The documentary Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (John Page, Chris Breemen, Helena Norberg-Hodge & Eric Walton, 1993) provides an excellent introduction to the local, human scale traditions in Ladakh, and how local communities have been affected by the industrialised notion of “progress”. The observation that consumer culture as portrayed in advertisements and Western media appeals primarily to insecure teenagers is apt. I am tempted to qualify the observation from my autistic perspective: consumer culture is designed to target neuronormative teenagers, […]
Cooking fresh for the planet
How often do you cook a meal from scratch? For 11% of British people, the answer is never. But subsisting entirely on processed food and ready meals is not only bad for your health, it is also bad for the planet. It makes little sense financially, either: it is cheaper to create a meal using whole foods and fresh ingredients than it is to buy a substandard supermarket version. Eating well shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for the well-off, everyone can […]
Averting the apocalypse: lessons from Costa Rica
Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled out by economic growth. In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy by about 1.9% per year, […]
An Economy of Meaning – or Bust
It’s not often that a scientist gets to use the words love, creativity, and wisdom in a paper, especially when writing about economics. Perhaps that’s because economics, the dismal science, is obsessed with dismal systems – make that abysmal systems, relative to need. To be clear, I’m not speaking of the specific policies of the US, the EU, China, the World Bank or others. I’m speaking of dominant economic systems as wholes – especially their underlying conceptual models (macro and […]
Globalization and the American Dream
This blog is also available in Spanish. “… 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 […]
Globalization and Terror
For people in the modern world, there may be nothing more difficult to comprehend than the group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIS. The beheadings, rapes, and other acts of cruelty seem beyond understanding, as does the wanton destruction of priceless ancient monuments. Perhaps most mystifying of all is the way ISIS has been able to recruit young men — and even some young women — from the industralized West, particularly Europe: the conventional wisdom is that the cure […]
Mental Health and Globalization: An Alternative Theory on the Mental Health Crisis
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti I have a secret that I usually keep locked up inside of myself, hidden from even those who know me well: I suffer from depression. At times it is a deep, bottomless depression, an intense loneliness, serious end-of-the-world-thoughts depression.
Big Picture Activism
This piece is excerpted from Localization: Essential Steps to an Economics of Happiness, a new publication from Local Futures. Despite the countless grassroots projects already under way, the global economic juggernaut can seem too powerful to stop. But because more and more of us are becoming aware of how disastrous the global economy is for people and the planet, I believe that the chances for meaningful change are greater today than ever before. The environmental costs of the current […]
The Easiest Way to Tackle Climate Change
Hopes were high as our leaders gathered in Durban late last year. But another round of prevarication, indecision, postponement and finally outright refusal to meet carbon targets has certainly left those of us concerned about climate change feeling very discouraged. Yet not surprised. Since the very first attempts at addressing carbon emissions, our governments have approached the problem in the same reluctant, reductionist way. We’ve been led to believe that reducing carbon emissions will involve sacrifice—that we have to tighten […]
A Tale of Two Cities: Beijing and Detroit
This is a piece I wrote recently for Yes! Magazine. The original story is here, or you can read the full text below: Around the world, two opposing forces are contending to define our future. On one side are those working for a new economy—one that is more equitable, decentralized, and attuned to the needs of people and nature. On the other are the forces behind corporate globalization and its consolidation of political and economic power. While thousands of people […]