Niches, Not Riches

April 21, 2009 by David Eggleton

If you've read older posts, you may recall that I've established for our purposes a distinction between wealth and riches.  The distinction was inspired by Confucius and Buckminster Fuller, in particular.  If you've read my posts and pages of this site, you know Woburnite.com wishes to help people find their niches in our local economy. We're thinking that true niches are superior to riches because niches are essential to a locally owned and controlled, adaptive wealth-generating system.  The flows of energy and materials can go on indefinitely, so niches are quite secure.  Of course, riches can vanish overnight, by various means.  "Some'll rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen," according to the song Pretty Boy Floyd.
 
We want to insert something in the foreground (our locale) that bit-by-bit eclipses much of what's in the background (distant places).  All of us here will decide the optimum degree of obstruction; it'll probably vary as the great big systems do what they're going to do.
 
I suppose it was only a matter of time until I arranged those similar words into a bumper sticker or T-shirt sort of message.