Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”
The idea was to demonstrate, in practice, and at a city-wide scale, how to combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture, with the metabolic energy of social innovation.
We’re excited to announce the publication of our first Community Resilience Guide: Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity by PCI Fellow Michael Shuman. This book series will be part of a larger new effort we have launched—the Community Resilience Initiative.
We may not be able to beat the banks, but we don’t have to play their game. We can take our marbles and go home. The Move Your Money campaign has already prompted more than 600,000 consumers to move their funds out of Wall Street banks into local banks, and there are much larger pools that could be pulled out in the form of state revenues.
Who’s right? Gordon Gekko (greed is good) or Tim Jackson (prosperity without growth)? It should be a simple question, but the answer is not so clear.
If Transition is to succeed – to deliver on its promise of happier, more resilient communities – then it’s always seemed obvious to me that the work we do is fundamental to this change. If we can find ways to create enough work that contributes to the resilience of our area, that is more fulfilling, in tune with our own particular skills and values, and that pays the bills, then many of the outcomes we want will naturally emerge.
These overview books on starting up a smallholding/homestead/small farm/urban sustainable oasis are often the first books any of us come to, precisely because we need that encyclopedic breadth so badly – eventually we may need to know more about growing melons or delivering a calf or butchering a rabbit or canning pickles – in fact, most of us end up with specialist books on all these things. But at first the best of these books give you a picture of the whole range of the work you are entering into – and that’s what a lot of us need.
Let’s not be shy about the matter; the dominant picture of agriculture in this country is pretty grim. Set upon the foundations of unequal land distribution, the expansion of neo-liberal policies into agriculture since the 1950′s have accounted for a halving of agricultural employment, the systematic industrialisation of farming techniques, the consolidation of larger farms and the tightening of corporate control on food markets. We have been left with an economy in which new entrants to farming can expect to pay up to £10,000 an acre for land but receive less than 10% of the money spent on food by consumers.
The global economy grew 3.8 percent in 2011, a drop from 5.2 percent in 2010. Economists had anticipated a slowdown, but this was even less growth than expected, thanks to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, unrest in oil-producing countries, the debt crisis in Europe, and a stagnating recovery in the United States. As richer economies struggle to recover from the financial crisis of 2008–09, poorer countries are facing high food prices and rising youth unemployment. Meanwhile, growing income inequality and environmental disruption are challenging conventional notions of economic health.
This discussion turns to the theme of economics and the subject is Bay Bucks, the local currency circulating in the larger Traverse City region. Dave is joined by long time Bay Bucks advocate Sharon Flescher, discussing the reasoning behind the creation of a local currency, the seven year history of Bay Bucks and a look to future growth. Local currencies generate the full impact of their multiplier effect in the local economy. None of that economic value is exported to outside economic interests. The key to that success is to get more and more of the local currency in use. Bay Bucks is set to push for another round of expansion.
We chatted with Herman Daly on a range of topics from ecology to economics, policy to politics, relocalization to religion. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, pioneered work on Steady-State and Ecological Economics, and has received more accolades and written more books than we can mention.
Parts 3 and 4 of Fleeing Vesuvius, “New Ways of Using the Land” and “Dealing with Climate Change,” focus mainly on local and national strategies for reducing fossil fuel use (both to conserve fossil energy and reduce carbon emissions).
We tend to think of technology as rock and metal – from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, from pyramids and statues to Viking swords and pirate cannons. We think of the things that survive to be placed in museums, in other words, and tend to neglect the early and important inventions that ordinary people used every day but whose materials did not survive centuries of exposure.
