Author archive: Steven Gorelick

Thinking Outside the Grid

Technology and Its Discontents

Our Obsolescent Economy

The Sharing Economy: It Takes More Than A Smartphone

Globalization and the American Dream

Changing Everything

Branding Tradition: A Bittersweet Tale of Corporate Capitalism

Current Trade Treaties: “a revolution against law”

Resisting the Technocratic Paradigm

The Global Economy’s “Impeccable Logic”

Steven Gorelick is Managing Programs Director at Local Futures (International Society for Ecology and Culture). He is the author of Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home, and co-director of The Economics of Happiness. His writings have been published in The Ecologist and Resurgence magazines. He frequently teaches and speaks on local economics around the US.

Thirty years ago, a friend of mine published a book called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save The Earth. It described the huge environmental benefits that would result if everyone made some simple adjustments to their way of life. Six hundred thousand gallons of gas could be saved every day, for example, if every commuter car carried just one more passenger; over 500,000 trees could be saved weekly if we all recycled our Sunday newspaper; and so on. The book was immensely popular at the time, … [Read more...]

Tucked within the pages of the January issue of the Agriview, a monthly farm publication published by the State of Vermont, was a short survey from the Department of Public Service (DPS). Described as an aid to the Department in drafting their “Ten Year Telecom Plan”, the survey contains eight questions, the first seven of which are simple multiple-choice queries about current internet and cell phone service at the respondent’s farm. The final question is the one that caught my eye: “In what … [Read more...]

A friend of mine from India tells a story about driving an old Volkswagen beetle from California to Virginia during his first year in the United States. In a freak ice storm in Texas he skidded off the road, leaving his car with a cracked windshield and badly dented doors and fenders. When he reached Virginia he took the car to a body shop for a repair estimate. The proprietor took one look at it and said, “it’s totaled.” My Indian friend was bewildered: “How can it be totaled? I just drove it … [Read more...]

I ran into my friend Rick the other day in a small town near our homes in northern Vermont. He was just coming out of the bookstore, holding a pink plastic bag that, I would soon learn, contained a dozen eggs from his flock of free range hens. After a bit of small talk, Rick asked, “you don’t by any chance have a pair of jumper cables in your car?” I did. “Would you be willing to drive over to the post office and jump my pickup truck? I’ve been trying to park on hills until I can get a new … [Read more...]

“... America is a new kind of society that produces a new kind of human being. That human being – confident, self-reliant, tolerant, generous, future-oriented – is a vast improvement over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced.” — Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About America Editor's note, October 31, 2018: This post has been updated to reflect the most recent statistics on child and adolescent mental health issues; school … [Read more...]

Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive demonstrations, legislative fiat or some other strategy, but the goal is generally the same: replace dirty fossil fuels with clean renewable energy. Such a transition is often given a significance that goes well beyond its … [Read more...]

It’s almost sugaring time here in Vermont. On our homestead we tap about 25 trees, boil down the sap on the kitchen cookstove, and – in a good year – end up with 4 or 5 gallons of maple syrup. That may sound like a lot, but since it represents our family’s main source of sweetener it’s rarely enough to get us through the year. By mid-winter we’re usually buying syrup from a neighbor – someone who makes his living from his sugar bush. His syrup comes in a gallon jug with an iconic sugaring image … [Read more...]

A respected human-rights expert at the United Nations, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, has joined the global movement opposing trade treaties like TPP and TTIP. And he has novel and powerful legal arguments. In international law, de Zayas says, there is a hierarchy of agreements, and at the top is the UN Charter: “in case of conflict between the provisions of the UN Charter and any other treaty, the Charter prevails.” In other words, trade treaties that lead to a violation of human rights — or … [Read more...]

Ever since the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’, people in our circles have been waxing rhapsodic about its message: finally, a powerful global figure is explicitly calling for fundamental structural change. Unfortunately, the media has pigeon-holed the encyclical as a “climate change” document, and so Francis’ deep and broad critique of the modern economic system – with particular emphasis on its links to reductionist science and technology – isn’t getting the attention it … [Read more...]

« January 2020 »

By Steven Gorelick Ever since the Occupy movement coined the terms “the 1%” and “the 99%” to point out disparities of wealth and power, the gap between rich and poor has received a lot of attention. In his highly-regarded 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, for example, Thomas Piketty’s central thesis is that wealth inequality is bound to increase in modern capitalist economies. This was underscored by a recent Oxfam report, which tells us that the world’s 85 richest people now … [Read more...]