off in a corner someplace, and little of significance around or between. The conventional economic indicators, such as the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, actually portray the destruction of the commons as economic growth and gain. The more we turn forests into timber, the atmosphere into a dump, quiet into noise and childhood into a marketing free-fire zone, the better the “economy” is doing, according to the GDP and the belief system it embodies.

In this economic script, the commons has been assigned the role of housekeeper. It does the unglamorous but essential work, and gets little recognition or support. Consigned to this conceptual netherworld, it is constantly subject to expropriation, despoliation and abuse. As with low-paid factory workers in developing countries, the supply supposedly is inexhaustible. No matter how much the commons gets cannibalized, there always will be more, or so the thinking goes. The conventional economic mind simply cannot acknowledge that there is more to life – more to an economy – than the market; and that the growth of the market might mean the diminution of something else.

So long as the only choice is between a voracious market and a regulatory state, we will be stuck in a demoralizing downward spiral. We need to get beyond the market/state duality, open the windows and let in some fresh air. In particular we need an economics that embodies the “we” side of human nature, as a counterweight to the market’s unrelenting “me.”

This is not a utopian romance. It’s happening already, all around us. Intuitively, without outward orchestration, people are turning to the commons on a wide range of issues, to do what the corporate market and state can’t.

Reinventing Economics

The commons is much more than a polemical framing device. It is a social dynamic that – like the market concept — helps to explain how the world works. In particular, the commons sheds light on a crucial element of both natural systems and human society that have been shunted to the periphery – namely the capacity of individuals to cooperate, which the conventional economic models systematically ignore. The structure of online software networks, the dynamics of natural ecological systems, the social dimensions of creativity – these operate in ways that are counter to the so-called “laws” of economics. To talk about the commons, in other words, is to talk about a different kind of economics – one that both underlies the market and an alternative way of meeting human needs.

In the formulations of both left and right, the market is the central focus. The right wants to protect and expand it; the left wants to regulate and adjust it. But for all their differences they agree over the centrality of the thing itself. The commons is the third force that unsettles that view. The role of government becomes not just to regulate the market and provide services the market doesn’t; but to also support this third realm much as it does the market itself .

This changes the economic calculus in a fundamental way. A market-based society channels us into the roles of “owners,” “workers,” or “consumers,” and the media follows suit. Either we make stuff or we buy it – that’s the extent of our permitted economic function. The commons, by contrast, gives expression to a side of our natures that is not limited to selling and buying.

Conventional economists dismiss the commons as inherently “tragic” and prone to overuse. That was the argument of Garrett Hardin a biologist, in an influential essay published in Science magazine in 1968. Yet Hardin hadn’t actually studied commons; and his “tragedy thesis” was largely wrong, as he himself conceded late in his life. In fact, commons have worked wonderfully where there have been formal rules or an informal social structure to govern access and use. In our times, it is the corporate market that increasingly fits the definition of tragic. It has a fatal character flaw – namely, an incapacity to stop growing. No matter how much it grew yesterday it must continue to do so tomorrow, and then some; or else the machinery will collapse.

There is no sufficiency principle, no ability to say “enough.” Every last scrap of material, every last inch of earth, every last iota of human attention and experience, must become a commodity in order to feed the market maw. There is no other option. A system that supposedly embodies “choice” in the end doesn’t give us any. The mechanism grinds on, out of synch with both the natural systems that sustain it and the needs of the humans who comprise it. “Prosperity” becomes another word for ecological and social dysfunction, and a staggering increase in illth.

This dysfunction is a daily experience for most of us. Yet for most economists it does not exist. In their view an increase of expenditure is by definition an increase in well-being, so there is no need to inquire further. To the contrary, problems make the GDP go up. Cancer begets costly cancer treatments; stress leads to the consumption of prescription drugs, and on and on.

Is Everything for Sale?

One of the signal failures of market culture is the inability to declare what is not for sale. On the whole, as a society we reject the idea that babies, votes, or body parts should be bought and sold like soybeans. But these are aberrations from the general rule that everything is legitimately for sale One principle of a commons-based society, by contrast, is that certain things are off limits to the market — the air we breathe, the languages we speak, and the genetic information of which our bodies are composed, to name a few.

As the market continues its relentless creep, a host of new devices have arisen to reestablish boundaries. The Creative Commons licenses for music, film, and other creative works allow for the free sharing and distribution of content without legal rigmarole. In effect they turn copyright on its head: you can use so long as you agree to share. In a similar manner, the General Public License in software development has prevented companies from “taking private” software code intended by its inventors to be available to everyone. In the realm of physical space, land trusts have provided a way to protect land from developers, and to make it available as parks and open space instead.

We cannot flourish without relationships insulated from the demands of money, contracts and ownership. Yet for many years, the reigning Western view has assumed that human happiness is to be found through precisely those things. It has seen the production of stuff – called, revealingly, “goods” – as a sort of escalator that conveys people to ever-greater heights of fulfillment and well-being.

Ample new research, however, has demonstrated what most of us know from experience: beyond a certain threshold of material comfort, more stuff just doesn’t provide much enjoyment. These studies – which draw on the work of psychologists, sociologists, and economists, among others — also show that the happiest people tend to be those who are most engaged in the lives of others. The commons is the economic realm that promotes relationships rather than stuff.

This is true as much for the impoverished as for the affluent. Apologists for the corporate market often accuse critics of being elitists who want to deny the world’s poor the comforts and conveniences that they themselves enjoy. This misses the point. The gap between the very rich and everyone else is increasing rapidly under the market monoculture. The commons serves as an equalizer – a source of sustenance and support for those the market leaves behind. Those without financial means are more exposed to polluted air and water than wealthy people are. They are more likely to use the commons for sustenance activities, such as hunting and fishing; and they depend more upon the help of neighbors, and upon libraries and parks.

Who creates wealth?

In 2004, a reserve first baseman for the Boston Red Sox sullied the sweet moment of the team’s first World Series victory in 85 years, when he claimed ownership of the ball he used to make the last out. It was a sad commentary on a grabby age; and it raised a couple of crucial questions: Who exactly created the monetary value of that ball (which could fetch millions), and why should the person who just happened to be holding it at the end of the game be entitled to all its value?

These questions are highly inconvenient to the reigning economic thinking. Yet they need to be asked. The value of a business, resource, historic baseball or whatever does not reside solely in the thing. Nor does it arise from the efforts of an entrepreneur alone. Value is, rather, a co-production between an individual, society and nature; and the latter two often play the larger part. Land values, for example, are almost entirely a social product. That’s why two acres near an urban freeway exchange or subway stop can fetch more than does an equal amount of land in the middle of a desert.

The question is less what the owner did, than what others did around him, individually and through government. So, too, with music, inventions – just about everything. These accomplishment draw on what was done before, and depends on the sustaining presence of society as a whole. Even stocks would have little value without stock markets through which to sell them, and without governments to police – to some degree – those markets These are social creations all.

Once we acknowledge the social component of economic value, then discussion of financial return and social policy take a new turn. Taxation, for example, no longer is a matter of “redistributing” someone else’s income, or wealth, but rather of restoring a portion of it to the rightful owners. The acknowledgment of social co-production also dissolves the myth of the heroic individual businessman or woman. Individuals do great things; but as Warren Buffet – who knows something about making money – has pointed out, none do it alone.

Current beliefs about economic freedom emerged in the West during the 17th and 18th centuries, when entrepreneurs were challenging the remnants of feudalism, and private property stood as a symbol of freedom against arrogant royal rule. But as often happens, yesterday’s answer became today’s problem. Today it is private property, as embodied in the corporation, that has become arrogant. The solution is not an all-encompassing state – the authoritarian “we” that has been the reactive refuge of the Left. Regulation there must be; but there must also be a different kind of property – common property – that exists alongside the market, providing a buffer against its excesses and producing what the corporate market can’t.

As market culture intrudes ever-deeper into daily life—from public spaces to the inner lives of kids— there is a yearning for space that is beyond the reach of of buying and selling. People might not use the word “commons;” but they seek increasingly what it represents – community, freedom, and the integrity of natural and social processes.

Russell Kirk, the intellectual progenitor of modern conservative thought, marked these as central tendencies of what he called the “conservative mind.” (Kirk would not be pleased by what claims that banner today, but that’s another matter.) We revere the land and take a dim view of change, and if those are not conservative inclinations, then nothing is.

Unlike the conservatism that prevails in Washington, ours is not pliant to moneyed interest or calculated for political advantage. It represents the strange fate that befalls the progressive in a commercial culture that turns everything into a commodity for gain. Yet this does not exempt us from the karmic conundrums that attend efforts to resist change or turn back the clock. Nor does it make us immune to the blind spots that can occur when a sense of virtue is wrapped up too tightly in the preservation of a status quo, even an ecological one.

Create a national park, restore a wetland, and people want to drive out here to partake of them. Start to create a local food economy, and more people come who are less interested in the landscape than in the food. The town fills with cars. Parking becomes a problem. A place in which ecology is practically a religion becomes, on summer weekends, a hot spot on air pollution maps.

We locals become a little cranky and walk around with a debate inside our heads. We like our neighbors who have started the ventures that help attract these crowds. We want them to succeed. We support local economy, organic food, all of it. Yet each success takes us a little further from what we thought we wanted to be—or at least from what this place used to be. It also drives up real estate prices, so that people who made the community what it is can no longer afford to be part of it.

It is not a new dilemma—the failure of success. But it has a particular and ironic twist in a place where people thought they were going to be different. It eats at us, the way our certitudes keep colliding; and this is what makes local points of contention—a footbridge over a creek, or an oyster farm on Tomales Bay—so symbolically hyper-charged, almost like conflicts in the Middle East. The disagreements are over competing versions of good and therefore become projection screens for the tensions that beset us not just from the outside, but from inside as well.

Walking—good. Sustainable aquaculture—good. Local food economy—good. How do such goods become bads? It is hard enough to battle developers. Now the fight is over objects of our own desire too. We feel a need to draw a line. But where, and how—especially when we are part of what we have to draw the line against?

We build our homes at the edge of this stunning landscape— well, let’s call the spade here, in this stunning landscape. Then we get our backs up at those who would intrude upon it with their footsteps, or a sustainable livelihood, or a second unit that enables the owner to afford the first. We create our own understated and ecologically responsible versions of better homes and gardens, and then wonder why the town cannot remain forever the rough-edged remnant of the Old West it still is in our minds.

As somebody once put it, the one who builds the house is the developer; the one who lives in it is the environmentalist. Yet we are not unself-conscious people. The paradoxes—I put this gently—of our oppositions rest uneasily in us, along with the awareness that we are a privileged group to begin with—we who oppose privilege on principle—just for being here. We find ourselves a little like those people who, in middle age, begin to suspect that they have become the parent they rebelled against, and that their rebellion somehow binds them to that parent all the more.

****

This quandary is not new to me. From the time I first came to West Marin 15 years ago, I have felt that I had walked back into a drama I’ve been through before. I spent my teen years at the tip of Cape Cod, which is as far east as Point Reyes Station is west. My mother’s husband was an artist-craftsman who owned a shop—and later apartments—in Provincetown, where the land ends, and from which the next stop is England. The Pilgrims landed there before they went on to Plymouth.

P’town, as it is called, is a compact little village along a narrow strip between the bay and the dunes. Physically and geographically, it is very different from West Marin. The Cape at that point is less than two miles wide; the open spaces are out to sea. History overhangs the place in the form of a tower that commemorates the Pilgrim landing.

And yet P’town in those days was similar too. The traditional economy was based on food. Where we have cows, P’town had fish. More precisely, it had a fishing fleet that worked the bay and the Georges Banks beyond. The old-timers were Portuguese fishermen, tough, swarthy guys who went out for a week or more and who still walked barefoot down Commercial Street in winter. As out here, there were decaying remnants of a railroad. It had once carried the fish to Boston, which is 120 miles by land, though only about 50 by sea.

What P’town shared most with West Marin was a sense of being beyond the pull of social constraint. It was a separate world; you could go for years without a coat and tie. Artists and writers were drawn to the rustic authenticity where they were close enough to Boston and New York for a quick visit to a publisher or gallery. Eugene O’Neill started the Provincetown Playhouse. Norman Mailer, Stanley Kunitz, and a host of others followed.

What drew them drew another group as well —- gays, who came in summer droves and let it all hang out in ways they couldn’t even in New York back then. The result was a mélange like no place else. There was traditional P’town, embodied in the fishing fleet and Portuguese Bakery, with its flipper bread and tangy soup. And then there was Mr. Kenneth with his hat shop; the female impersonator lounge singer at the Crown and Anchor Inn; the lesbian bar called the Ace of Spades, which jutted out into the bay and from the deck of which throaty laughter could be heard late into the night; and the Atlantic House down the alley where the homo-erotica in the men’s room could make even a gay sailor blush. A town council dominated by people with names like Santos and Cabral looked upon it all with a Mediterranean shrug. (The business brought to their bars and restaurants didn’t hurt.)

It was a rich mix, and a fragile one. As with so many places, P’town was done in by what made it so attractive; its uniqueness turned on itself. The tourist shops metastasized. Fudge became more prevalent than fish. The gay self-presentation became more circus-y and contrived. Wooden cottages were spiffed up. Rough turned into quaint; the nooks and crannies of affordability disappeared. The year-round population diminished; merchants had fewer customers in the winter months. Meanwhile, artists without trust funds could no longer pay the rents—nor could very many others.

If the shoe doesn’t fit enough already, there’s more. Outside of town, a new national park—the Cape Cod National Seashore—made the lower Cape (the end furthest out, though also the furthest north) all the more attractive, and the existing real estate all the more valuable. The park saved a precious landscape—within its boundaries. Outside them, development came like mange. The marsh across the road from the Goose Hummock outdoor shop in Orleans, which I passed on my way to school each day, is now the Cranberry Cove Plaza. You could be anywhere. Much of the Cape is that way now. It pains me to go back.

In the parts that aren’t spoiled, moreover, an Aunt Sally landscape has replaced the Huck Finn version—preserved, but with a precious quality, and woe to him or her who tracks dirt across the rug. Deer hunting season used to be a little like a Jewish holiday in New York, with empty desks at Nauset High School. Now the woods are houses. The guys go to New Hampshire to hunt. There was a dune colony just outside of P’town, near Pilgrim Lake, where adventuresome souls lived off the grid in summer in driftwood shacks. The Park Service took it down.

The dune colony was a little like the summer encampment at White House Pool, halfway between Point Reyes and Inverness, where young people in the 1960s took refuge when they had to relinquish their winter rentals to the owners. The informal campsite couldn’t happen now; and what is relief to some is a sense of loss to others, leaving us with a nagging question as to whether there might have been another way—one that maintained our rougher edges and the social dimension of our landscape.

****

That Cape experience helped to shape my conservative side, in the Kirkean sense. Washington conservatives see evil mainly in government and in a teeming penumbra of Communists, gays, Muslims, and liberals that never give them rest.  I see evil more in money — not money itself but the love of it, the cupidity, which threatens always to ruin that which is precious and beyond price.

That weighs on me when I see development creeping out from Petaluma, Fairfax, and Novato, and the story poles that go up periodically around town, and when I think about the potential ripples from an upgraded Grandi Building in Point Reyes Station. When I watch the parade on Western Weekend, I flash back to the P’town equivalent, the annual Blessing of the Fleet. It is still a celebration, if anything louder and more garish than before. But there is no more fleet, just a sad assemblage of rusting hulks at the town pier. The fish market there once did a brisk business. Town kids dived for coins nearby. Now they are gone; and it is hard not to wonder whether our ranches will go the same way and the pick-ups in town become mainly exurban accoutrements for the hauling of landscaping equipment and organic garden supplies.

Edmund Burke, that proto-conservative, worried about the unique local cultures that the Jacobins of the French Revolution would destroy with their rationalistic planning. The real estate market is a Jacobin by other means. Yes, the bulwarks here are stronger than they were on the Cape. We have county planning and the Coastal Commission, where the Cape back then had neither. Still, money doesn’t sleep, and plenty of damage can be done within the existing “envelope,” as the planners call it.

But then I remember the kid—myself—whose family lived on tourists, as did most of the people I knew. My mother and her husband were at the shop until 9:00 or 10:00 every night. I worked on a golf course and in a grocery store where the customers were tourists too. “The season,” as we called it, ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day—three months in which to make the nut for the year. There was gloom at the dinner table on rainy weekends, and even more when the bad weather stretched on for days.

That memory tempers my annoyance now at the traffic. Cars mean customers, and something besides spaghetti on the dinner table. I find myself asking merchants in town how the season’s going. I hope they don’t think I’m nosey; part of me thinks I’m still one of them. There is grumbling in town about the tourists. We grumbled too—about the ones who pawed the merchandise, and let their kids run wild, and never bought anything. My mother’s husband had a thing about the tourists from Canada, of all places, and the women who should have left the Bermuda shorts at home.

But I cannot get too down on tourists. I’ve been tempted, as when a contentious fellow shouted curses at me and my young son when we didn’t vacate a parking space as he expected. Still, our merchants need the business if there is to be a local economy and a Main Street with shops and life. Those lines of upscale motorcycle fantasists on Sundays help keep the Bovine Bakery open for the rest of us. And for all the traffic, it is a kind that is dependent upon the landscape and thus provides an economic base for it.

Do we really expect taxpayers to pay for a park and then let it become a private viewscape for those fortunate enough to be situated nearby? No matter what we do or don’t do, there is a price. Even if we try to build a wall around West Marin, our community still will change because of who gets to live within the wall and who doesn’t. From a strictly ecological standpoint that might not seem so bad to some. The Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, has preserved almost 3,500 acres of mainly woodland. You look at the surrounding sprawl and feel grateful for the enclave, much of which is open to the public.

But most of us humans cannot live on ecology alone. There is a social ecology here as well as a natural one; inhabitants as well as habitat. Our town is symbiotic with ranchers, ranch-hands, tradesmen, along with the artists and musicians, who together comprise a human web within the natural one to make the place unique. Yet for all the effort to preserve the landscape out here, not much has been devoted to the integrity of the town itself and the social ecology it embodies. This is a great opportunity. Our biggest contribution to the larger ecological cause could be in finding new ways for the social and the natural to co-exist.

Sustainability without settlement is a non sequitur, and one to which Western environmental movements are prone. I sometimes sense in the complaints about tourists—and in the opposition to such things as an oyster farm—an indifference to livelihood generally and to the practicalities of daily life. This is the classic astigmatism of the conservative gentry; and it is no less myopic because it is connected now to ecology and landscape.

Not long ago I too might have shared it. Then I married a woman from the Philippines and began to visit her family on their rice farm there. It is a rural landscape in a way that ours no longer is. The roads are dirt. There is no plumbing. Chickens and goats run about in the yard. When it is time to prepare dinner, my wife’s mother goes out back with a knife.

Yet for all this it is a domesticated landscape. Practically every inch is accounted for, and must be in a land that is so populous and poor. There are efforts in that country to restore clearcut mountainsides and protect remaining forests. But the concept of “wilderness” in the American sense does not exist. My wife had never encountered it until she moved here. For most of the world wilderness is a luxury for those whose income and sustenance comes from someplace else.

Untouched places are important, where they actually exist. But for most of humanity the challenge is to live on and with the land in a way that doesn’t ruin it; to embrace that challenge in West Marin might help us unravel the conundrum of change. Main Street and landscape are connected. If we want a town that is not just a quaint tourist destination, then we had better support the ranches and dairy farms—and perhaps even an oyster farm—that sustain the agrarian version. No ranches, no feed barn.

A range of housing is important too, to prevent the town from becoming too upscale and precious. Socially and environmentally, it is hardly ideal that so many of our service workers must drive in from Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa each day. This means, among other things, encouraging second units, especially close in. It means filling in the town so we can leave the landscape alone.

Organizations such as the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin (CLAM) and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT) have been doing yeoman work along these lines. Why not extend the techniques by which MALT has helped preserve the landscape to the town itself? If we can buy development rights to ranchland, for example, why not to town land?

Why not establish a town trust and buy key parcels ourselves? It could help keep out invasive uses, and the rents on existing or created housing or shops could provide a funding base for local purposes.

Such a trust might also purchase parcels in town to create common places where the social ecology can flourish. One of the constants in Provincetown through the years has been the benches outside the town hall on Commercial Street. No matter how expensive and tacky the place becomes—and it is both—the benches do not discriminate. Anyone can sit there to take in the passing scene.

This is social open space. Stinson Beach has a town green. Every town should, especially ones that want to maintain a noncommercial dimension and continuity with the past, as we conservatives want to do.

****

I know a person who bemoans change in town and the visitors who flock here. This person’s house wasn’t even built when another friend up the road first moved in.  There are old-timers who were here before both of them; from their standpoint, the first to move in was a hippie, the other gentry, and both took some getting used to. I have seen pictures from the early 1900s of locomotives coming down the middle of Main Street and the entire northeast side devoted to a railroad yard. That’s not a past that anyone I know wants to go back to.

There is a geology of memory out here, an accretion of reference points for the better yesterday. We tend to think the story starts when we enter; yet our own entrance might have been someone else’s jarring change. The point is not that one house justifies another ad infinitum until the landscape is full. It is that we need to approach the question with humility and an awareness that the process that enabled us to be here is going to continue in some form.

We need to leave some play in the line and some room for humans in the ecological scheme. Nature as a concept would not exist without us. The one thing we can say for certain is that the town will be different in 30 years, just as it is different now than 30 years ago. Once upon a time, the Dance Palace was in the Cabaline. Point Reyes Books was a natural food store. Building Supply was in the Grandi Building, and there was a dance studio above it.

That process will continue, and this is not necessarily to be regretted. If the change is indigenous and inventive—as it can be—we could look at the results and think, “Hmmm, not so bad.” A generation ago, a burst of local energy gave rise to the Dance Palace, the Point Reyes Clinic, and other civic institutions that are warp and woof of the community today. That change is our normal. If we can bequeath a new normal such as that, then we conservatives will
be able to rest in peace.