What can we expect to come out of the Glasgow COP meetings? If the pattern established by previous COPs is repeated, not much. Dire statistics will be cited, pleas for action will be heard, earnest pronouncements will be made, non-binding […]
Source Temple and the Great Reset
I recently visited a spiritual community in Brazil called Source Temple. Drawing primarily on the teachings of Adi Da and A Course in Miracles, it comprises about thirty people from about ten countries, mostly Brazil and South America, ranging in […]
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 […]
COVID-19: An Opportunity for Localization
Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was believed that globalisation would lead to development and prosperity. However, the whole scenario has changed now with almost every part of the world under some form of lockdown, which has […]
What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
This blog is also available in Dutch, French, 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 most […]
A wakeup call for local resilience
The lead article in a recent edition of my hometown newspaper highlighted the efforts of a local teen and a sewing business to create 1,000 masks for area hospitals. While this is a wonderful development, it shouldn’t have come to […]
We will survive the Coronavirus. Will we survive ourselves?
What an astonishing slap in humanity’s face, this coronavirus. But the silver lining is that it is also a rude wake up call. I say ‘silver lining’, for at the centre of this is a massive humanitarian crisis of illnesses […]
Comparative resilience: 8 principles for post-Covid reconstruction
This past weekend, a bright Georgetown undergraduate asked me how I squared my passion for localization with the theory of comparative advantage. For economics newbies, he was referring to David Ricardo’s argument that every community should find one product to […]
Coronavirus and the Death of ‘Connectivity’
The Covid 19 pandemic is the second major crisis of globalization in a decade. The first was the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, from which the global economy took years to reach a semblance of recovery. We did not learn […]
5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis
The human tragedy of the coronavirus is immense. Thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been infected globally, and millions more have been affected. Whilst infectious disease has always been a part of the human experience, the expansion of industrial […]