Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a co-operative, Labour hires Capital – capital becomes merely another resource that the business requires to produce its services or products. The aims of the business are to produce excellent goods and services, to provide good terms and conditions for employees, to be fair to suppliers, to provide limited* returns on investment for investors, to support local communities and to respect the environment.
• An interesting post from Riverford’s Guy Watson about climate change and crops
• Hobby gardeners boost backyard biodiversity
• Huge scale of California pollination event
• Proposed law could deliver huge boost to urban agriculture in California
A little over two years ago, we sold our house in Lexington, Kentucky to come back and settle in India. Me and my husband had spent seven and eleven years respectively in the United States and after years of confusion, vacillation, and endless planning, we finally decided to make the big move. Our compulsion to leave the United States was very strong, but our feelings were mixed. We had missed family and the surroundings familiar to us terribly the whole time we were in the United States, but so many years can hardly be just an interim—it is real time, and bound to be significant in certain ways.
Since reading Herman Daly’s “Nationalize Money, not Banks,” my head has been whirling with notions of how to help restructure the financial system to support a steady-state economy that respects ecological limits. The current system creates debt-based money by allowing banks to hold only a very small fraction of demand deposits while lending out the rest (with interest) to be re-deposited and then loaned out again (with interest), and on and on. Why is this so important? Besides according gratuitous profits to the private banks for producing money (a public resource that could just as easily be produced by a public institution), the fractional reserve system also creates a structural dependency on economic growth because, as Bill McKibben observes, “without the growth, you can’t pay off the interest.”
Welcome to the spring of sequester and discontent. Just ahead, whatever happens in the world of politics, a world of people are going to experience yet more cuts to education, housing, healthcare, and there’s no solution to poverty in sight. Even for those who were flushed with excitement last November, the new term is already feeling like a pretty glum place. What real change is likely to come? Probably not much. By how much are real wages going to grow? Probably less. ”If you counted poverty the way every other nation in the world counts it, a quarter of our society is in poverty,” says political economist Gar Alperovitz. So why is it then, that Alperovitz also says we may be witnessing the prehistory of the next American Revolution? What’s up?
What if, instead of giving Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming Nobel prizes for their life-saving work on radiation and penicillin, they’d been thrown in jail? Or, instead of being awarded the Grand Croix of the Légion d’honneur for his work on the germ theory of disease, Louis Pasteur was imprisoned like Napoleon on Elba? It would be perverse to return the favour of great, public works by depriving people of their freedom. Yet that is just what we’re doing in Britain right now. The contributions of the people above were remarkable, but how much greater is the challenge of preserving a readily habitable climate, and how thankful should we be to those prepared to throw their life’s energy and creativity at the task?
Within a modern, highly financialized economy, most interactions are impersonal, based on purchase and sale within a market system. If you are the loser in any one transaction, it is your fault, because you chose to deal with people you had no particular reason to trust, and therefore it is your mistake. If the swindle is not illegal, you have no legal recourse. You can, of course, complain to a few friends, perhaps even blog or tweet about it, but then, in a market economy, more of a stigma attaches to being swindled than to swindling, and most people are reticent when it comes to telling the whole world that they let someone take advantage of them.
‘Daring to dream’ is the fifth and final Transition ingredient, and far from being as whimsical as the title suggests, it actually refers to imagining what Transition would look like if it were implemented nationally, enabled by government and council policy and invested in properly. It is also a look at how Transition initiatives can learn from one another and deepen through our national and global network.
If you’ve ever found yourself on the phone with a customer service representative telling you it would cost more to fix your electric tea kettle than to just buy a new one, you are well acquainted with the concept of "planned obsolescence." The good news is that people across the world are getting wise to the intentional design flaws hoisted upon us by clever manufacturers eager to sell more products, and are coming up with new and creative ways to salvage perfectly usable things.
•Money talks: the impact of economic framing on how we act and feel •We’re Hooked on ‘Growth,’ But It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way •Is GDP the right way to measure progress? One economist says no •The Slippery Grip of Growth •Should socialists support degrowth?
Last October, a group of seventeen commons activists from throughout Asia – India, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand and other countries – met in Bangkok to have a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the commons, especially in fighting neoliberal economics and policy. The primary goal was to discuss economics and the commons from an on-the-ground perspective, and to help identify promising avenues for future research, writing and political action.
Today sees the publication of what may well turn out to be one of the most important documents yet produced by a Transition initiative. Over the next few weeks we will be returning to it, to hear a range of perspectives on it, and hope it will generate debate and discussion. The document is the ‘Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint‘, and you can download it for free here. The Blueprint is the first attempt that I am aware of to map in detail a local economy and to put a value on the potential benefits of an increased degree of localisation. If you like, it identifies “the size of the prize” of Transition.
