Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Community building in the United States is on the verge of something special. As we observe trends in economy, demographics, energy consumption and cultural prefernces, we see the outlines of a New American Frontier slowly emerge from the settling dust of the Great Recession.
This book demonstrates that empty-world economic theory has failed on its own terms and that its application by policymakers has resulted in the failure of capitalism itself. Pursuing absolute advantage in cheap labor abroad, First World corporations have wrecked the prospects for First World labor, especially in the US, while concentrating income and wealth in a few hands.
Researchers have discovered a significant flaw in large swaths of ecological research into the impact of logging on tropical forests: Scientists have been dramatically overestimating the damage done by loggers, skewing conservation strategies paid for by the donations of millions of environmentally minded citizens.
Localise West Midlands (LWM) has just completed some research which we wanted to share with those interested in the REconomy project. It is closely related to REconomy thinking, and we hope (have to hope) it has potential to increase how “reconomics” can be integrated into mainstream economic development.
The latest round of political theater in Washington DC over the automatic budget cuts enacted in the 2011 debt ceiling compromise—the so-called “sequester”—couldn’t have been better timed, at least as far as this blog is concerned. It’s hard to imagine better evidence, after all, that the American political process has finally lost its last fingernail grip on reality.
After three centuries of forest policy that put the interests of the state above locals, the French are realizing that a more inclusive policy is better for both people and forests.
Even Forbes is jumping on the bandwagon of the “sharing economy” with a recent article on AirBnB. This closely follows Van Jones’s CNN article about the “sharing economy,” but the push to transform our broken economy isn’t just about sharing, though; it isn’t even just about renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, and the other elements of the green economy movement. There is a “new economy movement” that’s pushing for a fundamental shift away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated our economy and society for decades.
Placemaking is a process, accessible to anyone, that allows peoples’ creativity to emerge. When it is open and inclusive, this process can be extraordinarily effective in making people feel attached to the places where they live. That, in turn, makes people more likely to get involved and build shared wealth in their communities.
IATP has always argued that trade agreements need to respect and promote human rights, not drive a process of globalization that privileges commercial interests and tramples on public interests. In a new paper on land grabs, we reaffirm that position.
Jobs and economic growth are a result of having a productive system in place, not the other way around. We need to create real net wealth that benefits not only the local communities, but the region as a whole. Don’t get me wrong, jobs are great. But, building infrastructure with the primary purpose of creating jobs, with little consideration to context, is setting a bad precedence and setting up communities for unexpected liabilities.
Global warming challenges us to go beyond ordinary political tactics to the level of social inventions. Ordinary tactics can be heroic, seemingly all we have, and even effective up to a point, but in this case we may need to supplement them with tactics not drawn from past struggles.
Don’t get me wrong, there are rural investments and there are rural initiatives, but they tend to be sectoral – you can run a project for older people or younger people or business people or just about any other ‘people’ you care to mention. But it’s a hard sell to persuade those holding the purse strings that rural areas deserve an integrated, holistic approach, an approach based on geographies rather than targeted bits of the population. This piecemeal approach to rural development gradually undermines the sustainability of rural geographies and chips away at our understanding of geographical identity and belonging. As a result of this, power and money and skills and resources have haemorrhaged away from rural communities over the decades, to be only partly replaced by the energies and aesthetic of a legion of culturally creative incomers.
