Media & Communications

Night Thoughts in Hagsgate

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There are times, at least for me, when the fate in store for industrial society can be seen with more than the usual clarity. I’m thinking just now of the time I looked out a train window and saw an abandoned factory, not yet twenty years old, with foot-high saplings rising incongruously from the gutter around the roof; or of another time, in a weekend flea market here in Cumberland, when I found a kid’s book on space travel I’d loved as a child, flipped through the pages, and found myself face to face with the gap between the shining future we were supposed to have by now and the mess that was actually waiting for us when we got here.

97% Owned – Director’s Cut

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Off the back of my recent post on Transition Money, this excellent new short film, 97% Owned, explains the privatised, debt-based money system we currently use. The one that allows UK banks to simply create around £200,000,000,000 (£200bn) a year and use it as they see fit — without any oversight — to shape the economy and control politics, causing crises, creating inflation and pushing house prices out of reach.

Most of us work for money, but these people are magicking it up and then using it to pay others to do whatever they please. How is this different from legalised slavery?

Building wind energy can save Midwestern consumers $200 per year

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We’ve all heard that wind energy is too expensive, and that massive investments in wind will drive up electricity rates for consumers. This argument is based on the belief that wind energy is more expensive on a per kilowatt-hour basis than traditional fossil fuels. While even this premise is up for debate (for example, wind is now the least expensive option for new generation for some utilities in the upper Midwest), the bigger problem is that this argument ignores how electricity markets actually work.

Making the case for economic relocalization

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The term “economic relocalization,” which has been around about four years, describes the global movement of loosely knit Transition Towns and other grassroots networks working to strengthen local and regional economies and systems of food and energy production. I myself was unacquainted with the term until I came across it in the promotional materials for the Economics of Happiness.

The human factor

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It was the enlightenment, certainly, through which a whole host of new political views about public voice and the independent integrity of the individual emerged into the mainstream, even if took another 150 years, or even 200, to work themselves out. And at the same time it was the beginning of the age of extraction, when humankind started to use the stored resources of the planet at scale for their profit and endeavour. Both of these ideas are still the dominant frames of our public discourse, certainly in the richer world, and shape (almost completely) competing arguments about sustainability.

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.

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.