No Place Like Home: Building Sustainable Communities

Will Molson is a Toronto-based business consultant and accountant.

This timely and insightful book examines the failure of contemporary
economics to provide widespread satisfaction and economic well-being. We
are all of us a little mystified as to why the West has not been able to
create an earthly paradise. After all, we are collectively rich and
technologically advanced. What is going wrong? Nozick, a Winnipeg-based
community activist, city planner, and publisher, argues that because our
economy—and particularly our pricing mechanisms—does not address
real human needs, it cannot therefore generate real satisfaction. Her
solution is the creation of sustainable communities, within which people
have the social relationships necessary to personal well-being.

This intelligent and practical treatment of what a sustainable
community is, how it works, and how to make one proceeds through five
themes: economic self-reliance; ecological development; community
control over resources; meeting individual needs; and the building of a
community culture. Nozick places individual behavior and satisfaction in
a global context. The social consequences of the cost of “global
overhead”—the increasing amount of money that local actors are
required to send to centralized decision-makers who have gained control
over our assets—are shown to lead inevitably to the impoverishment of
the very communities that are generating the wealth: in this way, First
World tends to Third World. Moreover, the failure of central economies
is advanced and gaining momentum, as exemplified by the downloading of
federal responsibilities to provincial and more local levels, and by the
rapid growth of underground economies. The apparent failure of
traditional economies is mirrored by the rise of local economies more
responsive to individual needs.

This book advances its central theme clearly (despite the author’s
tendency to use jargon) and successfully, and, in dealing with important
social changes already under way, is recommended reading, particularly
for social commentators and business/trend analysts.