By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
What can we do!? We want to feel in control in an out of control time. We want to occupy our minds with something other than worry. I’ve spent half my adult life, it seems, prepping for this moment by creating resilience tools for money, food and community. They are simple, though take intention to use.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
With coronavirus prompting a slowdown in global trade, it’s all the more critical to find a different way forward. Thankfully, Asher, Rob, and Jason have a few ideas about how to have fun while building a resilient local economy.
By Brian Czech, CASSE
COVID-19 has done in a deadly way what steady-state economists would prescribe in a healthy way: putting the brakes on a runaway economy. In fact, the pandemic has slammed on the brakes and jammed the GDP gearstick into reverse.
By Samuel Alexander, Resilience.org
When an economy contracts involuntarily, that is called a recession or, if it lasts long enough, a depression. Nobody advocates for such unplanned economic contraction because that has all sorts of negative social effects, including rising unemployment, stress, and poverty. So we must never confuse degrowth with recession.
By Timothy McKeon, Sara Escribano, Grassroots Economy Organizing
DisCOs are a commons-oriented, feminist, cooperative way for people to work together. A set of ideals and criteria for ensuring that patterns of oppression and violence that permeate our society are not replicated within intentional, cooperative spaces. DisCOs systematize fairness and the recognition of care work.
By Brian Davey, Feasta
The point to make in this article is of the need to self isolate and/or practice social distancing, at the same time as maintaining economic activity as best we can. There will be no one size fits all ways of doing it and each person will have to improvise during this crisis.
By Marjorie Kelly, Transnational Institute
It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete. In the perilous moment we face, with the crises of the climate emergency and spiralling inequality, the time is up on corporations acting as though serving financial shareholders is their highest duty.
By Aaron Karp, The Trouble
Mainstream economics offers no solutions to climate chaos; ecological economics envisions a path forward.
By Andrew Pendleton, New Economics Foundation
You would have thought the time for obfuscation is over. But there’s a new game in town for those who still think there’s time left for business as usual. It’s called ‘net zero by 2050’ and its prevalence shows how many of those with power and influence still don’t really ‘get’ climate change.
By Samuel Alexander, The Conversation
If capitalism is still the dominant economic system in 2050, current trends suggest our planetary ecosystems will be, at best, on the brink of collapse. Bushfires will become more monstrous and wildlife will continue to be annihilated.
By Riccardo Mastini, Uneven Earth
A truly transformative Green New Deal cannot simply be about returning to a welfare capitalist order of days of yore. It must move beyond capitalism’s growth imperative. This is not only because there is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures anywhere near the scale needed to deal with the ecological crisis, but also because such decoupling appears unlikely to happen in the future.
By Mark H. Burton, Steady-State Manchester
The key problem is economic growth on a finite planet – with critical limits at both the resources and the sinks end of the chain – in addition to the internal contradictions of the (can I say “capitalist”?) economy. Adding aspirational adjectives to growth, “inclusive”, “green”, “smart” …. doesn’t change the basic reality.