Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition.

The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing it to urgent action to tackle the crisis.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. In this time we must go both fast and far, together,” said Colin Cook-Miller, coordinator for the coalition. “Our movement for a rapid Just Transition mobilization must be coordinated, strategic, and unified, with leadership from the most-impacted frontline communities who are at the forefront of change.”

The “Declaration of a Climate Emergency and Requesting Regional Collaboration on an Immediate Just Transition and Emergency Mobilization Effort to Restore a Safe Climate” resolution commits the city to:  an “urgent climate mobilization” to slash emissions, moving towards zero net emissions; building resilience strategies for the coming climate impacts; a just transition, making vulnerable communities central to such a shift; and calling on other states, the federal government, and other nations to make a similar mobilization towards climate action and a just transition.

In a letter to city council members on Tuesday, local organizational leaders including Miller, as well as Greg Jackson of Sustainable Economies Law Center, Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Bonnie Borucki of Transition Berkeley, and Kemba Shakur of Urban Releaf, noted that climate emergency resolutions have already been in the California cities of Richmond and Berkeley passed and wrote that the measure before the Oakland city council  “matches the urgency and scale of the ecological, economic and climate crisis that we face.”

“At this time in history,” they wrote, “a livable future for any of our children is far from guaranteed. We must do everything in our power today to create a safe, just, and healthy world for ourselves, for our children, and for future generations.”

Photo: Takver/flickr/cc

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Beyond Disaster Capitalism — Jonny Gordon-Farleigh

“What if the expected responses during disasters either fail to occur or are only marginal? What if the temporary breakdown of social hierarchies allows for new ideas and systems to emerge? What if disasters resolve pre-existing conflicts? And what are the new political powers of this ‘community of sufferers’?”
The Blitz — Rebecca Solnit

“Some spread out to camp in forests, caves, and the countryside outside London. Many became so inured to falling bombs they chose to stay home and chance death for a good night’s sleep. Connelly says, “The people’s role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led.”
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change — Ashley Dawson

“Cities are not homogenous, though, they are sites of extreme class and race inequality — it’s always the most marginalised communities that are affected.”
ORDER HERE

Beside the Bombs: Building a New Life with Bare Hands
Jo Taylor

After the Angry Sea: Co-operatives Rebuilding After the Tsunami
Stirling Smith

EPIC Homes : Extraordinary People Impacting Community 
Nadhira Halim

The Mondragón Experience to the Preston Model
Julian Manley

Uneven Burns: California’s Climate-Fueled Wildfires
Robert Raymond

Book review: Crashed by Adam Tooze
Hanna Wheatley

The post Co-operating out of Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle’s narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn’t just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero’s solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep – the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths – but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimately destructive?

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea – say, that agriculture was a wrong turn – and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story.

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment – imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way – not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths – if that’s our nature – then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story – and sharing one’s own – but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it’s more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it’s for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making – and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do – without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people’s myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all? Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice.

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen.

Photo by giveawayboy

The post Do we need a new myth, or no myth? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post by Nafeez Ahmed was originally published on Insurge Intelligence, Medium.com

Inside the new economic science of capitalism’s slow-burn energy collapse

And why the struggle for a new economic paradigm is about to get real

New scientific research is quietly rewriting the fundamentals of economics. The new economic science shows decisively that the age of endlessly growing industrial capitalism, premised on abundant fossil fuel supplies, is over.

The long-decline of capitalism-as-we-know-it, the new science shows, began some decades ago, and is on track to accelerate well before the end of the 21st century.

With capitalism-as-we-know it in inexorable decline, the urgent task ahead is to rewrite economics to fit the real-world: and, accordingly, to redesign our concepts of value and prosperity, precisely to rebuild our societies with a view of adapting to this extraordinary age of transition.

A groundbreaking study in Elsevier’s Ecological Economics journal by two French economists, for the first time proves the world has passed a point-of-no-return in its capacity to extract fossil fuel energy: with massive implications for the long-term future of global economic growth.

The study, ‘Long-Term Estimates of the Energy-Return-on-Investment (EROI) of Coal, Oil, and Gas Global Productions’, homes in on the concept of EROI, which measures the amount of energy supplied by an energy resource, compared to the quantity of energy consumed to gather that resource. In simple terms, if a single barrel of oil is used up to extract energy equivalent to 50 barrels of oil, that’s pretty good. But the less energy we’re able to extract using that single barrel, then the less efficient, and more expensive (in terms of energy and money), the whole process.

Recent studies suggest that the EROI of fossil fuels has steadily declined since the early 20th century, meaning that as we’re depleting our higher quality resources, we’re using more and more energy just to get new energy out. This means that the costs of energy production are increasing while the quality of the energy we’re producing is declining.

But unlike previous studies, the authors of the new paper — Victor Court, a macroeconomist at Paris Nanterre University, and Florian Fizaine of the University of Burgundy’s Dijon Laboratory of Economics (LEDi)—have removed any uncertainty that might have remained about the matter.

Point of no return

Court and Fizaine find that the EROI values of global oil and gas production reached their maximum peaks in the 1930s and 40s. Global oil production hit peak EROI at 50:1; while global gas production hit peak EROI at 150:1. Since then, the EROI values of oil and gas — the overall energy we’re able to extract from these resources for every unit of energy we put in — is inexorably declining.

Source: Court and Fizaine (2017)

Even coal, the only fossil fuel resource whose EROI has not yet maxed out, is forecast to undergo an EROI peak sometime between 2020 and 2045. This means that while coal might still have signficant production potential in some parts of the world, rising costs of production are making it increasingly uneconomical.

Axiom: Aggregating this data together reveals that the world’s fossil fuels overall experienced their maximum cumulative EROI of approximately 44:1 in the early 1960s.

Since then, the total value of energy we’re able to extract from the world’s fossil fuel resource base has undergone a protracted, continuous and irreversible decline.

Insight: At this rate of decline, by 2100, we are projected to extract the same value of EROI from fossil fuels as we were in the 1800s.

Several other studies suggest that this ongoing decline in the overall value of the energy extracted from global fossil fuels has played a fundamental role in the slowdown of global economic growth in recent years.

In this sense, the 2008 financial crash did not represent a singular event, but rather one key event in an unfolding process.

The economy-energy nexus

This is because economic growth remains ultimately dependent on “growth in material and energy use,” as a study in the journal PLOS One found last October. That study, lead authored by James D. Ward of the School of Natural and Built Environments, University of South Australia, challenged the idea that GDP growth can be “decoupled” from environmental impacts.

The “illusion of decoupling”, Ward and his colleagues argued, has been maintained through the following misleading techniques:

1. substituting one resource for another;
2. financialization of GDP, such as through increasing “monetary flows” through creation of new debt, without however increasing material or energy throughput (think quantitative easing);
3. exporting environmental impacts to other nations or regions, so that the realities of increasing material throughput can be suppressed from data calculations.
4. growing inequality of income and wealth, which allows GDP to grow for the benefit of a few, while the majority of workers see decreases in real income —in other words, a wealthy minority monopolises the largest fraction of GDP growth, but does not increase their level of consumption with as much demand for energy and materials.

Ward and his co-authors sought to test these factors by creating a new economic model to see how well it stacks up against the data.

Insight: They found that continued economic growth in GDP “cannot plausibly be decoupled from growth in material and energy use, demonstrating categorically that GDP growth cannot be sustained indefinitely.”

Other recent scientific research has further fine-tuned this relationship between energy and prosperity.

The prosperity-resource nexus

Adam Brandt, a leading EROI expert at Stanford University’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering, in the March edition of BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality proves that the decline of EROI directly impacts on economic prosperity.

Earlier studies on this issue, Brandt points out, have highlighted the risk of a “net energy cliff”, which refers to how “declining EROI results in rapid increases in the fraction of energy dedicated to simply supporting the energy system.”

Axiom: So the more EROI declines, a greater proportion of the energy being produced must be used simply to extract more energy. This means that EROI decline leads to less real-world economic growth.

It also creates a complicated situation for oil prices. While at first, declining EROI can be expected to lead to higher prices reflecting higher production costs, the relationship between EROI and prices begins to breakdown as EROI becomes smaller.

This could be because, under a significantly reduced EROI, consumers in a less prosperous economy can no longer afford, energetically or economically, the cost of producing more energy — thus triggering a dramatic drop in market prices, despite higher costs of production. At this point, in the new era of shrinking EROI, swinging oil prices become less and less indicative of ‘scarcity’ in supply and demand.

Brandt’s new economic model looks at how EROI impacts four key sectors — food, energy, materials and labor. Exploring what a decline in net energy would therefore mean for these sectors, he concludes:

“The reduction in the fraction of a resource free and the energy system productivity extends from the energy system to all aspects of the economy, which gives an indication of the mechanisms by which energy productivity declines would affect general prosperity.

A clear implication of this work is that decreases in energy resource productivity, modeled here as the requirement for more materials, labor, and energy, can have a significant effect on the flows required to support all sectors of the economy. Such declines can reduce the effective discretionary output from the economy by consuming a larger and larger fraction of gross output for the meeting of inter-industry requirements.”

Brandt’s model is theoretical, but it has direct implications for the real world.

Insight: Given that the EROI of global fossil fuels has declined steadily since the 1960s, Brandt’s work suggests that a major underlying driver of the long-term process of economic stagnation we’re experiencing is resource depletion.

The new age of economic stagnation

Exactly how big the impact of resource depletion on the economy might be, can be gauged from a separate study by Professor Mauro Bonauiti of the Department of Economics and Statistics at the University of Turin.

His new paper published in February in the Journal of Cleaner Production assesses data on technological innovations and productivity growth. He concludes that:

“… advanced capitalist societies have entered a phase of declining marginal returns — or involuntary degrowth — with possible major effects on the system’s capacity to maintain its present institutional framework.”

Bonauiti draws on anthropologist Joseph Tainter’s work on the growth and collapse of civilizations. Tainter’s seminal work, The Collapse of Complex Societies, showed that the very growth in complexity driving a civilization’s expansion, generates complex new problems requiring further complexity to solve them.

Axiom: Complex civilizations tend to accelerate the use of resources, while diminishing the quantity of resources available for the civilization’s continued expansion — because they are continually being invested in solving the new problems generated by increasing complexity.

The result is that complex societies tend to reach a threshold of growth, after which returns diminish to such an extent that the complexification of the society can no longer be sustained, leading to its collapse or regression.

Bonauiti builds on Tainter’s framework and applies it to new data on ‘Total Factor Productivity’ to assess correlations between the growth and weakening in productivity, industrial revolutions, and the implications for continued economic growth.

The benefits that a certain society obtains from its own investments in complexity “do not increase indefinitely”, he writes. “Once a certain threshold has been reached (T0), the social organisation as a whole will enter a phase of declining marginal returns, that is to say, a critical phase, which, if ignored, may lead to the collapse of the whole system.”

This threshold appears to have been reached by Europe, Japan and the US before the early 1970s, he argues.

Insight: The US economy, he shows, appears to have reached “the peak in productivity in the 1930s, the same period in which the EROI of fossil fuels reached an extraordinary value of about 100.”

Of course, Court and Fizaine quantify the exact value of this peak EROI differently using a new methodology, but they agree that the peak occurred roughly around this period.

The US and other advanced economies are currently tapering off the end of what Bonauiti calls the ‘third industrial revolution’ (IR3), in information communications technologies (ICT). This was, however, the shortest and weakest industrial revolution from a productivity standpoint, with its productivity “evaporating” after just eight years.

In the US, the first industrial revolution utilized coal to power steam engine and telegraph technology, stimulating a rapid increase in productivity that peaked between between 1869 and 1892, at almost 2%.

The second industrial revolution was powered by the electric engine and internal combustion engine, which transformed manufacturing and domestic consumption. This led productivity to peak at 2.78%, remaining at around 2% for at least another 25 years.

After the 1930s, however, productivity continually declined, reaching 0.34% in the period 1973–95. Since then, the third industrial revolution driven by computing technology led to a revival of productivity which, however, has already tapered out in a way that is quite tepid compared to the previous industrial revolutions.

Axiom: The highest level of productivity was reached around the 1930s, and since then with each industrial revolution has declined.

The decline period also roughly corresponds to the post-peak EROI era for total fossil fuels identified by Court and Fizaine.

Thus, Bonauiti concludes, “the empirical evidence and theoretical reasons lead one to conclude that the innovations introduced by IR3 are not powerful enough to compensate for the declining returns of IR2.”

Insight: The implication is that the 21st century represents the tail-end of the era of industrial economic expansion, originally ushered in by technological innovations enabled by abundant fossil fuel energy sources.

The latest stage is illustrated with the following graph which demonstrates the rapid rise and decline in productivity of the last major revolution in technological innovation (IR3):

The productivity of the third industrial revolution thus peaked around 2004 and since then has declined back to near 1980s levels.

Bonauiti thus concludes that “advanced capitalist societies (the US, Europe and Japan) have entered a phase of declining marginal returns or involuntary degrowth in many key sectors, with possible major detrimental effects on the system’s capacity to maintain its present institutional framework.”

In other words, the global economic system has entered a fundamentally new era, representing a biophysical phase-shift into an energetically constrained landscape.

Going back to the new EROI analysis by French economists, Victor Court and Florian Fizaine, the EROI of oil is forecast to reduce to 15:1 by 2018. It will continue to decline to around 10:1 by 2035.

They broadly forecast the same pattern for gas and coal: Overall, their data suggests that the EROI of all fossil fuels will hit 15:1 by 2060, and decline further to 10:1 by 2080.

If these projections come to pass, this means that over the next few decades, the overall costs of fossil fuel energy production will increase, even while the market value of fossil fuel energy remains low. The total net energy yield available to fuel continued economic growth will inexorably decline. This will, in turn, squeeze the extent to which the economy can afford to buy fossil fuel energy that is increasingly expensive to produce.

We cannot be sure what this unprecedented state of affairs will herald for the market prices of oil, gas and coal, which are unlikely to follow the conventional supply and demand dynamics we were used to in the 20th century.

But what we can know for sure from the new science is that the era of unlimited economic growth — the defining feature of neoliberal finance capitalism as we know it — is well and truly over.

UK ‘end of growth’ test-case

The real-world workings of this insight have been set out by a team of economists at the University of Leeds’ Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, whose research was partly funded by giant engineering firm Arup, along with the main UK government-funded research councils — the UK Energy Research Centre, the Economics and Social Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

In their paper published by the university’s Sustainability Research Institute this January, Lina Brand-Correa, Paul Brockway, Claire Carter, Tim Foxon, Anne Owen, and Peter Taylor develop a national-level EROI measure for the UK.

Studying data for the period 1997-2012, they find that “the country’s EROI has been declining since the beginning of the 21st Century”.

Energy Returned (Eout) and Energy Invested (Ein) in the UK (1997–2012) Source: Brand-Correa (2017)

The UK’s net EROI peaked in 2000 at a maximum value of 9.6, “before gradually falling back to a value of 6.2 in 2012.” What this means is that on average, “12% of the UK’s extracted/captured energy does not go into the economy or into society for productive or well-being purposes, but rather needs to be reinvested by the energy sectors to produce more energy.”

The paper draws on previous work by economists Court and Fizaine suggesting that continuous economic growth requires a minimal societal EROI of 11, based on the current energy intensity of the UK economy. By implication, the UK is dropping increasingly below this benchmark since the start of the 21st century:

“These initial results show that more and more energy is having to be used in the extraction of energy itself rather than by the UK’s economy or society.”

This also implies that the UK has had to sustain continued economic growth through other mechanisms outside of its own domestic energy context: in particular, as we know, the expansion of debt.

It is no coincidence, then, that debt-to-GDP ratios have continued to grow worldwide. As EROI is in decline, an unsustainable debt-bubble premised on exploitation of working and middle classes is the primary method to keep growth growing — an endeavour that at some point will inevitably come undone under its own weight.

We need a new economics

According to MIT and Harvard trained economist Dr. June Sekera — who leads the Public Economy Project at Tufts University’s Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE) — net energy decline proves that neoclassical economic theory is simply not fit for purpose.

In Working Paper №17–02 published by the GDAE, Sekera argues that: “One of the most important contributions of biophysical economics is its critique that mainstream economics disregards the biophysical basis of production, and energy in particular.”

Policymakers, she says, “need to understand the biophysical imperative: that societal net energy yield is falling. Hence the need for a biophysical economics, and for policymakers to comprehend its central messages.”

Yet a key problem is that mainstream economics is held back from being able to even comprehend the existence of net energy decline due to an ideological obsession with the market. The result is that production that occurs outside the market is seen as an aberration, a form of government, state or ‘political’ interference in the ‘natural’ dynamics of the market.

And this is why the market alone is incapable of generating solutions to the net energy crisis driving global economic stagnation. The modern market paradigm is fatally self-limited by the following dynamics: “short time horizons, growth as a requisite, gratuitous waste baked-in, profits as life-blood.” This renders it “incapable of producing solutions that demand long-view investment without profits.”

Thus, Sekera calls for a new “public economics” commensurate with what is needed for a successful energy transition. The new public economics will spur on breakthrough scientific and technological innovations that solve “common-need problems” based on “distributed decision-making and collective action.”

The resulting solutions will require “long time-horizon investment: investments with no immediate payoff in terms of saleable products, no visible ROI (return on investment), no profit-making in the near-term. Such investment can be generated only in a non-market environment, in which payment is collective and financial profit is not the point.”

The only problem is that, as Sekera herself recognizes, the main incubator and agent of the non-market public economy is government — but government itself is playing a key role in dismantling, hollowing-out and privatizing the non-market public economy.

There is only one solution to this conundrum, however difficult it might seem:

Citizens themselves at all scales have an opportunity to work together to salvage and regenerate new public economies based on pooling their human, financial and physical assets and resources, to facilitate the emergence of more viable and sustainable economic structures. Part of this will include adapting to post-carbon energy sources.

Far from representing the end of prosperity, this transition represents an opportunity to redefine prosperity beyond the idea of endlessly increasing material accumulation; and realigning society with the goal of meeting real-world human physical, psychological and spiritual needs.

What will emerge from efforts to do so has not yet been written. But those efforts will define the contours of the new post-carbon economy, as the unsustainable juggernaut of the old grinds slowly and painfully to a protracted, chaotic halt.

In coming years and decades, the reality of the need for a new economic science that reflects the dynamics of the economy’s fundamental embeddedness in the biophysical environment will become evermore obvious.

So say goodbye to endless growth neoliberalism.

Photo by eg65

The post Inside the new economic science of capitalism’s slow-burn energy collapse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Summary

“The discourse and practice of participatory governance experienced a boom in European cities in the aftermath of the new millennium, coinciding with a period of economic boom. This project thoroughly examines the role of participatory urban governance in times of crisis and austerity: Has participation strengthened? Has it weakened? Does it remain unchanged? Has it been reformulated?

In principle, the empirical evidence points to four contradictory directions: (1) the continuity of some pre-existing formal structures of participation; (2) residualisation and the disappearance of some others; (3) the emergence of new practices; and (4) the development of new meanings and new roles for participation. But do all these trends have the same weight or are there some that clearly dominate over the other? Are there significant variations from place to place? What are the explanatory factors for such variations? When we speak of participatory governance we are concerned not only with what happens to citizen participation mechanisms promoted from the “top” by the public institutions, but also we wonder what new participation dynamics emerge from the “bottom”

Overall, how are relationships between government and citizens evolving? Can we talk about new models, new paradigms? What political assessment should be made of them? This project addresses these issues through a comparative analysis of various British cities (Cardiff, Leicester) and of the Spanish state (Madrid, Barcelona, Lleida and San Sebastián).”

The Evolution of Participatory Governance in Barcelona After the 2008 Crisis

Excerpted from here:

“The case of Barcelona is a good example of the participation boom that took place in Catalonia and Spain – and in other parts of the world – in the beginning of the new millennium. However, Barcelona’s participative tradition can be traced back to the late 1980s, when some of the current mechanisms of citizen participation were set up. Citizen participation mechanisms, in fact, form part of a wider model of collaborative governance, in which local government maintains a leading role, but cooperates with different types of actors (public, private and communitarian) to reach collective goals such as urban regeneration, economic development and social and environmental progress. Collaborative governance has crystallized in the city as a tradition, spanning different mandates and resisting the effects of governmental change in 2011.

Consequently, continuity (rather than retrenchment, enhancement or innovation) is the dominant trend of collaborative (and participative) governance in the city of Barcelona in recent years. As anticipated by the theoretical framework of the TRANSGOB project, collaborative structures deployed over many years (two decades in the case of Barcelona) can become deeply institutionalised practices difficult to modify or transform, even in the current period of crisis and fiscal retrenchment. Collaboration has become a “policy paradigm”, that is to say, a cognitive framework that defines legitimate courses of action for politicians and state managers (Hall, 1993; cited in Fuller, 2010: 279). Moreover, the fact that the current government has not dismantled the existing participative structures – inherited from the former centre-left governments – might be related to the fact that the anticipated costs of eliminating them ‘could simply outweigh the benefits’ (Davies and Blanco, 2014).

The new conservative government of Barcelona certainly launched a modification of the current ‘Rules of Citizen Participation’ passed in 2003. Such modification was interpreted by some actors as a lost opportunity for a comprehensive and radical transformation of participatory structures in the city, something that some would have expected to occur given the intensity of social and political transformations under the crisis. The government’s discourses on citizen participation put the emphasis on (supposedly) innovative notions such as ‘open government’, ‘social innovation’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘e-democracy’, although such discourses have not had significant impacts on the structures of citizen engagement. In contrast to this situation of institutional paralysis, the crisis has framed the emergence of new social movements in the city such as the 15M assemblies, the PAH and new social groups which reclaim the community use and self-management of misused urban areas.

Such movements adopt new styles of mobilisation – more horizontal, more decentralised, more inter-connected via social networks and the internet. They are also reflective of a ‘pragmatic turn’ in collective action, which means that they tend to focus on specific problems (such as housing evictions and misused urban spaces) to which they try to create specific answers through direct action, complementing or compensating for state and market deficiencies. In a way, they could be considered as examples of what Davies (2014) has called the ‘every-day makers’, although they show an uneven capacity to challenge the status quo: movements like the PAH, for example, challenge private property and confront central actors in the capitalist system like the banks; whereas groups that reclaim the self-management of misused urban spaces contribute to temporary solutions to the shortcomings of the market and state, despite being critical of the neoliberal city.

The case of Barcelona illustrates an increasing mismatch between formal mechanisms and rules of participative democracy, and emerging practices and discourses on citizen engagement. Such mismatch provokes an increasing delegitimisation of existing (formal) channels of citizen involvement in local governance. However, the new social movements demand a new, more transparent, more democratic local politics, with more opportunities for direct participation such as popular legislative initiatives, community management of public goods and referendums. The debate on participative democracy is far from being over. It rather adopts new terms, and expresses ambitions formulated by new socio-political actors. The new government of Barcelona en Comú inherits the participative dynamics of the city. It expresses the emergence of novel concepts such as social innovation, coproduction and the urban commons that emphasize the need of developing more horizontal relationships between the local institutions and the citizens. It is also a reflection of the development of practices of grass-roots mobilisation, claiming a new way of doing politics in the city. The new government aims to give continuity to the participative and collaborative tradition of the city, although it is working on a fresh model of participative governance based on the strengthening of existing structures of citizen participation like the neighbourhood councils, the enhancement of direct democracy mechanisms like citizen initiatives and referendums, the community management of public spaces and facilities and the promotion of participation for underrepresented social groups such as the migrants, the youth and the homeless. To what extent such political intentions will be translated into tangible changes in the formal structures of participation in the city remains to be seen in the future.”

The full Report Series of TRANSGOB can be found here (English & Spanish).

Photo by Asian Development Bank

The post TRANSGOB: Transformations of Urban Governance in the Context of the Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Part One: Crisis as Opportunity

“Crises offer the opportunity to implement policies that lead to profound political and economic changes on the fast track as societies are in turmoil and unable to organise themselves against these implementations. Naomi Klein (2007) explains in her book, “The Shock Doctrine”, how proponents of neoliberalism unable to convince people by means of argument, use situations of shock such as coups d’état, dictatorships or natural disasters to proliferate neoliberal policies. These entail a stripping of the welfare state and general public services as well as the privatisation of public assets. Rather than “free economies” going hand in hand with democratic societies, as it often tends to be represented, the “liberalisation” of economies historically depended on the shocking of populations through extreme state violence and terror or the seizing of opportunities that had an equally traumatising and paralysing effect on civil society. Naomi Klein shows through a rich array of case studies of the last 50 years how neoliberal policies are incompatible with constitutional democracy if no repressive measures are taken against the own population. Neoliberalism was tested first as an experiment in Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile where the population was held in check through widespread torture and disappearances. After the experiment was repeated in other military dictatorships like the Argentinean junta, Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain became the first Western democracy that adopted neoliberal policies. After initially dismissing neoliberalism as “incompatible with constitutional democracy”, she created domestic conditions that enabled her to push forward with the neoliberal agenda at home. These conditions were created through the Falkland War abroad and a violent suppression of unions at home. In Thatcher’s Great Britain, downsizing of the welfare state and far-reaching privatisation programs came along with the curtailment of labour and demonstration rights and an increase in repressive measures. Such developments can also be observed in Spain and Greece today.

In direct resemblance to Thatcher’s TINA (“There is no alternative”) narrative, the media and politicians of both Spain and Greece adopt a discourse of “we have lived beyond our means and now we have to cut back, there is nothing we can do about it, we have to cut social services and privatise in the name of fiscal balancing” (Reich, 2013). One of the main objectives of the Shock Doctrine, as explained by Klein (2007), is to sweep away autonomous narratives and inoculate people with fear to diverge from the prescribed plan of action; in other words, to create an experiential understanding that there really is no alternative to what the central powers say and do. Similarly, David Graeber interprets neoliberalism less as an economic program than a political program “designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives” (Graeber & Solnit, 2012). It is thus telling that the Greek mass media create horror scenarios of what happens if the congress does not pass Troika’s austerity memoranda. “Economic experts” literally tell the Greek people on national TV that “there will be chaos. Greece will become a Third World Country. The supermarket shelves will soon be empty. There will be ration coupons” (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012). Similarly, a special “Citizen Security Law” is crafted in Spain to quell the new forms of citizen protests and politics that defy the austerity programs, create autonomous narratives and form the Spanish indignado movement (Fernandez-Savater & Martin, 2014). These anti-protest laws take such repressive measures as criminalizing passive resistance, uploading police violence on Youtube or Tweeting about a protest which can be punishable by fines as high as 600,000€ (The Guardian, 2013). Members of the indignado movement identified the objective of these laws as an attempt “to proscribe politics by criminalizing it, and withdrawing anything other than politics by politicians from circulation” (Fernandez-Savater & Martin, 2014). It is thus directly aimed at the citizenry’s capability to create their own narratives and to make sense of the events around them without having to rely on the information propagated by the political elite and the mass media.

While civil society is educated towards learned helplessness, a psychological state in which there is no more perceived capability to effect changes on the personal environment and complete submission to any external changes that are inflicted on the person, comprehensive privatisation programs transform public goods into private wealth (Soy Publica, 2014). Before the privatisation program in Greece could begin, however, the necessary governmental positions needed to be staffed by the appropriate personnel favourable to the plans. When former Prime Minister George Papandreou stepped down from his post in 2011 due to vehement popular opposition to the conditions of the Troika’s bailout plan, he made way for the former Vice President of the European Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, to lead the new interim-government until elections in 2012 (The Guardian, 2011). Papademos then staffed governmental positions with people from the private Greek Bank Eurobank which made negotiations with the Troika essentially into an interbank deal (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012). It is important to note that this interim government had no democratic legitimacy while passing comprehensive austerity and privatisation bills that would shape the country’s future for years to come. In the light of the massive vocal opposition to the neoliberal policies passed, this interim government can be viewed as a direct cancellation of democracy where sovereignty is given to experts from the banking sector. One Greek citizen summarizes the feeling of the time in the Greek documentary Catastroika: “The political system we have now in Greece resembles that of a junta. It is a banker’s junta with no more popular legitimation than the 1967 junta” (ibid.).

In order to facilitate a speedy privatisation process, the Greek privatisation fund “Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund” (commonly known under the Greek acronym TAIPED) has been founded to undertake the most extensive privatisation program ever implemented in an EU country (Mavroudi, 2013). The stated mission of the private fund is “to restrict governmental intervention in the privatisation process” (TAIPED, 2014). Public assets ranging from islands to public utility companies and motorways are handed over in escrow to the fund for it to be sold off to private bidders. A special law prohibits assets once handed over to be given back to the state, and the Greek public sector has legally withdrawn from any financial claim over revenues which are committed to go towards debt-service (Mavroudi, 2013). Only two out of the six board members are approved by a parliamentary committee and there are a range of international experts and observers from the Troika advising the fund. Critical observers argue that the Greek privatisation process resembles that of occupied countries where external agents come to the country, run the sell-off of the country’s assets, while the costs of the whole operation are carried by the local population whereas the profits which are expected to amount to 50 billion Euros go to the creditors (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012).

It is a large scale transfer of public wealth into private property outside of any democratic control.

As in other privatisation cases, the value of the public assets are vastly underestimated and therefore sold far below actual value (Klein, 2007). To take an example, the old Hellenikon airport has been estimated by independent pre-crisis valuations to be worth $6.8 billion (Baboulias, 2014). Recently, however, it has been sold to the private entity of Lamda Development for $1.2 billion who as the sole bidder for the site has been exempted “from any tax, duty or fee, including income tax in respect of any form of income derived from its business, of transfer tax for any reason, [or] capital accumulation tax” (The Press Project, 2014). To make matters worse, the Greek newspaper To Vima calculated that the Greek state will have to make at least another $3.4 billion in administrative and infrastructural expenses before it can deliver the property to its new owner (Roos, 2014). The Greek state thus accumulates further public debt by subsidizing the multi-billionnaire Latsis family through this purchase while poverty-inducing fees and taxes are imposed on ordinary citizens who survive on less than 500 Euros per month. This is but one example to show how the privatisation process is first of all a transfer of public wealth to the capital class and not necessarily helping in fiscal balancing.”

Part Two: The Crisis as Community Builder

Crises do not only cause material hardship and an opportunity for the powerful to privatise public wealth, but they can also spur the fast building of communities and a sense of solidarity between those who are affected by it. Rebecca Solnit (2009) provides in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster a rich array of case studies where people came together as a response to natural disasters in order to help each other through the difficult times. From earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City to floods in New Orleans and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, what Solnit found time and again was that in these times of external disruptions to social life, people who usually lived individuated lives suddenly came together for cooperative disaster relief. On the ground, people were there for each other, helping their neighbours and fellow citizens who they mostly did not know, and people reported a great sense of belonging and solidarity. At the same time, individuals respond emotionally in surprising ways: rather than being overwhelmed by fear and confusion, they report an intense joy of working together for a greater cause, and of getting intimate with people instantly who lived in their vicinity for years without ever having personally interacted with them. Furthermore, as external structures and institutions break down and individuals respond to them in cooperation with others, they start to feel in control of their own lives again; they feel to have more power and agency than in their uninterrupted everyday lives. Solnit describes this spirit of mutual aid always in great contrast to the response of the central powers – governments – who often militarise disaster zones expecting people to behave in savage Hobbesian ways as “the social order” is expected to break down through the external havoc. The only way the prevailing social order breaks down however, is in the sense that people stop relying on external institutions and start taking responsibility for their own lives by interacting in spontaneously emerging decentralised networks for dispersed decision making. Solnit recognises how threatening disasters are for political elites as power is being devolved to people on the ground as they are the first responders who assemble impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild their neighbourhoods. She argues that centralised powers are structurally incapable of dealing with such situations and that “only the dispersed force of countless people making countless decision is adequate to a major crisis” (Solnit, 2009, p. 305).

My hypothesis is that economic crises like the one we are currently living through have a similar effect on people as the account Rebecca Solnit (2009) provides of natural disasters. As great parts of the population lose their employment and some even their home, and they feel they cannot turn to the state for help, they start to rely on each other again. In such times of widespread shared economic distress, people begin to build networks of solidarity and mutual aid. As hierarchical institutions fail and cannot further be relied on, people build their own decentralised networks of provision and decision-making on the ground. This can take the form of widespread social movements or collaborative economic projects. As the formal economy breaks down, people start building their own parallel economy on the ground based on values they view should be embodied in economic interactions. The question is though whether these alternative economic networks persist longer than the spontaneous reactions of disaster relief which vanish again as their environment is rebuilt and many think only warmly back to it as an episode they once lived through. If these new economic networks are built for the purpose of social transformation rather than surviving through the times of a dysfunctional formal economy, then they can lead through a genuinely different economic culture that continues to flourish even outside the times of crisis. Either way, through the convergence of various ecological crises that can be expected to seriously disrupt the economic system in a not too distant future, the experience of having built a grassroots economy increases the resilience of these local communities who are better prepared for the crises still to come. The more these alternative structures are developed, the less hard will be the transition to a new economy when we are forced to. For this, it is important to strengthen a new economic culture now that relies on cooperation, mutual aid and solidarity within ecological limits.”

Part Three: Beyond the Crisis: The Emergence of Alternative Economic Practices

“Economies are inherently cultural. The way things are produced, distributed and consumed is strongly shaped through cultural norms and practices (Zelizer, 2011). When there is a systemic crisis, this indicates also a cultural crisis: the existence of certain values as the guiding principles of human behaviour that are non-sustainable (Aitken, 2007; Akerloff & Shiller, 2010). Thus, the transition towards a new sustainable economy based on social and environmental values is strongly dependent on a fundamental cultural change if we are not to wait on external resource pressures that force us in that direction (Nolan, 2009). It may very well be that we are currently in such a period of cultural transition. Since culture is a material practice, it should be possible to observe signs of new protocultural forms in the spontaneous adaptation of peoples’ lives to the constraints and opportunities arising from the crisis. This dissertation investigates new economic practices as an indication of such a cultural transition.

The financial crisis has been brought about through a combination of deregulation and individualism as a way of life which manifested in corporate managers focused on their own shortterm profits as the guiding principle of their increasingly risky decisions (Tett, 2009; Zaloom, 2006). The “me first” culture is a key-ingredient of business management, manifested in the self-interested, rational, utility-maximising “homo economicus” (Sennett, 2006; Moran, 2009). This culture can be designated as “networked self-interest” (Cardoso & Jacobetty, 2012). On the other hand, across the world, there are movements of protesters that condemn this “me-first” culture in economic and political networks of power and the results it has brought about. Gustavo Cardoso and Pedro Jacobetty (2012) research the culture of these oppositional movements and argue that although we live in a network society under network individualism, an underlying cultural shift is taking place towards the adoption of a paradigm less centred on self-interest and more on the ability to adopt common interests and belong to a group that shares objectives within a given network. Such a cultural transition is fuelled by a change in values and belief in cooperation, free sharing, transparency, and open source production. Cardoso and Jacobetty identify these traits in the political and economic movements for social change and term them “cultures of networked belonging”. A description that I find very appropriate as a sense of belonging is one of the most valuable features that these networks offer to their participants. The sense of belonging to a wider movement, contributing to a bigger cause, to be looked after and to be able to care for other people are some of the most valuable psychological support mechanisms that save its participants through the time of crisis. This has always been the case with catastrophes as Rebecca Solnit (2009) makes abundantly clear in her book A Paradise Made in Hell, but the difference with the support systems that flourish in this particular crisis is that they are created to stay on afterwards and continue to provide these benefits as they embody exactly the social change that people are aiming for. As one writing on a wall in Madrid puts it: “Nothing would be worse than getting back to ‘normal’” (Biliris, 2012).

The crisis creates a profound cultural challenge for many as it throws them into an identity crisis as consumers (Chatzidakis, 2014). Since the crisis leads to a severe drop in income for many people who are also not able anymore to consume on the basis of credit as they used to for the last decade, large parts of the Southern European population find themselves in a position where they cannot consume as much as they used to and would like to. Some try desperately to revive consumer fantasies by visiting gifting bazaars or paying small deposits in stores to reserve items, pretending not to know that it is no longer possible for them to return and buy them (ibid.). Others try to find fulfilment in something else than consumption and in order to do so need to change their values and generate from within a new culture in order to overcome consumerism (Castells, Caraca & Cardoso, 2012). Since new values do not generate in a vacuum, this non-consumerist culture may only grow on the basis of actual social practices that exist in societies around the world, often first enacted by drop-outs of the current economy because of their rejection of what they consider to be a destructive way of life (ibid.). The rise of a new economic culture may thus result from the historical convergence between a cultural vanguard searching for a different way of life, and the disoriented masses of ex-consumers who no longer have the opportunity to consume anything but themselves – “people who have nothing to lose but their cancelled credit cards” (ibid., p. 12). In this light, they need to make the shift Erich Fromm (1976) advocated almost 40 years ago “from having to being”. In the context of the crisis, the identity of an affected person framed through “having” is likely to be that of a “defective and disqualified consumer” for whom “non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled” (Bauman, 2011). To create a dignified identity in this new context, it thus remains the frame of “being” which places greater emphasis on a person’s relationships, belonging and processes someone is involved in (Fromm, 1976). The alternative economic practices that currently proliferate in Southern Europe’s crisis-ridden societies offer exactly this kind of identity-creation through practical affiliation.

A Catalan research group, including the eminent sociologist Manuel Castells, conducted an empirical research project to study the universe of conscious alternative economic practices in Catalonia (Conill et al., 2012). On basis of seventy filmed interviews of individuals involved in such networks and organisations, the research group created the documentary film “Homage to Catalonia II” which subsequently was used to stimulate debate in eight focus groups. From this qualitative research, a questionnaire was created which was used to conduct 800 interviews with a statistically representative sample of the population of Barcelona. The survey tried to measure the extent of diffusion of each one of the identified alternative economic practices in society at large, and determine the factors inducing or restraining the diffusion of these practices during the economic crisis. To be sure, economic activities that do not fit within the pattern structured by the rules of the capitalist market permeate throughout the entire society, and society only functions because everybody performs every day countless acts of generosity that defy market logic (Graeber, 2011). In some cases, however, there is a deliberate attempt to connect these practices to an alternative vision of how social interaction and especially economic activities should be organised (Conill et al., 2012). The research team attempts to map the diffusion of these conscious non-capitalist practices in Catalonia and has categorised the diverse activities in a typology that is displayed in Figure 1.

The researchers have found that alternative economic practices have grown considerably since the onset of the crisis, but are due to their methodological setup – a one-time survey and not a longitudinal study – not able to quantify this growth (Conill et al., 2012). Nonetheless, one remarkable quantitative finding is that 97% of the surveyed people have engaged in some kind of non-capitalist economic practice since the start of the crisis 2008. The fact that virtually every participant of the representative sample of Barcelona’s population is engaged to some degree with these practices shows that there is a strong resonance between a conscious alternative economic culture and the culture of a mainstream society shaken by the economic crisis. While everybody, regardless in how intensely they are involved in alternative economic practices, is fully aware of the severity of the economic crisis, people differ widely in their perception and evaluation of the crisis. The first group, which the research team terms “culturally transformative” feels reaffirmed in their analysis and rejection of a consumerist lifestyle and feels vindicated to have set up an alternative way of life before the crisis hit. They position themselves ideologically and aim for social change that treats the root causes of the crisis rather than adapting to its effects. For the second group, who the researchers term “alternative practitioners”, the crisis has shaken their beliefs and their understanding of life. It affects everything they used to do or think, so that adapting to the new environment is difficult and confusing. In order to get by in these hard times, they change their practices: they consume less, they share and barter, they participate in solidarity networks and a number of other practices that help them to deal with the economic unpredictability in which they currently find themselves, but often without knowing exactly why, how and for what kind of future. While the practice of the first group is mostly value-driven, the motivation of the second group to engage with such alternative economic practices tends to be to meet their needs in a new way as old patterns do not suffice anymore. While the culturally transformatives had anticipated the crisis, the alternative practitioners are reacting only now and are learning by doing, slowly discovering a new world of alternative economic practices through gradual involvement. In contrast, the third group that the researchers term “culturally adapted” are unable or unwilling to accept the new circumstances, are waiting, enduring the hard times, and hoping for the best, which is often vocalised as a return to the ‘normal’ pre-crisis conditions. The research team speculates that as the crisis deepens, the shift from being culturally adapted to becoming alternative practitioners may be one of the most decisive trends in ongoing social change (Conill et al., 2012).

The research team has identified 26 practices which they grouped in three categories: self-sufficiency, altruistic and exchange and cooperation (Conill et al., 2012). Table 1 depicts the percentage of the total population that has engaged in each of these practices since the beginning of the crisis in 2008 until the research was conducted in 2011.”

Lead image by Dr Case

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An excerpt from Janosch Sbeih:

“The etymology of the word ‘crisis’ tells a lot about the characteristics of such an event. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Crisis comes from the Greek word kerein, meaning to separate or cut, to make fixed, settled (Williams, 2012). The earliest registered use of the word, dating back to the 1500s, is in relation to medical and also astrological events, which were believed to be closely related. In this context, crisis describes “the point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or for worse” (OED, 2014). Crisis is defined in contrast to ongoing progress – initially progress of an illness, and by the seventeenth century, “of anything” (Williams, 2012). A crisis can be understood in two ways. First, as an obstacle to be overcome, a bump in the road of progress that that needs to be dealt with in order to return to the “normal” state of affairs.

Alternatively, a crisis can be understood as the convulsion in the transition from one system to another, as a deciding phase in a change of systems. Media and governments universally frame the current crisis in the first sense, as a temporary turbulence which needs to be addressed through technical fixes in the current system. Every response is geared towards the reinstallment of a functional pre-crisis system. As we live in a growth-dependent economic system, the central question of the mass-media and policy-makers is “how do we get the economy to grow again?”. In contrast, people who are critical of the current economic system and work towards structural change tend to conceptualise the crisis in the second way, namely, as a moment that marks the transition into a new system. Long-term critics and grassroots activists often feel that their views are being validated through the crisis, as the economic system proves to be inherently unstable and governments look out only for the needs of the banking sector. People on the ground thus need to rely on each other and take matters in their own hands to save themselves and each other through the crisis. Many decide that it is time to change how the society works and push for political and economic change. The former takes shape in occupations, demonstrations and practices of direct democracy while the latter can be found in the establishment of and participation in alternative economic networks. Both are prefigurative in the sense that the movements embody the values people want to see in politics and the economy. On a small scale in the individual initiatives, they are thus already practising the changes they want to bring about in society at large. The political and economic ideas that people advocate in these movements are not necessarily new and many have been practising them already for years before the crisis. It has been argued that severe downturns tend to accelerate deep economic shifts that are already under way which is why these ideas that have been around for a while suddenly gain traction through the crisis (Williams, 2012).

Edgar Morin (1976, 1984) who advocated in the mid-1970s the development of the scientific study of the crisis as such (“crisology”) suggested that a crisis can be an event that both reveals and has an effect. It reveals what usually remains invisible; it forces us to see things that we are usually unwilling to confront. The crisis reveals aspects that are inherent to reality and are not merely accidents; it constitutes a moment of truth. In the current case, it can be said that the crisis reveals unbridled capitalism, in particular financial capitalism, in all its brutality and its extreme injustice (Wieviorka, 2012). Above all, it reveals the dynamics of debt which structure our global economy to a large extend while at the same time destabilising it and stripping it of resilience. It is interesting to observe that in this context the Bank of England published for the first time a report that openly states that money is created ex nihilo as loans by private banks (Graeber, 2014). The crisis thus reveals threatening dynamics that have been going on long before 2008. As an event that has an effect, Morin considers that a crisis sets in motion not only forces of decomposition, disorganisation and destruction, but also forces of transformation (Morin, 1976, 1984). In these cases it is also a critical point in a process that includes dimensions of construction, innovation, and invention. The focus of my dissertation is the transformational dynamics of alternative economic practices that this particular crisis fuels and set in motion. Continuing the idea that a crisis both “reveals” and “has an effect”, Edgar Morin invites us to admit that the crisis demonstrates that what a matter of course was is in fact a source of difficulties and presents problems: what worked had its limits, its drawbacks, and its inadequacies. The crisis therefore constitutes an incentive to invent something new; but an incentive that is imperative as the system that previously helped us structure our lives became deeply dysfunctional and cannot further be relied on.”

Photo by PFNKIS

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From our friends at The Extraenviromentalist Podcast.

From the episode notes:

The catastrophe at Fukushima presents the opportunity to re-evaluate basic assumptions about energy and technology but the temptation to double down on business as usual becomes incredibly strong. Will our species obtain a paradigm shift in the face of an energy emergency? Could we create new models for business that regenerate ecological functions rather than destroy the planet?

In Extraenvironmentalist #66 we speak with Michael Stone and Ian MacKenzie about their new film Reactor which covers their recent trip to Japan. Is the social fallout from Fukushima a template for social change elsewhere? Then we speak with Willem Ferwerda of the Ecosystem Return Foundation about scaling up the ecosystem restoration techniques we discussed on XE #65 with John Liu. We talk about the potential for regenerating ecological functions through new models for business and investing. Can we develop a process for launching permaculture businesses around the world?

The post Podcast of the day: The Extraenviromentalist: Changing Reactions. appeared first on P2P Foundation.