Year: 2012

Conceptualizing post-capitalist economics

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Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein is a well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the worldwide movement for economic relocalization. Part I explores the profound effect the institution of money has on human thinking and psychology, as well as direct links between our monetary system, the current economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis. Parts II and III explore possible alternatives to a debt-based monetary system that has outlived its usefulness.

Transition Money – the need to scale up and get real

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Could we really feel that the Transition movement’s responses were adequate in the face of the suffering being inflicted by the crisis? Would speaking of local currencies feel sufficient in comforting the family of the pensioner who shot himself in front of the Greek Parliament last month after his pension was cut to nothing (described by Greeks not as suicide, but as "financial murder")?

Transitioning Money means building narratives and economic structures that empower people to step away from the crumbling mainstream and learn to trust in each other again, instead of in money.

 

Oil – May 18

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-Dump the pump: could peak oil be voluntary?
-Shell’s Majnoon deal highlights Iraq oil target verdict
-Insight – Peak, pause or plummet? Shale oil costs at crossroads

The shadow of fascism

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Our capacity to bring about collective change decreases with every passing year – at least the kind of collective change the French people can accept. It is quite possible to simplify the French society, but that means accepting, even embracing, poverty, not something we as a people are likely to do.

Authoritarianism is therefore bound to fail, and become more and more authoritarian with time as, unlike democracy, failure is not something it can accept. Its normal way of dealing with it is not handing power to the other side, but finding somebody to blame.

Thoughts on Richard Heinberg’s book “The End of Growth”

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Sounding the alarm early is far better than not sounding the alarm at all. In fact, those who do are the true pioneers of ecological conciousness. Heinberg may be early, or he may not be, yet he has engaged us all in a very necessary conversation, arguably the most important conversation my generation will have in our lifetimes.

Mobile slaughterhouses help meat go local

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Bruce Dunlop was an engineer before he became a farmer on a picturesque island off the coast of Washington in 2002. This technical background turned out to serve him well in producing pork and lamb to sell from Lopez Island Farm. Faced with the financial and logistical difficulty of transporting his live animals 200 miles to the closest USDA-permitted slaughterhouse on the mainland—a trip that included a 45-minute ferry ride—he began designing the nation’s first mobile slaughterhouse, in cooperation with Washington State University extension and Lopez Community Land Trust.

The commons law project: A vision of green governance

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For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law). Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources. Most of these governance traditions deal with natural resources such as farmland, forests, fisheries, water and wild game. Commons law has existed in many forms, and in many cultures, over millennia.

Circulation and circularity

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I was really cheered to see a comment on my post about the need to understand the economy as a complex system, pulling me up for not mentioning the limitations of a Keynesian approach in an era of ecological crisis. I covered this point in my earlier post ‘A green paradox of thrift’, but I am still encouraged to know that the no-growth position is now so established that people are reminding me about it!

Occupying the Future, Starting at the Roots

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“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”

Valuing Nature: Democracy or economics?

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Aristotle asked how we as political animals could create and design institutions which assure survival with ‘some measure of the good life in it’. Although the scope of Aristotle’s question was that of the city, the question of institutional design is acutely relevant to efforts to arrest global resource degradation.