If there’s one thing I’d love world leaders to think about in connection with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, it’s that their measure of progress actually goes up with unhappiness and unrest. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is […]
Chak Chok: a campaign against junk food
Transnational corporations have been spectacularly successful in their profit-driven quest to hook the world on junk food. The global sale of packaged foods swelled to US$2.8 trillion by 2020, and is estimated to balloon to $3.4 trillion by 2027. Soda […]
Repairing broken economies
Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: to the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around Reparatur-und […]
As we consider our future…
Ask not for energy or goods that depend on international supply chains. Ask not for solar power, wind power or battery electric storage (BESS). Ask not for e-vehicles (EVs) or smartphones. These can’t be manufactured without fossil fuels, extractions, […]
Appropriate Technology, Traditional Cultures and Degrowth
The industrial-capitalist-technological system is characterized by perpetual growth through excessive production, relentless marketing and public relations to expand markets and demand through consumerism.[1] In the process, novel ‘needs’ are manufactured and the boundaries and norms of comfort and convenience are […]
Is Alternative Energy the Best Solution to Climate Catastrophe?
Environmentalists have known for decades that the “greenest” form of energy available is reduction of useless and harmful energy. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day embodied this with “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, that seems to have been replaced […]
Co-creating urban, regenerative futures
“Regenerative Futures” The phrase had been rolling around my head for a while. I felt that it pretty neatly summed up the direction I wanted to be heading with my work and life. ‘Regenerative’ – I reasoned – is the […]
Cities and Green Orthodoxy
As the world has urbanized rapidly since 1950, per capita carbon footprint has declined, and so has carbon intensity in economic output, defined as the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic growth. But gross material throughputs and […]
What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
This blog is also available in Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian and Spanish. The crises of the modern world verify what indigenous cultures have always known: that all phenomena are inextricably interconnected. As the Amazon – one of the […]
We Can’t Do It Ourselves
How to live a more sustainable life? This question generates a lot of debate that is focused on what individuals can do in order to address problems like climate change. For example, people are encouraged to shop locally, to buy organic […]
