PerpetualPlanet

China’s president Hu Jintau outlined his country’s economic goals for the coming 25-50 years in an exemplary speech before the APEC CEO Summit this past November in Santiago, Chile.  He noted that his country has a sustained annual growth rate of 9.5%, a result of the strategies defined 25 years ago and executed with continuous discipline.  That a country so successful at implementation of a far-sighted plan is now laying out its next set of goals ought make Europeans and Americans take notice.  The U.S. rate of growth is 3.5%.  China, now fully capable of feeding, clothing and sheltering its own, seems on a course to become the leading economic power on the planet by appropriate means.

“In a word, mankind is faced with both grave challenges and rare opportunities for development. Given the circumstances, the only right option for us to take is cooperation geared to a win-win result, and the only goal for us to endeavor towards is sustainable development. Our own experience with development tells us that every country must go through an evolving process that today’s development is the continuation of that of yesterday and the groundwork of that of tomorrow. When a country lays down its plans, chooses its strategies, decides on its approaches and implements its measures towards its long-term goals of development, it should take into account both its present and future needs of development and address both the current concerns of the people and the interests for their long-term development.”

It’s heartening to hear that sustainability is at the core of the plan, even if it is a disappointing reminder that our leaders in the U.S. are still planning for faster consumption of finite resources and the war machine required to secure them.

If your business is growing food or garden stock or you farm for a hobby, you should read Living at Nature’s Pace, by Gene Logsdon. Those folks interested in Permaculture will love it too. Logsdon takes us inside the operations of successful small-scale farms and convincingly challenges the inevitability of their demise. The best passage in the book describes a barn raising in an Amish community that begins with bare ground in the morning and concludes with animals eating hay in their new home that evening — all without power tools. In his P&L for the typical Amish farm, it turns out buying a tractor is a poor alternative to a horse-drawn plow and using pesticides would beg financial doom. Someone selling produce to McDonald’s might not get it, but if you define your success to include your family’s development and sustainability as well as profitability, then some of the techniques described are optimizations rather than compromises.