Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. Image from Wikimedia. Lafayette, Louisiana, has a population of around 125,000. That makes it about the 200th largest city in the country; not really big but not really all that small either. It has a unique culture and geography, but the layout and design of the … Read more
Sustainability 4.0 implies the empowered co-creation of prosumers in order to re-shape economy and society towards social inclusiveness and ecological soundness.
Trade unionist Jimmy Reid described alienation as ‘the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the process of decision-making’. This frustration is endemic in contemporary neoliberalised economies…
To ensure that sufficient zinc, molybdenum and antimony are available for our greatgrandchildren’s generation, we need an international mineral resources agreement.
And these are troubled times. It’s getting harder and harder for everyday folks to pretend otherwise as carrying the weight of the self-delusions begins to exceed the cost of waking up and squaring oneself with reality.
While not offering a critique of the degrowth discourse, I throw some light on the debate by offering a deeper and more useful conceptualization that avoids the negative connotations of, and resistance to, “degrowth”
Here I will be laying out what I consider to be the core elements and principle guidelines for civic/popular programs for democratic praxis. First, some definitions.
In Part I, last week, I made the case for the over-riding importance for a major shift in the strategic focus for all democratic change movements, and especially for co-operative/solidarity economics. Here in Part II I sketch out how I think we can begin moving decisively toward community and regional networks with a cultural/structural strategy.
Let’s begin by stopping our addiction to thinking in big structural terms. There is value in the scaling-up structural visions and strategies for growing our movements for co-operative/solidarity economics [2] and deep social change. However, structural strategies by themselves are like a one-armed swimmer moving upstream into a heady current.
The world – and chiefly among it, first world countries – seems to me, to be moving away from a purely industrial model, aimed mainly at production, to a new type of society whose contours and goals have yet to be clearly defined.”
There is no doubt that as a species we have to downsize if we are to respect the limits; not only for ourselves but —just as importantly— for the millions of other species that co-inhabit the earth with us. It is timely, therefore, to talk of degrowth in the context of humanity as a whole, and most certainly in the context of the Global North which is overconsuming and overdumping.
I attended the UN Climate Summit (COP22) in Marrakech last November…As someone studying the ethical issues surrounding carbon trading schemes, it was particularly noticeable that ‘ethics’ of any description are simply not on the agenda of these talks.
