Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben (New York: Holt, 2007 – US$14.00).

We live in a culture which has long assumed that we can have our cake and eat it too. We have had a slightly dewy-eyed love affair with the concepts of “more” and “better” and we’re sure that we can have them both. In his latest book, economist Bill McKibben challenges the prevailing wisdom that the goal of economics should be unlimited growth, or “more” at all costs.

He argues that the world simply doesn’t have enough resources to sustain endless economic expansion. As an example, if the population of China owned cars in the same proportions as New Zealanders, there would be 1.1 billion more vehicles on the road – an unthinkable state of affairs for a world that is rapidly running out of oil and clean air.

McKibben focuses on questions about the ultimate purposes of economic activity and about how human beings might construct a future. His thesis is: “A single-minded focus on increasing wealth has driven the planet’s ecological systems to the brink of failure, without making us happier.” He asks, “How did we screw up?”

He divides the world into two “nations’: 1) Wal-Mart Nation (gigantic, globalized, unsustainable in the face of the trashing of nature and the coming exhaustion of the world’s fossil fuels, and 2) Farmers’ Market Nation (manageably small, localized, communitarian, neighbourly, calibrated to the human scale).

McKibben’s aim in Deep Economy is relatively modest — to change minds, to present “a new mental model of the possible”.

There is no explicit theology in the book at all, but there is a particular driving vision reminiscent of the great song of overturned expectations which is the Magnificat (Luke 1). The great can be made small; the global can be restored to the local; the harm may be undone, the seas may recede, the temperatures may drop, the hurricanes may abate and a vision for just living realised here and now.

Lynda Patterson is Theologian in Residence at ChristChurch Cathedral. theologian@christchurchcathedral.org.nz