Without pandering to rhetorical hyperbole, one should see the PBS type series on the global economy available at many libraries. This economy is vastly bigger than Bush, Clinton, Blair, or anyone else; and, anyone who gets in the way is simply moved aside. The market for labor is as impersonal as the global economy, and like corporations in general, labor generally seeks the most return for the least investment whether in America or China.

One theory suggests that our standard of living will decline as things balance out globally, and is the reason that both personal, family, and community sustainability be sought on one's own terms. We should remember that beyond mechanization of human tasks, is even an equally influential trend towards specialization. Nobody in the world understands the need for a developed broad set of life-skills than people from the mountains. This same breadth of vision which was labeld inappropriately as well as technically incorrectly as laziness by those seeking mining on scale from 1900-1930, was an understanding that many things had to be accomplished in a day besides going down in the mine by locals.

Early miners very often if not nearly always had kitchen gardens, and those with families sometimes had extensive resources from their farming days along these lines. We always knew not to put all the eggs in one basket, not as a choice but as a necessity for existence. Regardless of how it has been painted, Appalachia has always been about a lot more than coal. Just as traditional mountain people around the world have the same sensibilities, that perspective has most often been like Jeffersonian democracy: 10 percent actuation, 90 pecrent ignored.

The deterrents that keep this huge economy from collappsing at one point or another, are the same forces that seek value in labor like it or not. The relationship there is symbiotic and while each is distinctive (company-worker), balancing the entire economy is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the whole. For this reason alone, it may be critical that individuals and communities begin to develop the broad skill set mentioned from within whether it is labeled sustainability, or good ole' mountain common sense.

One of the reasons common sense is important is that the global economy can't even decide whether to follow the reasoning of economists Hayek or Keynes internally, while some like myself look at other perspectives at the same time like that of E.F. Schumacher--author of "Small is Beautiful", and try to make sense of what the sustainability movement is doing without giving any of the above a carte blanche. The old song that "A Country Boy will Survive", has never been more important.

It's not Dubbya's fault, or anyone else's for that matter.