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Consumerism
If Your House Is On Fire
Kathleen Dean Moore On The Moral Urgency Of Climate Change
Every decision that we make — about where we find information, where we get food, what we wear, how we make our living, how we invest our time and our wealth, how we travel or keep ourselves warm and sheltered — is an opportunity for us to express our values both by saying yes to what we believe in and by saying no to what we don’t believe in.
December 2012
Weekly Apocalyptic, Or Poem Written On The Wall In An Ascending Space Capsule
We had to stop what we were doing / to see what we had done. Thing was, / we wouldn’t.
December 2012A Time Of Unexampled Prosperity
Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when the “credit system,” as it is called, expands to full luxuriance; everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly, from the facility of borrowing.
February 2012Prophet Of Modest Profit
Woody Tasch On How Not To Get Rich Quick
We use the power of entrepreneurship but support the entrepreneurs who design businesses to solve social and environmental problems and are committed to bioregions and communities. I’m especially interested in agriculture as a place to create that change. We’re not investing enough in small-scale, organic agriculture. Rapid economic growth has created tons of cheap food with a long shelf life, but it’s destroyed family farms, which are vital to rebuilding and preserving soil fertility.
June 2010
Busted
Dean Baker On The Price We’re Still Paying For The Housing Bubble
Conservatives tout the free market as the backbone of our economic system but hide the fact that they’re stacking the deck to serve their interests. The option of leaving the market alone doesn’t exist. Show me someone who’s made lots of money, and I’ll show you how we wrote the rules so that he or she made money. Bill Gates is a rich man because the government granted him a monopoly on his Windows software programs. If I sell you Windows without Bill Gates’s permission, he’ll sue me. That’s not the free market; that’s the way we wrote the rules. The government doesn’t have to give Gates copyright protection for Windows; there are other, better ways to finance software development.
February 2010
Sunbeams
October 2009You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.
The Decline And Fall Of The Suburban Empire
James Howard Kunstler On Reshaping The American Landscape
I hear two themes that both represent a big fantasy. One is the techno-triumphalist fantasy that assumes we’re going to invent our way out of our problems: some mythical “they” will come up with a techno-rescue — a new miracle fuel to keep the cars running, or something like that. The other fantasy assumes that we’re going to organize our way out of this mess. Both tend to ignore the likelihood that we’re going to be living in a more disorderly society with a lot of people who are unhappy and perhaps violent and who are going to be making disruptive political claims.
October 2009
excerpted from
Small Is Beautiful
Economics As If People Mattered
Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on worldwide systems of trade.
October 2009The Magic-Makers Of Havana
In a globalized world of interlocking economies, is it possible for a culture to evolve at its own pace, or does change come in only two packages: fast-tracked by corporate-sponsored leaders, or arrested entirely by dictators and juntas? I’ve seen savvy indigenous communities in Ecuador and Chiapas, Mexico, incorporate what they like of the outside world and reject the rest, but can this be done on the scale of an entire country? Is there even a possibility that Cuba can preserve its culture while opening to the world, to dissent, to change?
October 2008
How Many Americans Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?
Joan Ogden On The Nation’s Uncertain Energy Future
Getting back to the federal level: There is currently a suppression of politically unacceptable views on energy. For example, scientists who work on global warming are being told not to talk to the press. The Environmental Protection Agency issues an annual report on air pollutants and their impact. A few years ago, when the draft of the report included greenhouse gases — the kind that contribute to global warming — the information was pulled by the Bush administration.
August 2007
