local economy is now a fairly common idea in this new economy space and
there's good reason for that again going back to the principles in real life life
happens in the context of a unique culture in a unique place so a tropical
rainforest has its own unique characteristics very different than a
than a you know a Arctic zone in human cultures or in human communities it's
not just the geological context that matters but it's also the cultural
context that matters so business in Japan or in South Korea it happens very
differently than it does in the United States or in the United Kingdom and yet
in our modern understanding of economy we talk about this thing called the
global economy and we sort of aggregate numbers into a global GDP which is
completely divorced from the unique qualities and characteristics that exist
in each place and so I would even go so far as to say that the unit of analysis
that we've chosen nation-states and corporations is a human artifact that
was originated in the modern age using reductionist thinking and in fact the
real or the correct unit of analysis is bioregional scale place and so imagine
if you thought about human economic development from a place-based
perspective you would have instead of a global corporation like Apple thought of
as a single thing you would have apples manufacturing plant in China as part of
the Chinese bioregional economy and in one of our hubs in Buffalo you have the
solar polar manufacturing plant that is operated by Panasonic but our partner in
that project is the Panasonic plant manager
not Panasonic in in Japan because that Panasonic plant manager in Buffalo is
part of that local community and is operating in that context and has to
understand the history of that place in order to thrive in that place so in a
nutshell we believe that the new pathway toward economic prosperity is going to
happen sort of in the context of community in place and and build from
there through networking as opposed to happen
from sort of top-down policy initiatives and even some of the well-regarded well
read columnist now are onto this both Tom Friedman and David Brooks for
example have written about community-based economic development in
the context of you know when the nation-state is broken things work
better you know the interesting things are happening at the local level which
is true what I don't think they've done yet is connected the dots to see that
that's actually in alignment with the principles of how living systems work so
it's correct it's not just it's not just an observation it's actually what has to
happen and the hopeful sign here is that the worse things get the greater the
pressures that build the more that these these shifts happen automatically you
know systems don't change unless there's pressure if you put a pot of water on
the stove it saves a pot of water and Tralee turn
the heat up and then eventually it boils so that the heats turned up in our
global economy and so that pressure is causing the economy to alter and find
its way into a more healthy state and that's that's called emergence in
complexity science and we see that happening all over the all over the
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