Found a great new source today: GlobalGeopolitics.net. They are now on my list of inspiring blogs to follow.
Here is an excerpt from yesterday's post on ENVIRONMENT: Rethinking Jobs for a Sustainable Economy.
"The possibility of environmental catastrophe has led many leaders, scholars and average citizens to reconsider an economy based on constant growth. It is becoming clear that people, especially in the United States, will need to consume less in the way of natural resources to avoid planetary peril. The million-dollar question, of course, is how the U.S. can move to a sustainable, zero-growth economy without losing more jobs. If people are consuming fewer goods and services, does that mean fewer jobs in the manufacturing, sale, and provision of those goods and services? 'It’s a good question because we are faced with unsustainable levels of consumption right now,' said John Talberth, president for the Center for Sustainable Economy. 'The whole economy collapses if we don’t consume enough, and we’ve got to change.'"
"Judy Wicks, founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies says, 'It’s going to mean more businesses, many more owners. Business ownership will be distributed much more broadly,' Wicks said. 'This means that the benefits of our consumption as a community will go more to families, and less to stockholders and financial institutions', she explained. 'Local ownership really brings out the unique, supports local innovators. In local living economies, we support our local artists, local musicians, our local culture, so that our community creates unique products that express our local culture. It might be a great wine, a great cheese, a new fashion… it could be anything a community creates,' Wicks said, 'so that our economy is about creating things that celebrate our being human [instead of] commodity crops.'"
I have been a fan of Judy Wicks ever since meeting her last year as a Change Agent In Residence (CAIR) at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Her vision makes a lot of sense to me.
I then think of the structural problem I noticed last year when studying microcredit and noticing how difficult it is to translate that model to an American context. In India, for example, it takes very little in the way of resources to set someone up to be able to make a living for their family with a small business. You can be illiterate and still support your family. Here, even allowing for the difference in cost of living, etc, our economy is structured to require a good deal more in the way of resources: education, cultural literacy, and a much steeper financial requirement for even the most basic business. This makes the micro-lending model significantly less micro, and less simple, at least in terms of application to developed economies. And it is the developed economies that require the most adjustment if we are to save the planet.
Where does this point us? Perhaps Judy's note that with a focus on local living economies, the benefits of our consumption as a community will go more to families, and less to stockholders and financial institutions holds some of the answer. If we can cut out-- or down-- the percentage of profit that leaves the community, we can keep more of what we make, and we may need to make less money entirely to make the system fly. We can downshift with less pain, and perhaps some added pleasure in terms of the quality of our lives.
What do you think?
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We must shift to local living economies if we expect people to make the connection between their actions and the effects they have on the rest of the world. In the current paradigm it is just too abstract. And that is just one of the many reasons why we need to move away from the global economy.
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