The Maholian Way - Part Four: A sustainable home for society

Why Maholians care about the environment

Maholians are committed to building a sustainable country and a sustainable world, and they have put in place a range of practical measures to achieve this. The main impetus behind this comes from the good relationships and equal, self-reliant communities they maintain.

When you have strong ties within your local area, when it is the place you work, socialise, recreate and shop, the place where many of the things you consume have been grown and produced, then your knowledge of the area and your concern for its well-being are that much greater.

The local area becomes like an extended home, but unlike your own home, you can witness more complete ecological systems at play, and thus witness the consequences of good or bad environmental management. So there will be more awareness of how devegetation and bad farming practices erode the land and silt up watercourses, of how litter fouls public spaces and the water supply, and of how too much traffic adversely affects public safety and the attractiveness of the locality. Even if you are not personally affected by these issues you’re likely to know people who are, because of your strong ties with other locals. Of course, these are matters of degree. There are Maholians who are not so connected in their neighbourhoods, or not so dependent on the local area to meet their needs. But overall, local connections and local self-reliance in Maholia are very strong, and there is consequently a natural tendency to be more concerned with the health of the environment on which your life and wellbeing depends.

Maholians also have more power to act locally to protect this environment. Decentralised economies mean more decentralised decision-making – by the owners, managers and staff of independent local businesses (including cooperatives) and by consumers whose influence is greater because the market is smaller and they are more likely to know the producer or retailer. On top of this, in Maholia there are more ways through which people can influence public decision-making, including deliberative forums, one-stop-shop-fronts and their membership of the many local organisations that can have input into policy-making. So local people are able to do more about the environment that they also know and care more about.

Moreover, when you are more attuned to the state of your local environment, you  tend to seek more information about it and mix with people who know about it. Such people usually care about environments elsewhere as well, and thus you start off caring about your own local environment and then are drawn into a milieu of more generalised environmental awareness and concern.

In addition, experience in Maholia strongly suggests that people who derive rich satisfaction from good relationships, absorbing activities and contributions to others have less need to get pleasure out of objects – such as the biggest, latest TV or the twentieth pair of shoes – and less need to possess such objects as status symbols bolstering their self-image. Furthermore, the greater level of equality in Maholia means that the country does not have to resort to simply increasing economic growth across the board in order to raise living standards for low income-earners, a policy that leads to wasteful and unnecessary consumption by the well-to-do.

However, Maholia’s attitude to material consumption is not driven by any kind of puritanism, but rather by a desire for sustained happiness. Research around the world has shown that once people’s basic material needs are met, acquiring more material goods does not make them any happier, whereas meeting a range of non-material needs does.

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