Posts Tagged ‘new economy’
Active Networks for a Rapid Global-to-Local Transition
It’s too easy to get depressed by the daily news cycle of wars and the threat of A.I., and to assume that nothing at all is going on to take the world in a more life-affirming direction. The truth is, there are thousands of grassroots projects on every continent challenging the bigger-is-better, high-tech trajectory of…
Read MoreWhat if food were treated as a human right?
It can be difficult to imagine a world – or even a city – without hunger. It seems so endemic to the world we live in that it can appear intractable. But there are examples around the world of places that have reorganized themselves to eradicate food insecurity completely, whether it be within one community…
Read MoreThe Radical Roots of Community Supported Agriculture
Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is one of those rare ideas which combine transformative potential with an elegant simplicity. The CSA model of funding and sustaining locally-rooted agriculture has grown exponentially around the globe over the past four decades. Since the first formal CSA at Robyn Van En’s Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts in the…
Read MoreRepairing 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 Service-Zentrum (R.U.S.Z.), the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998. It wasn’t…
Read MoreThe Flower of Transformation
With growing news of war and conflict, ecological and climate catastrophe, stark inequalities, health crises related to both poverty and affluence, the authoritarianism of governments, and the increasing stranglehold of mega-corporations in all aspects of our lives, it is understandable that there is deep anxiety about the present and future of humanity. On the brighter…
Read MoreComparative 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 specialize in and trade for everything else. I gave my usual response that the theory…
Read MoreTo Leave or Remain: Dichotomy or Distraction?
Ever since the Brexit referendum was first announced, we have been bombarded by an array of starkly contradictory pronouncements – from the Leave camp’s now infamous claim that withdrawal from the EU would release £350 million a week for the NHS to the former Chancellor George Osborne’s assertion that Brexit would leave the UK “permanently…
Read MoreWhy Growth Can’t be Green
Warnings about ecological breakdown have become ubiquitous. Over the past few years, major newspapers, including the Guardian and the New York Times, have carried alarming stories on soil depletion, deforestation, and the collapse of fish stocks and insect populations. These crises are being driven by global economic growth, and its accompanying consumption, which is destroying…
Read MoreThe Commons, Short and Sweet
I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp. Here is a fairly short overview, which I think gets to the nub of things. The commons is…. A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and…
Read MoreBulldoze the Business School
Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how…
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