I
A little over ten years ago, a blacksmith offered to make me a steel tool for a beehive if I gave him the dimensions. (This all existed in a context in which I had been gearing up to make some top-bar beehives, and, at least to my knowledge, those kinds of hive tools were not commercially available.)
I knew a woman in the Bay Area who had been keeping bees in these kinds of hives for years. I also knew that she had one of those tools, and that she had made it herself.
I emailed her, asking for the dimensions of the tool. She sent me the length. I emailed back, asking for the width and depth, and the point on the tool’s length where it flared out. After a very long time, she sent me information about the depth. I emailed again, thanked her, and asked once more for the additional information. After another long wait, she emailed me, saying that she wasn’t going to just give me that info, but if I wanted to buy one of those tools from her, it would cost me $65.
Wowza. That was a real reminder about how every little thing—every piece of information or know-how or expertise—can get monetized. And in the monetizing, information, know-how, and expertise becomes less diffuse. It becomes a thing someone sells and someone else buys, and not a thing that’s freely or openly shared. (I didn’t buy the tool.)
It was also a reminder of a world that I didn’t really want to live in. I had so benefitted from so many people throughout my life freely sharing information and skills (and I continue to benefit from that kind of sharing), and I so believed in it as a model, that this felt like a real breach.
Now, I don’t know this woman’s financial particulars. Maybe she was so strapped for cash that she felt she had to charge for anything she could. And I’ve written before about how I loathe general expectations that women are just going to work for free, or cheerfully give away their time.
This felt different (but, as mentioned earlier, I don’t have full information). This felt like we could have built a connection, threaded a string between us that might contribute to building community around a shared commitment to a couple of aspects of urban agriculture and DIY ethics. This felt stingy and withholding.
II
Some time after that, I did the Climate Change Action Facilitator Training at the Ecology Center in Berkeley. We had an interesting cohort that included an architect; an accountant; a couple of artists and some activists; a few students; and me.
At one point in the training, we were looking at community-based, alternative economic arrangements, and we were encouraged to barter among ourselves for goods and/or services. Everybody wanted to barter with the architect to get him to draw up plans for this or that project. But his many years invested in his education and in his professional experience were hard to balance with what any one of the rest of us had on offer, namely, bike repair; lemons; baking; and woven willow basketry.
It just didn’t feel right; it didn’t feel balanced; it didn’t feel fair to him. And that brought me to my central discomfort around barter: It is not easy for two individuals or even two groups of people to design an exchange where it feels that everyone is getting and giving in a comparable, fair way. It can be done, of course, and I think it’s a great arrangement when it works. But for many of the services we require in our modern world, it’s difficult to imagine how barter might function. What would you swap your dentist for repairing a chipped filling? Or your oncologist for performing multiple surgical procedures on you?
The Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Timebank addresses this issue by equalizing the value of every participant’s time. So if you contribute one hour of pet sitting in the Timebank community, you have now earned one hour that you can “spend” on goods and services offered by other Timebank members.
There’s a nice symmetry to that and, of course, the equalizing idea that the hours of every human’s life are as valuable as the hours of every other human’s life is attractive and feels fundamentally respectful and democratic. But we’re there again, where all that experience and education, time and life energy invested in a particular endeavor won’t always feel appropriately matched.
III
I first learned about the Gift Economy from Charles Eisenstein’s writings, especially his book, Sacred Economics. I liked the idea: By giving away knowledge, goods, and services, you create a web of social reciprocity in your community. Gifts don’t necessarily flow from Person A to Person B, and then back from Person B to Person A. But a mesh of giving and receiving links people, such that after Person A shares with Person B, Person B may help out Persons C and D.
The Gift Economy is a way for people to step away from money as the only definer of wealth. Instead, connections with others and throughout the community might be one way to define one’s wealth in a Gift Economy.
Eisenstein defines himself as a “degrowth activist.” He’s not about growing the Gross National Product, and instead promotes initiatives like a community toolshed where neighbors buy a couple of sets of power tools or rarely used kitchen gadgets that they all share.
I love the idea, but I see a sticking point for someone as fussy as I am about taking good care of tools. The community that shares tools would also have to share an understanding about how to care for and maintain those tools, because, for example, if I wanted to use the community plane, and someone’s three-year-old had innocently scraped it across the family grill multiple times (take it from me; this can happen), it would drive me nuts. I would feel irritated.
However, I’m certainly not opposed to the idea of a community toolshed, and I believe that anyone willing can learn how to properly care for tools. So this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Other initiatives, however, feel lower stakes and easier to participate in. I feel very comfortable and easeful about community food forests, or shared orchards, or community livestock.
Here’s what I like best about the possibility of the Gift Economy: We can’t regulate when someone gives something to us; but we have complete control over when we give something to someone else. That’s a beautiful idea. Potentially, we can make every moment a giving moment. Or get close.