Steven Gorelick is Managing Programs Director at Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). He is the author of Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized, co-author ofBringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of The Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgence magazines. He frequently teaches and speaks on local economics around the US.
Thinking Outside the Grid
Ultimately, a greater reliance on local power would eliminate one of the most destructive side-effects of the grid: the implicit notion that energy is limitless. The expectation is that our homes and workplaces should have as much power as we’re willing to pay for, 24/7, year in and year out.
October 29, 2019
Technology and Its Discontents
In his book In the Absence of the Sacred, Jerry Mander points out that new technologies are usually introduced through “best-case scenarios”: “The first waves of description are invariably optimistic, even utopian.
February 9, 2018
Our Obsolescent Economy
In other words, the modern consumer culture was born – not as a response to innate human greed or customer demand, but to the needs of industrial capital.
July 12, 2017
The Sharing Economy: It Takes More Than A Smartphone
The ‘sharing economy’ concept first appeared around 2010, launched on a sea of optimism about technology’s ability to transform the world for the better.
March 1, 2017
Changing Everything
A transition to renewable energy is often given a significance that goes well beyond its immediate impact: it would somehow make our exploitative relationship to Nature more environmentally sound, our relationship to each other more socially equitable.
April 8, 2016
Branding Tradition: A Bittersweet Tale of Capitalism at Work
The image on a gallon of maple syrup reflects a way of life – slower and less high-tech, more localized and neighborly – that many people rightly yearn for.
February 10, 2016