Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-oriented civilisation suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.
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Kari McGregor caught up with Helena Norberg-Hodge – new economy activist, founder and director of Local Futures, and producer of award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness – for a glimpse at the journey that led her to conclude that the future is necessarily local.
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What is needed to get us out of our comfort zone and fight for our children’s future?
Consume less, share more and stand up against fossil fuels, urban sprawl, destructive infrastructures and resource extractivism. And, above all, fight for an economy that can fulfil everyone’s basic needs within the natural boundaries of a healthy planet.
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This is the first of three articles on understanding complexity, and how our energy, economic and ecological systems, like unruly children, tend to defy our attempts to change them.
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As our civilization proceeds down the slope of the post-peak-oil curve, global trade will become more and more expensive, so our economies will naturally localize. The energy-efficiency benefits of localized economies are obvious to us, but there are also social, and even psychosocial, benefits that aren’t often contemplated.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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SHIFT magazine 