Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Philpott A growing number of young people are finishing college and resisting the pressure to plunk down in a cube behind a computer. Others skip college altogether—given the spiraling costs involved, it’s hard to blame them—and yearn for meaningful, hands-on work.
Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting – and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change – for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where our food comes from. We’d like to live in communities with a greater measure of food security, we’d like to know more about what we’re eating. We’d like to have more contact with nature, we’d like to be more self-sufficient. We’d like to have better food at lower cost, we’d like to have a reserve for an emergency or to share. We’d like to do more in our community and to eat with one another. We’d like to sit down to a home cooked meal more often.
Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.
-What the Olympics Can Teach Us About the Price of Gas
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-Asia buys record volume of W.African oil in Q1
-Russia February Output Nears Post-Soviet Record on TNK-BP
-RBS accused over funding for tar sands ‘blood oil’
-Consumerism ‘doomed’, investment forum told
-A Titanic Budget in an Ocean of Icebergs
-Growth and Consumerism: Nature or Nurture?
-Titanic and the Lusitania disasters reveal difference in survival instincts
-Finding a cure for the insidious cancers of “hope” and “faith”
-Depression’s Upside
The term “economic growth” has two distinct meanings. Sometimes it refers to the growth of that thing we call the economy (the physical subsystem of our world made up of the stocks of population and wealth; and the flows of production and consumption)…But the term has a second, very different meaning – if the growth of some thing or some activity causes benefits to increase faster than costs, we also call that “economic growth” – that is to say, growth that is economic in the sense that it yields a net benefit or a profit.
Here is Part Two of an interview I did with Tim Kasser a couple of weeks ago while he was at Schumacher College. He is a psychologist, author of the seminal High Price of Materialism, as well as other useful writings such as a great chapter in the State of the World Report 2009 about consumerism and climate change. The interview raises some fascinating areas for research and thoughts about Transition and psychology, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one….
If we want to have any hope in controlling our destiny we have to understand our environment. In one sense, if we treat our environment as a control system, capable of responding to a stimulus, we need to understand not only its behavior, but how it will respond to the stimulus. One can ask: will it collapse in response to dwindling resources? Or will it rebound and stay resilient? For that we require a good model of the system. And of course, the simpler the model to describe, the better.
I ended up spending much of my weekend going through Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, and I have to say I’m pretty gutted by the experience. The report is written by a large collaboration of 30 or so authors, and a slew more reviewers, drawn from a variety of US agencies, with NOAA as the lead. So it’s in the character of an official US government assessment of the science. It seems worth while really understanding humanity’s best guess about what the situation is.
One of the authors of Limits to Growth, talks about growth, peak oil, and the possibility of collapse at the World Resources Forum. He says: “The current growth in population and in material use cannot continue–absolutely, with 100% probability, that it is going to stop. When? How? How seriously? We have no scientific way to make predictions. The longer we wait to do social measures, like birth control, or voluntary simplicity, the more likely it will be that physical measures will cause this decline.”
When I started volunteering this winter as a garden science teacher with Washington Youth Garden, entering one 3rd-grade classroom every week to help instill knowledge and enthusiasm by the children for the wonders of nature, I had no idea that this experience would inspire me to initiate a national call for Universal School Gardens.
