Salmon Economics

December 14, 2009

Dear Friends,

Imagine leading economists spent time in the wilderness. Perhaps the chair
of the Federal Reserve could spend an afternoon standing at the mouth of the
Tsiu River on central Alaska's little explored lost coast, as the sleek
bodies of silver salmon everywhere swelled upstream pushing against him.

Andrew Kimbrell, driven by his personal experience of the Coho salmon on the
Pacific Coast, is on a quest for an economic ecology, a consideration of our
economic system as subservient to and informed by nature. As a result of
that afternoon in the river, he "began to imagine a world where the
economist knows the salmon." For Kimbrell, the salmon embodies the qualities
of nature abandoned and ignored by our competitive free market system,
namely redistribution, reciprocation and gift-giving.

Appended to this email you will find a selection from Kimbrell's "Salmon
Economics (and other lessons)" E. F. Schumacher Lecture pamphlet. The
section, titled "Return to Sanity," provides an outline of the salmon's
natural economy and its core principles.

The pamphlet goes on to address the crises the salmon are facing due to
environmental degradation, bioengineering, and the forces of the competitive
market, and then he shows how these crises are our own. Kimbrell offers
persuasive arguments about the deleterious effects of the commodification of
land and labor, nature and man. He shows how the salmon offer inspiration
for living well: "The salmon teach a different lesson. For them there is no
linear progress or search for perfection; instead, they seek and fight
doggedly to complete their cycle of life."

Salmon returning from the sea to the precise river inlet in which they were
spawned bring with them nutrients from the ocean. This vital gift-giving
represents an essential part of the economy of all living systems. Kimbrell
writes how: "Unlike the self-interest of the market, embodied in legal
contracts, gift-giving affirms a sense of community, charity, reverence, and
a spontaneous sense of the relationship between humans and the natural
world."

As the year comes to close and many gift-giving opportunities arise, we urge
you to consider giving the gift of visionary voices, like Andrew Kimbrell's.
For twenty-nine years the E. F. Schumacher Annual Lectures have been a forum
for new economic thinking. The lectures are edited and published in
pamphlet form and sold for $5 each or 5 BerkShares, including postage. A
full publication list and order form are available online or on request.

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html

We would be pleased to include a gift card with your name in your order.

The full text of Andrew Kimbrell's "Salmon Economics (and other lessons)" is
available as a pamphlet or can be read in its entirety at
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_03.html

Best Wishes for the Holiday Season,

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Neva Goodwin,
Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Dan Levinson, Constance Packard, Will
Raap, Gus Speth, Joseph Stanislaw, Stewart Wallis.

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The Return to Sanity

"To live on the land we must learn from the sea."
George Sumner

What can the salmon offer that will move us toward a new paradigm in
economics? Can their homeward journey help us rid ourselves of the obsolete,
dangerous, and somewhat pathological market mentality? To answer these
questions we will need to look more closely at the "economy" of the salmon's
life cycle.

When the Pacific salmon return to the rivers of their birth, they carry in
their bodies a number of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorous
garnered from their ocean sojourn. In fact, isotopic analyses indicate that
riverside vegetation near spawning streams receives 22 to 24 percent of its
nitrogen-the nutrient that most commonly encourages plant growth-from
salmon. As a result, trees on the banks of salmon-stocked rivers grow more
than three times faster than their counterparts along a salmon-free river.
Alongside spawning streams Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) have been found
to take eighty-six years instead of the usual three hundred to reach 50 cm.
in thickness. Research also shows that at least one-fifth of the nitrogen in
the needles of Sitka spruce trees and other plants near spawning sites comes
from the ocean via Pacific salmon carcasses. These same trees that have been
fertilized by the carcasses enhance the quality of breeding and rearing
habitats for the fish by providing shade, sediment and nutrient filtration,
and large woody debris.

It is not just the vegetation that profits from these nutrients. Muscle
samples taken at these riversides from vertebrate herbivores (deer mice,
voles, shrews, and squirrels) show increased levels of nitrogen compared
with samples taken from animals farther away. The animals eating the salmon
also help with the spread of these nutrients. It has been estimated that 70
percent of a black bear's annual protein comes from salmon. During a 45-day
spawn each black bear catches about seven hundred fish and leaves half of
each carcass in the forest. At 2.2 kg. per fish, this amounts to 120 kg. of
nitrogen fertilizer per hectare of land. British Columbia's 80,000 to
120,000 bears could be transferring, through salmon carcasses and the bears'
dung, as much as 60 million kg. of salmon tissue into the rainforest,
accounting for half of the nitrogen fixed by old-growth trees

Salmon are also the principle source of food for the brown bear. And
analysis of hair from grizzly bears, who became extinct in Oregon's Columbia
River Valley in 1931, has shown that 90 percent of their diet came from
salmon. Additionally, the salmon's eggs and carcasses are the major source
of food for sea otters and several trout species. The carcasses also provide
critical nutrient resources for aquatic invertebrate scavengers,
detritivores, and aquatic microbes-organisms that in turn help enrich the
nutrient capital of the wetland itself. And perhaps most crucial of all, 50
percent of the nutrients that young salmon receive comes from their dead
parents.

In contemplating this "salmon economics" we find no trace of the
self-interest and laws of supply and demand endemic to the human market
mentality. What alternative economic values are taught by the cohos' life
cycle and final journey? One value is redistribution. The riches of the
ocean are redistributed to the wetlands and the rivers. It is an intricate,
diverse, and egalitarian redistributive system, extending to the needles of
the Sitka spruce, the muscles of the vole, the intertidal microbes, the
bodies of the fry, and then even to the bear dung that becomes fertilizer
for the trees farther inland.

We do, course, have redistribution in our current economy. Through taxation,
for example, we redistribute wealth to aid those in need, whether the
unemployed, elderly, disabled, or poverty stricken. But these programs are
constantly under attack by free-market advocates and are often eliminated
under the rubric of tax relief. Unfortunately, those defending these
programs never amplify and undergird their argument by pointing to the
natural and ecological archetype of redistribution as found in the salmon
cycle and throughout nature. Redistribution is not only altruistic or an
expression of largesse, it is the fundamental element in successful and
sustainable natural economies. In sum, redistribution is the way nature
survives and thrives. It is a kind of natural law. By contrast, the
purported free-market laws of supply and demand are recent intellectual
constructs with no foundation in nature.

Then too, the salmon teach us about the value of reciprocity. There is a
complex reciprocal relationship between the salmon and future animal and
plant generations. As noted, the salmon's nutrients help the growth of
riverside vegetation, which in turn provides shade, protection, and
nutrients for the growing parr and smolts, preparing them for their ocean
journey and the repeating of the cycle. Moreover, the nutrients given to the
animals help fertilize the trees, whose roots in turn protect the rivers and
streams from erosion. Overall, it would be virtually impossible to
comprehensively describe the entire reciprocal interaction between the
salmon and the life around them, from microbes through mammals.

As with redistribution, our current economy also contains many reciprocal
elements. We pay our taxes so that we can have roads, schools, and other
basics that will be there for us. We participate in civic associations, on
zoning boards, or in local governments, with the assumption that our time
spent will benefit us, our families, and future generations. But perhaps
more importantly, the vast majority of Americans' work is based on
reciprocity. My research indicates that more than 70 percent of us get up
every morning to take care of something or someone, not to make a profit by
selling something for more than we paid to produce or buy it.

This is what I term "the care economy," which I contrast with "the profit
economy." Teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen, policemen, social workers, and
all those working in government and the public-interest community, including
those protecting our fellow creatures and the natural world, will not make
more or less profit depending on how much they produce. They are the care
economy and are paid a flat-rate salary for their service. Firemen will not
pick one house to save and turn down another based on making a profit for
saving the more expensive house. Teachers will not pick one child to teach
over another because they will be paid more for teaching the richer child.
After a natural disaster, animal rescuers save mutts and purebreds with
equal energy without wondering whose owner will pay more.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001, provided a graphic contrast between the
profit and care economies. During and after the terrorist attacks Wall
Street closed down, and there was a virtual halt in trading for days as
brokers looked to foreign investment until they could assess whether it was
safe and profitable to invest once again in America. Meanwhile, from the
very first the care economy was fully invested. Emergency workers, police,
and fire personnel worked tirelessly and under great personal risk for days
and weeks as did health professional, government, and nonprofit
organizations. Everyone seemed to grasp intuitively the reciprocal nature of
this sacrifice, to understand that the greater community can function only
when each of its members gives in this way, knowing that it will be
reciprocated should tragedy strike elsewhere. The fate of each is wedded to
the care and skills provided by the other.

The care economy, though it represents a solid majority of us and we all
depend on it, is not privileged in our society. Even progressives often call
it the "service" economy, which is more suggestive of entry-level restaurant
workers than of the vast majority of Americans who are part of this care
economy. Instead, America is often portrayed as the land of "entrepreneurs,"
where "the business of America is business." Never do we hear in defense of
reciprocation that it is a fundamental principle of natural economic life
and has the imprimatur of eons of successful natural economies behind it,
whereas the market system with its profit mandate is just over two hundred
years old and is already unsustainable.

Along with redistribution and reciprocation, the salmon teach yet a third
economic value-gift-giving. Unlike the self-interest of the market, embodied
in legal contracts, gift-giving affirms a sense of community, charity,
reverence, and a spontaneous sense of the relationship between humans and
the natural world. In a way it is the antidote to the market system. As
ethicist Thomas Murray explains:

Gifts create moral relationships that are more open-ended, less specifiable,
and less contained than contracts. Contracts are well suited to the
marketplace, where a strictly limited relationship for a narrow
purpose-trading goods or services-is desired. Gifts are better for
initiating and sustaining more rounded human relationships, where future
expectations are unknown, and where the exchange of goods is secondary in
importance to the relationship itself.

Salmon provide the ultimate relational gift-a gift for the otters, the
bears, the rainbow trout, their own offspring, and a gift for all of us who
witness and learn from them. This gift is an eternal promise, always kept if
not sabotaged by the intrusion of humans and their technology. It is an
intrinsic aspect of the very being of the salmon, not given in calculation
of receiving something in return. There are so many in our society who give
without looking for a return: the teacher staying late to help a student,
the neighbor helping the elderly couple next door, those millions giving
their time, work, and money to help in a cause they believe in or to help
others more needy than themselves. This generosity represents a major sector
of our economy but is usually marginalized as exceptional altruism instead
of being understood for what it is-an essential part of the economy of all
living systems.

One additional and critical economic lesson of the salmon I will mention is
the profound importance of the local. Salmon provide remarkable instruction
about the fundamental value of place. Father Thomas Berry has spoken about
the importance of the "smell of home," the odor of place. No creature better
embodies this teaching than the salmon. An Alaskan Fish and Wildlife study
found that just one drop of water from the home stream of salmon added to
250 gallons of water will take these salmon in the direction of that water.
It is impossible not to be astonished by the great odyssey of the salmon and
their uncanny ability to ultimately find the exact stream or even rivulet of
origin and to mate there, with all the redistribution, reciprocation, and
gift-giving going to that local place and its environs.

Every Thanksgiving, when tens of millions crowd the airplanes and jam the
roads, we catch a glimpse of the homing instinct, however alienated, that
survives in each of us. Mobility is prized and privileged in our society
(just think of the automobile, which embodies the glorified values of
autonomy and mobility-ergo "auto-mobile"). And this is a necessary attribute
of the supply-and-demand market economy, which may cause extreme dislocation
many times in our lives as we-purported human commodities-move about, often
involuntarily, to find work, economic survival, or increased opportunity.
Although this dislocation corresponds to the logic of capital, it is not
what most of us seek. Reminiscent of the salmon's journey is the yearning we
still carry for home, place, and community.

Moreover, in economic terms the idea of the local is becoming ever more
important. For millennia human economics was local, but over recent decades
we have seen a massive expansion in the global economy. Now transnational
corporations-obeying the call of the market, whose only motive is profit and
their own self-interest-roam the world in search of resources and markets
for their products. They forcibly bring down trade barriers and any
protections that localities might have against this economic onslaught.
Corporate-led globalization brings a corresponding contraction, and
destruction, of the local economies it replaces. The corporate enclosure of
these local communities and eco-systems devastates the natural world,
homogenizes cultures, disrupts communities, and deprives their members of
any meaningful control over their lives.

How is this process to be halted and reversed? The salmon give us the
answer: local production for local consumption. Note that the salmon travel
freely as they grow and become mature but always ultimately return to
provide their local community with what it needs. I like to think of this as
a kind of internationalism based in the local as opposed to the homogenizing
juggernaut of market-based globalization. Internationalism allows each of us
to travel and learn from all peoples and cultures and geographies, but
unlike globalization it understands that the purpose of this travel is to
return and nourish the local with a diversity of knowledge and experience.

Fortunately we are beginning to see a rebirth of the local around the world
in food and energy production, local currencies, and emphasis on local
governance. To those who inevitably will state that this localization is
contrary to the ersatz laws of free trade and the market we need only point
to the salmon and note that localization corresponds with the laws of
nature.

Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the field of
ecological economics, a field that infuses certain ecological realities into
current economic thinking. Much good work has been done in this area, but
perhaps it is time to reverse the adjective and noun in ecological economics
and call it economic ecology, not privileging thereby human economy but
recognizing that our economic needs fit into the larger "economy" of our
eco-systems. The tendency in ecological economics can be to "greenwash"
capitalism or socialism, By contrast, an earth economics would base the
allocation of resources primarily on ecological principles, including those
so beautifully embodied in the salmon life cycle and other of the earth's
living systems. It is a call for the economist to truly meet and learn from
the salmon, a call for an economics of earth that is based not on the
abstractions of thinkers but on the study of, and wonder at, its creatures.

This new and important discipline is not without its precedents. Indigenous
societies were never based on market economies but on a mix of reciprocal
service and exchange, redistribution of resources, and gift-giving in local
situations. These societies based their economic behavior-redistribution,
reciprocation, gift-giving, and localization-on the archetypal patterns of
the natural systems around them. To survive we must follow their lead, and
without delay. We must learn and integrate the great economic lessons of the
salmon.