Wendell Berry's Rule #13

As always, with thanks to visionary writer, Wendell Berry who wrote these provocative "Rules for a Sustainable Community" that are presented here as excerpted from the poster of the "Rules" published by Yes! Magazine:

Account for costs now conventionally hidden or "externalized."  Whenever possible, these costs must be debited against monetary income.

What does this mean? How are costs hidden in an economic sense?

The easiest way to think of this is to think of a manufactured product that comes from raw materials that are shipped, probably from one country to another, to a manufacturing plant.  In accountancy, the cost to the environment of the planet of extracting the raw materials, is not taken into consideration.  So, for example, the effects on the land, the air, the water and ultimately to the people in nearby communities and the world at large, of clear cutting forests or strip mining or mountaintop mining, which are extreme examples of negatives effects of materials acquisition, are not figured into the cost of production.

This means that, although there is a huge cost in terms of health, safety and welfare of all living beings on the planet by these actions, the monetary cost to repair (if that's even possible) is put off to some indeterminate time in the future to be borne by future generations.

Eating wild harvested fish that are being caught in vast numbers that boggle the mind, contributes to the profit of fishing corporations or even individual fishing families, but the crash of fish species populations in the oceans lead to devastating disruptions of the oceanic ecosystem with far reaching results for ocean health and therefore climate and biological health of the planet.

None of these types of costs are shown on the debit side of a corporations bookkeeping ledgers. What Rule 13 is asking is to have these costs clearly shown and the profits of a corporation should reflect these costs in an honest way so that profits made from the product should be reduced accordingly to repair the damage created by the companies activities.

By buying locally produced goods and foods we can more easily see the results of the businesses actions and choose whether the products meets our needs of living sustainably and in harmony with our belief that the human race must choose options that do not harm the planet so that we all may live (the human race in concert with other creatures).