Planning for Deep Living

Categories of local social objectives for community betterment through deep living and factors that have to be managed to reach a holistic vision of a resilient culture.

'Deep living' describes itself as 'deep' because it regards itself as looking more deeply and holistically into the actual reality of the human ecological niche. Deep living takes a more holistic view of the world human beings live in and seeks to apply to life an understanding of how the separate parts of the human ecological niche, which includes all life forms, function as a complex whole. In this contex, deep living is a social strand of 'deep ecology' whose core principle is the belief that the living environment as a whole should be respected and regarded as having certain inalienable legal rights to live and flourish, independent of its utilitarian instrumental benefits for human use. This philosophy has fostered a system of environmental ethics and has provided a foundation for green movements aimed at living sustainably.

Cooperatives are organizations that are owned and democratically controlled by the people they serve. In a political sense they infuse economies with the basic values of democracy and provide citizens with a means to effectively address the shortcomings of the market-driven economy. Many people take the view that cooperatives are the solution to lots of today’s major economic, social, and environmental problems. This is because co-ops are democratically controlled and are motivated primarily by the goal of providing services to their members, not by generating profits for their owners and investors.

As a result of their democratic, services-first design, co-ops are much more likely to avoid the negative consequences of economic institutions which are primarily driven by the quest for ever-increasing profits. It can be argued that latter model of economic development has led to two centuries of economic instability, inequality, and environmental degradation in the Western world. There is a growing feeling that the coming decades, co-ops can lead the way to undoing these fundamental flaws in our economic system.

In Wales, these ideas led to the project known as 'Deep Place: Tredegar'. This was launched in 2014 as an attempt to imagine a different future for communities in Wales which have been dogged by continuing inequality and poor economic performance. The project seeks to develop a vision for a future that is not scarred by poverty, gaps in educational attainment and health inequalities, which was the solution argued by the Report of the Welsh Cooperatives and Mutuals Commission (2014). As a model, the protagonists identify four key local economic ‘sectors’ that are critical to the future success of a more localised economy in Tredegar: food; energy conservation and generation; the care sector; and, e-commerce and employment.

http://www.regenwales.org/upload/pdf/042814110201Executive%20Summary%20English.pdf