I agree with most of Mr. McKibben’s premises. We do need to be more connected with each other, we need trade on a more local, human scale, we need to consume less (radically less IMO). But he thinks NPR is community radio instead of government radio, he thinks farm subsidies should be transferred to farmer’s markets, and he thinks communities are made up of something other than individuals. He’s wrong on all those counts, and pretty much all of his other implementation ideas.

At one point he decries “hyper-individualism” of increasing specialization and idealizes the multi-tasking of African villagers. I want to shake him. It is the specialized western worker who is not an individual but an ANT, an insect (in Thoreau’s terms) and the villager/farmer who is the self-sufficient individual. “Self-sufficient” doesn’t mean doesn’t live in community, it means one is an asset to rather than a leech on the community.

I guess he just doesn’t get what a real individual is, and what a strength it is to have a family and a community composed of them.

Drive alone into a gated community in the suburbs, to park in a private, 2-car garage and hole up in a secret internet room. This is what our wealth has bought us, according to activist and author Bill McKibben: Ways to better seclude ourselves. In America, it’s lonely being rich.

Yet McKibben isn’t preaching a simple “money won’t bring you happiness” message (though that’s a part of it). In his new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, McKibben is most concerned about our sense of self in a “hyper-individualized world,” a world in which we’ve been conditioned to deprioritize personal connections with other human beings in the pursuit of individual success, monetary or otherwise.

The rest of my review here.