Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [13]
Citizen politics takes the next step. It is task oriented. It is less concerned about proving our own righteousness or the others’ failings than about taking responsibility for solutions. Whether it is citizens developing land trusts to keep down the cost of housing or the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth moving from protest over toxic waste to joining a state taskforce to work out solutions.19
But where do we learn to be problem solvers, rather than merely good complainers?
At home, at school, at work … just about anywhere people come together. Among the most effective classrooms in the country are those in which teachers are encouraging students to learn by tackling real problems in their communities. One of my favorite examples is in a grammar school in Amesville, Ohio, where Bill Elasky proves that his sixth graders can plan and carry out long-term problem-solving projects, given encouragement and back-up.
After a chemical spill in a nearby creek, Elasky’s students decided they “didn’t trust the EPA.” Constituting themselves as the Amesville Sixth Grade Water Chemists, they set out to test the water themselves—and succeeded. In the process they had to divide into teams, assign tasks, plan sampling and testing times, and so on. Soon the Sixth Grade Water Chemists became the town’s water quality experts, and their neighbors were buying their water testing services. These kids are learning democracy not by memorizing distant structures of government but by “doing democracy.”20
Citizen democracy assumes that citizen participation is just as necessary in governing economic life as it is in political life. At the time of our nation’s founding, the primary unit of economic life was the family. We were family farmers, shopkeepers, and traders. It made a certain amount of sense to think of economic life as private, and therefore not governed by the same democratic principles that we deemed appropriate to political life.
But in the intervening years, what has happened? The determining unit of the economy is no longer the family. Dominating the economic landscape are giant bureaucracies—non-elected, but nevertheless with more power over the quality of our lives than most governments have. We call them corporations. They determine the location and the quality of many jobs, the health of the environment, and—through their political influence—even broader questions.
Today, the world’s four largest corporations enjoy a total revenue greater than the combined gross national products of 80 countries comprising half the world’s population. Yet we perceive them as private entities, beyond democratic accountability!
Citizen democracy—the concept of ordinary people assuming greater responsibility for public decision making—challenges us to ask whether such categories of public and private still make sense.
More and more citizens are taking responsibility for making democratically accountable such “private” economic structures. A consortium of citizen organizations developed the Valdez Principles, guidelines to ensure that oil companies take measures to avoid oil spills, the consequences of which are broadly public in every sense. The Financial Democracy Campaign is providing a vehicle for citizens to take part in devising a fairer burden-sharing of the federal Saving and Loan bailout.21
Evidence of the last 20 years seems definitive on one point: Without democratizing economic decision making, reversing environmental decline seems beyond our reach. In his 1990 Making Peace with the Planet, Barry Commoner updates his earlier classic, The Closing Circle. In the earlier work he predicted that only in the few cases where citizen movements were using government to require economic bureaucracies to change their technologies of production could environmental deterioration be substantially turned around. Commoner’s predictions proved correct: Real success in protecting the environment has been achieved in just a few