Coping
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
Essentially, coping requires that we attend to the things about being human that never change, and which we share with other people, even if they take different cultural expressions: temporality, death, sociality, language, pain, joy, suffering, doubt, anxiety, rejection, loss, uncertainty, sexuality, fun, creativity, imagination, curiosity, love, inventiveness, the capacity to express ourselves.
The Two Faces of January: Looking Back, while Thinking about the New
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
As we work towards this new culture, we experience frustration, fear, anger, grief and many other dark emotions, not to mention physical exhaustion. In these uncertain circumstances, which are unlikely to end any time soon, we need spiritual and intellectual courage, as well as persistence and patience.
The Economics of Arrival: Review
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
I read The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a grown-up economy (Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, Polity, 2019) during summer 2019 and have been dipping back into it ever since. To somebody who asked me what it’s about, I replied, ‘It’s Enough Is Plenty for the current decade; it’s all about how rich countries can share the wealth so that everybody can have enough, and how poorer countries can take varied trajectories that do not result in the maldevelopment we see in many rich countries today’.
Cultivating the Middle Ground: Enough in Action
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
In the places where citizen-leaders come together, we can promote the idea of the great middle ground. The ‘middle ground’ refers to the masses of people all over the world whose way of living is between over-consumption and poverty; they live without making excessive demands on the earth.
Keystone Attitudes and Policies of Enough
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
We need keystone policies that are underpinned by a vision of a rich social, personal and economic habitat for people. The role of politics is to design institutions and policies that enable people to co-operate and that facilitate citizens to act for the common good. The policies mentioned above function in this way. If key principles are observed or key attitudes developed, many structural problems can work themselves out in practice.
We Need to Talk About … Green New Deal and Other Necessary Vocabulary for our Times
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
In this post, I reflect on the vocabulary we need to be familiar with if we are to raise awareness and develop widespread literacy and skills for responding to all our interrelated problems, from climate breakdown to soil erosion, species extinction, human suffering and inequality. The issue of language and vocabulary has arisen in a number of conversations I’ve had with friends and acquaintances in recent weeks, as we approached the School Climate Strikes on Sept 20 2019.
Enough is Plenty
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
In the past, we did not need to make a big deal of enough; it was built into our lives in many ways. Our language recognised it in phrases like ‘enough is as good as a feast’, and ‘waste not, want not’. But in modern life the sense of enough is badly underdeveloped; in affluent societies we have largely forgotten the wisdom captured in the old sayings.
Rumpelstiltskin, Debt and Economic Liberty
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
Modern economic systems have sanctified the payment of debt but this is not some natural or God-given rule, rather a situation designed by financial elites. The wisdom of Rumpelstiltskin needs to be revisited and adapted for modern times.