Comments on: Local economy betrayed by the $5 customer http://slowcoast.ca/2009/06/12/local-economy-betrayed-by-the-5-customer/ Always a day late Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:12:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: David Parkinson http://slowcoast.ca/2009/06/12/local-economy-betrayed-by-the-5-customer/#comment-279 Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:18:15 +0000 http://slowcoast.ca/?p=988#comment-279 One of the typical features of a Transition effort is a buy-local campaign to raise awareness of the implications of keeping money within the local economy. Your post makes a very good point: the local economy is sometimes very local indeed: if Texadans want to preserve their ability to buy gas and take advantage of the other services provided by Centennial, they need to consider the island as the ‘local’ in local economy.

And as always, I think about the amount of hard work that will need to go into a campaign to get (some not all) people to understand the importance of supporting the local economy, even when it’s cheaper not to. It’s a classic ‘tragedy of the commons’ problem: it may be in everyone’s interest (defined narrowly) to by gas in Powell River, but the sum total of these individual decisions will be a severe loss to the fabric of the community of Texada.

But we are not well equipped to think or talk about the value of such intangibles as ‘community’ or the ‘common good’. Not yet, at any rate.

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