Inspired by Shani Graham’s recent TEDx talk titled Take a street and build a community, Kari McGregor met with the sustainability guru, co-founder of Ecoburbia and spearhead of the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta to get some insight into what it takes to build community.
Read more
This issue we step down the anthropocentric ladder one full rung to the vertebrate class of Aves. Yes the Orange-bellied Parrot isn’t even a mammal! Our disdain for other life-forms seems to increase the further removed the species is from Homo sapiens on the evolutionary tree or classification table. However, any student of nature will appreciate that the web of life is interdependent on every last cell of biodiversity, and that any notion of hierarchy is human-created nonsense.
Read more
New Zealand has felt the pinch of economic crisis much as other countries have done, and, with necessity the mother of invention, a small group of enterprising Kiwis have invested time in banking some real solutions.
Read more
Whether our motives are ideological, a matter of necessity, or pure tight-fistedness, we all like getting things for free, right? Well, it just so happens that you can get many of your needs met without spending a single dollar or cent (or yen, or peso, or shekel) on the really free market. Here are ten easily accessible ways of doing just that, and none of them involve begging or stealing!
Read more
Despite my personal view that careers are an artificial construct of economic conscription, rather than an inspiring signifier of moral prosperity, I’m anxiously adapting to a cutthroat culture of meritocratic musical chairs in a highly convincing game of class conscious monopoly. I wish my words were enough to seal that next paycheck, to keep a roof over my head, to prove I’m worthy and human enough to earn a humble living among the towering chess pieces of industrial civilisation. Instead I find myself playing dead on desks with my Bachelor of Adulthood; stuttering clumsily through interviews and panicking at performance reviews.
Read more
What is the economy for if not meeting human needs? Human needs are the basis of every economic activity we undertake. In order to reflect upon whether our economic system is effectively meeting our needs, we need to first of all understand what our needs are, their relative level of importance, and how to satisfy those needs.
Read more
Money makes the world go round. Or so we’re told. And you’d be far from foolish to believe it, as finance is our global operating system. If crashed, it will bring industrial civilization to its knees. If money is the root of all evil, yet makes the world go round, then solving our planetary predicament presents quite a conundrum.
Read more
The dream, promised by the western world’s doctrine of progress, which promises abundance for all, and increased leisure time (yes you can stop laughing now), is vanishing in front of our closed eyes. The party is over and all that’s left is a nasty hangover and a lot of rubbish to deal with.
Read more
So we need to build a new economy, right? And we’re trying, but it’s not happening fast enough, or going deep enough. So here’s a bit of a provocation, a suggested blueprint for one way of doing it. It’s all fairly simple, won’t take much money, and could be transformative if we put all the pieces together.
Read more
This is the second of three articles on understanding complexity, and how positive feedback loops are leading inexorably to civilization’s collapse – and what we can and can’t do about it.
Read more
SHIFT magazine 