Future Here Now: Cultivating native ecosystems

The Big Idea

The Big Idea is a selection from my book, The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived: What’s Changed and How you can help. Available in print or digital at Bookshop.org, Amazon, Lulu or wherever you get your books.

The Big Idea

We need to cultivate our native economic species.  The thing that grows naturally where you are can, with a little help and protection, provide more long-term benefit (and fewer of those unintended repercussions), than the exotics that we try to transplant at great cost.  In this era, the chase after the flashy, the big, the long shot, is too costly and too risky to deserve the lion’s share of our attention.

This means that we have to focus on our assets instead of just our deficits.  We’re used to seeing signs of deficits -- vacant buildings, left-out