Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nicole Foss and Laurence Boomert highlight community initiatives that can help people meet basic needs, even as monetary institutions pursue desperation measures. Then, John Michael Greer joins us … to highlight the lack of whole systems thinking in internet visionaries after Seth and Justin discuss the money illusion.
“It is fascinating to hear stories of how Transition is emerging and developing its own identity in some of those countries in southern Europe most impacted by the financial crisis,” writes Hopkins, “Here I’d like to share stories from Coín in Spain and Portalegre in Portugal.”
I’ve stayed away from politics pointedly in posts, because voting for either party is still just voting for growth, with different labels applied. I do not believe that the current corporate giveaway that we call a political system is fixable unless we elect a leader who is ecologically and energetically literate. I doubt that will happen. That said, here is an earth day wish for real servant leadership which would fix our problems. The post is directed at a specific leader, Obama, since the United States is the worst offender in terms of extreme behavior and unsustainability.
We have become so used to the idea that the middle classes are the winners that it is difficult to get our heads around the fact that something important is changing. It isn’t just the poor who are under pressure: the middle classes are no longer winning either.
Is this “the most exciting time to be alive in human history”? The economists and scientists interviewed in this film think so, and the reasons are all about the chance to create a more fair and sustainable global economy.
Since reading Herman Daly’s “Nationalize Money, not Banks,” my head has been whirling with notions of how to help restructure the financial system to support a steady-state economy that respects ecological limits. The current system creates debt-based money by allowing banks to hold only a very small fraction of demand deposits while lending out the rest (with interest) to be re-deposited and then loaned out again (with interest), and on and on. Why is this so important? Besides according gratuitous profits to the private banks for producing money (a public resource that could just as easily be produced by a public institution), the fractional reserve system also creates a structural dependency on economic growth because, as Bill McKibben observes, “without the growth, you can’t pay off the interest.”
I want to suggest a slight modification of the University of Texas’ motto, “What starts here changes the world.” A more accurate slogan — while not quite as pithy and probably less effective for public-relations purposes — would be, “What starts here accelerates the destruction of the world.”
Humanity faces a momentous period of transition. Modern civilization is not only in crisis. It confronts a multiplicity of overlapping global crises that are potentially terminal.
Across southern Europe resistance is taking on a new urgency. In Spain people are speaking of the start of “the real struggle”, while in Greece the term “civil war” permeates the political climate.
