”…….forests often have a combination of capturable wealth but poor, isolated, and powerless residents. Powerful interest groups can seize this wealth, depriving poor people of access to forest resources, and sometimes contributing to corruption and poor governance at the national level. Because it is more profitable to mine the forest than to manage it sustainably, this contributes  also to environmental damage.`

Rhode Island is the Industrial West’s fun house version of what is going on in forests around the world (the Great Swamp Massacre was not much different from what is going on in Irian Jaya today), where inner city populations are of a different ethnicity than the wealthy suburbanites and efforts to disenfranchise voters and ignore the will of the people are well known. In Rhode Island unless we encourage the paving over of farms and forests, which is an extremely stupid thing to do in the current global situation in which food security is critical to our development efforts, the prized sites for development in the cities are the brownfields, usually the old mills or dumps that line our rivers and dot our neighborhoods.  Our heavy and textile manufacturing is essentially gone, leaving toxic sites, degraded rivers, and poisoned low income people surrounding the sites.  The game of developing these sites so that they can generate money for the wealthy plays out similarly to the development of forest communities by the generals,   In the US we call these disenfranchised and marginalized communities subject to degradation Environmental Justice communities, EJ for short, and in our old deindustrialized industrial revolution heartland, these communities are treated similarly to forest communities in southern Asia that have been targeted for resource extraction.  With similar results.  It is my contention that the best practices that have been developed over the years to help forest communities develop themselves, the ones that yield the best results in terms poverty reduction, ecological healing, and contributions to the larger economy, provide some very clear lessons for places like Rhode Island. If we placed those same best policies and practices at the heart of all economic development efforts in Rhode island, rather than the business climate, we would achieve much better results in high poverty areas, and for the entire state, than anything going on today.

Economic growth that we have come to love and honor and rely upon to cover the tracks of the massive stealing by the rich, the system that allowed a few crumbs to trickle down to the rest of us because there was plenty more where it came from for the wealthy, is essentially gone, partly from ecosystem collapse, partly because inequality grinds economies to a halt, and maybe because the industrial revolution has run out of job creating innovations (17, 18) . At least one author has gone so far as to suggest that it is impossible to build modern industrial economies without new forests to exploit (19) something that is rapidly disappearing on planet Earth.  The stats coming out say the US economy grew about 2.5% a year last quarter (20). Not quite the 3% that signals good times, but the best in years.  What the media forget to tell us is that for the last 5 years more than 100 percent of the growth in income has ended up in the hands of 1% of the population.  (21)    Maybe 5% of the population has done well for itself, but wages are sinking for most workers and have been for years.  So for 80% of Americans there is no economic growth already and nothing in the offing from the traditional leadership seems like it will restart the jobs machine or relink it to improvements in productivity.  The growth is just funny money the rich play with so they can steal ours.

Another condition not mentioned in polite company is that 60% of the pseudo growth is in an industry that is bankrupting the country.  The Medical Industrial Complex. (22)  People are going bankrupt due to the high price of health care, while workplaces and municipalities are finding they can not afford health care for their employees or communities.  By every measure the US has the most expensive health care system in the world, and one of the worst of the industrial systems for most consumers. It takes from the poor and gives to the rich. This sector is growing at the expense of nearly every other sector in the American economy and Congress offers us pseudo solutions that keep the Insurance fat cats fatter while stymieing the ability of people to start and run microbusinesses.   So nearly everyone else is worse off now than they would be if the health care economy in the US was proportionally as large as it is in Western Europe and as good. Our political leadership keeps touting the medical industrial complex as a, economic growth center while trying to rein in health care spending.  Such contradictory goals highlight the problems we face as a community. Especially when the overall system is geared to expensive cures rather than cheaper prevention.

Due to the various “free” trade pacts large corporations have negotiated on their own behalf and then paid politicians to solemnize, wages in the US are trending down towards the global mean,and  have been for quite a while.  The buying power of the average American continues to go down every year ( 23)  and long term unemployment is spreading.  Even employed people have a harder time making ends meet each year as wages lag productivity.  Yet consumerism continues to be the state religion and every time housing prices go up the media pundits dance a jig despite the fact that many people, especially lower income people, are paying way too much of their income on housing ( 24). The rent is still too damn high. While the wealthy squawk when we tell them that we can no longer allow building in places at risk from rising sea levels and bigger storms.

Given the track record it is time for a new approach.  So let us try using the principles the World Bank offers us, which turn out to be exactly the same principles we have developed after looking at what kind of development really does alleviate poverty in the West and especially in EJ communities.  Take the principles of the Environmental Justice movement and put them at the heart of our work on developing the economy for all of our communities while remembering to ponder development in an age of no growth.  The key is development, not growth.  Using less but encouraging a healthy community without a toxic burden.  Providing for more of our own needs, becoming fossil fuel free and growing more of our food regionally.  Equality, community, justice and a proper and well maintained infrastructure are a great substitute for useless stuff.