I’m writing today from a Starbucks in Ballston, just outside the nation’s capital. Today is the first day of the three day New Green Economy Conference, where I will be attending and volunteering. It has proven to be a good trip so far, and I am looking forward to meeting all those sustainably-minded people I [...]
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Money. We use it everyday yet our concept of it is limited. When we talk about money, we talk in terms of what it does, not what it is. Despite our ignorance of money it rules most of our lives. I recently finished a great documentary about money that I would like to share with [...]
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The holiday seasons have a strong connection with families, harvests, and merriment through most of human history. However, today’s holidays have been corrupted – turned into marketing spectacles for the merriment of executive paychecks. Holidays in our growth economy are about increasing consumer spending, buying newer and bigger, getting more and more. They are no longer about [...]
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At a certain point our society’s leaders realized that in order to continue growing the economy we would have to turn consumers to debt. This is simply the next step in a series of events lead by our growth addiction. You see in order to get bigger the economy needs consumers to consume. However, you [...]
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You too can try this experiment in your house with some simple materials! This is a great short and informative video about neoliberalism, the economic thought that has been triumphed for awhile, that encourages more private economic control instead of public. Of course, we might point out that the economic system is not sustainable – neither ecologically [...]
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A Steady State Economy will need for us to value our externalities as best we can in order to take into account every impact we have and move towards a sustainable scale. It will also require us to create policies that protect us when these externalities cannot, or should not, be factored into market forces.
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A system that takes from the poor and gives to the rich is the system we have created in the growth economy. Our focus forever on profit over life, and increasing those profits, encourages less and less life. Those with the money can afford to take the natural capital that was once commons from the [...]
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Our money was once valued by the worth of goods, but today it is our goods that are valued by their worth in money. Banks create money out of thin air by loaning it into existence. Increasing the money in the market creates inflation. This also means the system is required to continually grow in [...]
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