Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s probably fitting that Michael Liebreich’s The Secret of Eternal Growth was published so close to Halloween. It’s so full of outlandish bogeymen, it sits perfectly alongside the ghouls and the ghosts of the trick-or-treat season.
Governments of all stripes base their policies on mainstream economics. Powerful challenges to the mainstream, especially from ecological economics and modern monetary theory, explain why we are in a hole and can’t seem to get out.
Let’s begin by asking, is supply and demand truly able to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that these resources are allocated sufficiently for the population living in that environment?
During Nate Hagens’ #WEP2018 keynote, he discussed how all of our lives will be influenced by how we react to the coming era of harder to extract and more costly fossil fuels that will be combined with cleaner but more stochastic energy types.
Continued exponential economic growth is impossible, but the S-curve of slowing growth followed by a steady state is not the only other alternative. If the goal is maintaining GDP at the highest possible level, then the S-curve is the best case scenario, but in today’s world that isn’t necessarily desirable or even possible.
The challenge now is to create local to global economies that ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials – from food and housing to healthcare and political voice – while safeguarding Earth’s life-giving systems, from a stable climate and fertile soils to healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer.
As our energy sources change, our economy will likely evolve and adapt—perhaps in surprising ways.
Local lean economies are emerging that can be described quite accurately as ‘island cultures,’
As economic growth threatens climate stability, biodiversity, planetary geochemical flows, and ecosystem health, humanity is creating a bottleneck for itself.
Join Mateo Nube from Movement Generation, as he lays out a Just Transition Framework for Action.
In the past, as in the future, local ecosystem resources were the key to the economies of cities.
The society being referred to as “schizophrenic” here is industrial society.
