Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We want to know: Is an alternative future possible—one rooted in small fishers, small farmers, and the teeming biodiversity of the islands? For starters we want to know: Can small fishers become a pillar of a new economy as this country begins to run out of oil and gas?
Robert Pollin, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute addresses the debate over the federal budget and deficit, counter-posing the need for economic policies that would, in the long term, shrink the deficit through massive job creation, cutting the bloated war budget, and a new social compact that would meet peoples needs and stabilize the economy by limiting the Wall Street speculative casino through a financial transactions tax.
“You have to decide what it is you are going to stand for,” Day explains. “Water is essential to life. We live in the water of the womb of our mother before we come into the world. We are birthed from water, our bodies are primarily water and we can’t survive without clean water. At some time in your life you have to take a stand.”
This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed one of the most progressive pieces of legislation for urban agriculture in the nation. The new legislation has amended the zoning code to allow agricultural activities in all parts of the city, as well as defining the parameters by which urban agriculturists can sell their products.
One question that needs to be asked is – do the happiness proponents and their public spokespersons know what they’re doing?
“Jobs” as we know them today — paychecks from large corporate employers — are a very recent phenomenon in human history. Within our new understanding of the future economy, this form of earning a living is not too likely to continue.
If we are to make by necessity or desire, a shift to a lower input society, it is necessary to take the lessons learned in other lower-input societies and ask the question: what are the major food security issues likely to be?
In the sphere of disaster recovery there is a term that we can expect to hear a lot in the coming months, even years — “build back better”.
Local initiatives like the Oakland Energy and Climate Action Plan aren’t enough to tackle the climate crisis. We need national and international regulations requiring deep, scientifically grounded emission reductions, and we need strict systems of enforcement. But before that can happen, people need to see that getting off fossil fuels isn’t a dour punishment. Done right, it can be a kind of gift. Oakland, once again, is leading the way.
A new law expected to pass in Bolivia mandates a fundamental ecological reorientation of the nation’s economy and society.
One no longer needs to go through the long and often arduous process of becoming a “person-in-the-foreign-culture” in order to spout off in public as an expert about its core realities. The new discourses about the other are predicated, more often than not, on an underlying belief in the essentially normative and universal nature of US cultural, political and economic behaviors.
We have been told that the experts know best, and that even though they crashed the economy, they’re still the experts. We’re told that we should be patient, not question things we don’t understand, and by all means, keep shopping. “These kinds of messages work to keep us paralyzed and isolated, and keep us from seeing other possibilities,” says Linda Schmoldt, a Common Security Circle facilitator in Portland, Oregon. “We must envision a new economy and society based on real wealth, and create a new story about what is possible.”
