Engineers without borders, and the Monoculture

Mat has published a new lunch on Free Lunch Diaries with Parker Mitchell, the founder of Engineers without Borders, which seeks to build sustainable businesses in impoverished areas worldwide. He seems like an accomplished, good-hearted guy. These two quotes stood out for me:

He cites the example of transitioning rural farmers away from relationship-based trading (where you know and can trust the person you’re buying and selling from) to a more global and impersonal trade (where money abstracts and renders irrelevant the relationship between buyer and seller).

Later in the interview he says, in contrast:

He suggests that the notion of leading our lives on the convenient and easy track (school > work > money > consumption) — what he likens to merely floating down the river–is at once not a sustainable model for the entire planet and not providing us with spiritually fulfilled happy lives. His somewhat cryptic antidote is to challenge ourselves to go into the vulnerable, into the questions. By way of example he challenges the notion that capitalism as we have practiced it over the past 200 years should be the model we adopt for the coming century.

A book I recently read, Monoculture: How one story is changing everything, shows how the economic story is the master narrative that shapes our culture in the modern age, and that resisting that monoculture is the way to human dignity and freedom. Having just read that made these two contrasting passages stand out to me. You can read a blog by FS Michaels too, which gives you a sense of the book’s perspective.

If there were some way of preserving the human, trust-based way of trade, that Mitchell describes above, AND bringing sustainable prosperity to its practitioners, that would be the ideal. It’s a tough problem, but worth solving.

Author: Caterina Fake

Literature, Art, Poetry, Homeschooling Mother. Founder & CEO, Findery. Co-founder, Flickr & Hunch. View all posts by Caterina Fake