I have realized more and more that there is not a single economy. There are economies, and these economies are large and small, useful and useless, and based on the worthiness of what they value. An economy that values a new coal plant as "economic development" is an economy of mean value that thinks in limited and short-term gains of incomes and stock prices and the tax base; an economy that measures the costs of a coal plant against the destructiveness of coal mining, mercury pollution, CO2 emissions, and livelihood is an economy that encompasses a more complete set of values. 

The economy that is referred to on the nightly news is one of limited value that fails to account for its costs. It is the economy that has brought with it the most rapid destruction of any world economy. It ignores the intrinsic value of things and follows the principles of Enlightenment-era thinking that nature is a machine, and that it has no value but the value that we give it. This is a false and petty economy. The rise of gasoline, the failure of the mortgage industry, and the energy crisis is an abstraction meeting reality—a false accounting of value that is finally getting an audit. 

This revaluation is having positive effect. I have seen more people using bicycles for transportation than ever before, as well as more people riding fuel-efficient scooters and motorcycles. I have also seen large tracts of sprawling developments halt to a stop as the "mortgage crisis" takes hold. Meanwhile, more people are planting gardens for the actual cost savings—costs that could be close to zero after a few years of saving seeds, developing soil, and building a rainwater collection system.  

Working on the farm reminds me that the economy of the nightly news is only one economy, an overly simple economy that has long ignored what it could not incorporate into dollars and cents and markets. As that economy spirals out of control and meets its natural limits, I am not worried. I only hope that all of us will readjust our sense of value to a more complete system of reckoning, before the economy of mean value collapses against the firm surface of the earth.