Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Last May, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern released a budget to improve the “wellbeing” of its citizens rather than focusing on productivity and GDP growth. And not so coincidentally, New Zealand has one of the best coronavirus outcomes of any democracy in the world.
The good news is that there is a “new Global Left” that enjoys a multitude of emerging movements, including climate justice groups led by young people. The rich array of activist groups and the dynamism and passion they display excite a sense of possibility.
Trained to see the dismemberment of complex production processes as efficient and natural, and its segregation from consumption as a core premise of “the economy,” economists tend to overlook a more elegant, practical approach to provisioning — commoning.
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by Ian Angus synthesises findings from cutting edge research in the natural and social sciences to demonstrate how capitalism’s excessive drive for growth, fostered by the rapid burning of fossil fuels for economic gains, has driven the earth to the brink of disaster.
For those of us working for change at local, municipal and regional scales, this is the moment when many of the solutions we’ve been promoting are needed and the conditions for building the foundations for longer term change are favourable.
If we are to follow this path that sustains life rather than the one that is destroying it we need more than the collection of great ideas and projects being put forth by so many brilliant people. We need a comprehensive, holistic plan. This will not be easy but the alternative will be far more difficult.
Just as income inequalities and social class differences are divisive and give rise to opposed interests and perspectives, being in the same predicament creates unity and shared interests. Hence the pandemic has brought us together in the same way that research shows greater equality does. Both make us feel we have more in common.
This book is focused primarily on domestic climate policy, because neither we as individuals nor our government can, with a straight face, presume to advise the wider world on climate issues unless we ourselves have at least started the journey toward life within ecological boundaries.
Having been shaken to our collective core by the COVID19 pandemic, can we muster the will to make major changes in how we rebuild our systems, to truly transform how we function as a society for the betterment of Earth and her inhabitants? What cause is more just, fair, and wise?
I have come to think that the themes we on the Left should be coalescing around are dismantling rentier capitalism, offering a new income distribution system in which basic income divorced from the performance of labor is the anchor, and reviving all forms of commons and commoning.
This fundamental question is the one I ask myself in my research, as an ecological economist. What are the physical things (like energy, materials, infrastructure and so on) we need to live well? To answer it, we must understand what we truly need, and how satisfying our needs connects to well-being.
In The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, Stan Cox has a message for all who were counting on the Green New Deal to help save us from ecological and economic collapse: this legislation will not go far enough. C
