This is a random excerpt from The Local Economy Revolution.  Yes, it was really randomly selected.  But the book is not random.  Want to learn more? Check it out here.

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This is a paper machine. My husband ran one in the 1990s.  I’ve often said it’s the only job he ever had where I actually could say what the heck he did all day.  He made paper.

A paper machine is a huge hunk of equipment.  The whole machine usually extends about a thousand feet from one end to the other, so it’s about the length of an urban city block.  It has lots of parts that whizz and hiss and rumble and make noises so loud you need ear protection, and sometimes the paper coming off the end of it breaks and sends clouds of fuzzy confetti flying everywhere. It looks like controlled chaos, managed power, in action.  It’s really kind of cool.

Despite looking so impressive, paper machines do something that’s basically pretty simple: they take a slurry of water and paper pulp, and they suck out the water and squash the pulp together to turn it into paper. There are several steps to the process, and sometimes there’s lotion or scent or something that gets introduced into it along the way, but fundamentally, that’s what the paper machine does.  Evaporate and squash.

As you might imagine, a machine this size has tons of controls — levers and inputs and electronic doodads, and the technicians who run the thing have to be pretty well trained to keep it all working.  But fundamentally, all the pieces that they can manipulate do one of two things: they take water out, or they squash paper fibers together.

We tend too often to think of our local economies as paper machines.  We have a handful of lever and dials that we know that we can push or pull, and we assume (or tell ourselves) that we can get the outcomes we want for our local economies by twiddling those controls.  Sometimes we call those controls incentives, sometimes they’re sewer lines or land that we can sell at a deep discount, sometimes they’re slick marketing materials designed to show potential businesses that “Hey!!! We are awesome!!!”

The problem is, our communities aren’t much like paper machines at all.  They’re more like forests or farms or gardens.

For a plant to grow requires a wide range of conditions — the right soils, the right amount of rain, the right amount of sun or shade, the right pollinating insects and the absence of the right kind of pests.  Some plants have higher ranges of tolerances than others — some of the flowers in my yard, for example, wilt when the temperature gets above 90, while the weeds could apparently survive a nuclear blast.

The main thing that makes a garden different from a paper machine, though, is the degree to which we lack direct control over many of those factors.  I can’t change the number of hours in a day that the sun shines, and I can’t ensure enough of a supply of the pollinators that my fruit trees want if something in the next yard over keeps eating them.

Not only do we lack direct control, we have to accept the fact that we lack direct control. Berating the sun to stay in the sky longer, or trying to pollinate each apple blossom by hand, don’t sound like helpful solutions.

Every so often, I open The Local Economy Revolution to a random location and copy down here what I find.  Intrigued by what you read? You can get the whole book here.  

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The easiest unintended consequences to figure out are those that will impact me directly – the ones that will come back to bite me in the butt.  If I am thinking about putting an addition on my house that I really can’t afford, and doing so will put me at risk of being unable to pay all my other bills, then the potential unintended consequences of my choice to add onto my house are pretty obvious. Since I will have to deal directly and immediately with those unintended consequences, they are part of my system – that means that these consequences should be relatively easy to see, if I am honest with myself about what all might happen.  I might delude myself into thinking I can have it all, but that’s not failing to think ahead.  That’s just being a dumbass.

The hardest, and potentially most troubling, types of unintended consequences fall into a group that traditional invisible-hand economics call “externalities.”   These are the impacts of a decision that accrue to someone or something else — the impacts are external to the person or organization that made the decision.

Traditional economic theory placed externalities outside of the economy – the externality was experienced by someone other than the economic actors, so it was not part of the economic activity.  Terming something an “externality” was a way to exclude it from the equation.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

As I mentioned, my father and grandfather ran a small paint company in the 1960s and 1970s.  In those days, there were few rules regulating hazardous materials, and most of the compounds in paint hadn’t been officially recognized as hazardous anyways.  Like most paint factories, theirs generated lots of garbage – batches of paint that didn’t come out right, test pots, empty containers, broken equipment, etc.

The company was located on the edge of a steep gorge that ran through town … and standard operating procedure at the factory was to toss the cans, pots and other garbage over the hillside.  This wasn’t uncommon – people used to use that gorge to discard a lot of types of refuse.  I remember 1950s-era car fenders and mattresses in the brush along the hillside farther downriver.

The company closed in the early 1980s, and as far as I know all of the officers and stockholders are dead.  But the old paint cans on the side of the gorge are probably still leaking – my brothers, who still live in the area, have heard friends talk about seeing rainbow-colored scum on the creek surface downstream from the factory site.

When the day comes when that property gets cleaned up, it won’t be my dad’s company doing it.  Instead, it will probably be the state Environmental Protection Agency.  Which means that, even though I didn’t do the polluting, as a taxpayer, I and all of my neighbors across the state will pick up the tab.