Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Senator Robert Kennedy, 1968

We have known for a long time that judging an economy’s progress and success in quantitative (financial) terms leads to dangerous distortions and misplaced priorities. In 1972, Limits to Growth warned of the potentially devastating environmental effects of unbridled growth and resource depletion on a finite planet. While some of the predictions made were delayed by the extraordinary resilience of the planetary system, recent research suggests that we are now very close to witnessing the collapse scenario of ‘business as usual’ that the authors warned of. In their 30 years up-date to Limits to Growth the authors emphasized:

Sustainability does not mean zero growth. Rather, a sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. […] it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth. It would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether the growth could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the earth.

Meadows, Randers & Meadows (2005: 22) 224

The calls for ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012), post-growth economics (Post Growth Institute, 2015), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2011), and a ‘steady state economy’ (Daly, 2009) have become louder and have found a much wider audience in recent years. All these more or less anti-growth perspectives make important contributions to our rethinking of economics with people and planet in mind, but they might be over-swinging the pendulum.

As a biologist who is aware of how growth in living systems tends to have qualitative and quantitative aspects, I feel uncomfortable with demonizing ‘growth’ altogether. What we need is a more nuanced understanding of how as living systems mature they shift from an early (juvenile) stage that favours quantitative growth to a later (mature) stage of growing (transforming) qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just. ‘No growth’ is not the answer. Growth is a central characteristic of all life; a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later. Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 4)

Capra and Henderson argue that “we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we describe them in purely quantitative terms”. Since “qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships” they need to be mapped rather than measured (p.7). There are close parallels between the difference in how economists and ecologists understand the concepts of growth and development. While economists tend to take a purely quantitative approach, ecologists and biologists know how to differentiate between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both growth and development.

It appears that the linear view of economic development, as used by most mainstream and corporate economists and politicians, corresponds to the narrow quantitative concept of economic growth, while the biological and ecological sense of development corresponds to the notion of qualitative growth. In fact, the biological concept of development includes both quantitative and qualitative growth.

(ibid: 9)

Life’s growth patterns follow the logistic curve rather than the exponential curve. One example of aberrant quantitative growth in living systems is that of cancer cells which ultimately kill their host. Unlimited quantitative growth is fatal for living systems and economies. Qualitative growth in living organisms, ecosystems and economies, “by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing” (p.9). Capra and Henderson argue:

Instead of assessing the state of the economy in terms of the crude quantitative measure of GDP, we need to distinguish between ‘good’ growth and ‘bad’ growth and then increase the former at the expense of the latter, so that the natural and human resources tied up in wasteful and unsound production processes can be freed and recycled as resources for efficient and sustainable processes.

(ibid: 10)

The distinction between good growth and bad growth can be informed by a deeper socio- ecological understanding of their impact. While bad growth externalizes the social and ecological costs of the degradation of the Earth’s eco-social systems, good growth “is growth of more efficient production processes and services which fully internalise costs that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems” (p.10). Capra and Henderson conclude: “the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth […] can steer countries from environmental destruction to ecological sustainability and from unemployment, poverty, and waste to the creation of meaningful and dignified work” (p.13).

Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures.

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by Tim @ Photovisions

The post Shifting from quantitative to qualitative economic growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“A smaller and different economy with higher welfare needs to be distinguished from recession or depression. The question is how do we land there by design and not by collapse?”

Following up on Jeroen van den Bergh’s excellent review of the growth versus climate debate, Giorgos Kallis points to a fundamental misrepresentation of the quoted research on degrowth: degrowth is not a strategy „aimed at reducing the size of the GDP“.

In fact, the degrowth proposition is that the relationship between fossil fuels/carbon emissions and GDP growth is mutual, and that a serious climate policy will slow down the economy, and a slower economy will emit less carbon – notwithstanding historical exceptions such as collapsing regimes burning their fossil fuels. Viable scenarios for successfully limiting climate change at a 2 ⁰C rise involve both a slowing of the economy and a reduction of its carbon content. The question then is how to slow down while securing wellbeing?

The theoretical possibility of absolutely decoupling carbon emissions from GDP cannot be logically refuted, but it is unlikely to be physically or empirically possible. But let’s agree to disagree. Both agnosticism and conviction about limits to growth are reasonable positions. My point here is to clarify the misunderstanding of what degrowth is.

A shrinking GDP by design or by disaster?

 Right or wrong, the diagnosis of Limits to Growth, and the degrowth camp today is that by the end of the century there are two possibilities. Either a collapse of output and welfare after crossing resource or carbon limits or a smaller economy with higher welfare. In the mid-term a decrease of welfare is also possible as climate disasters strike while GDP growth is  still sustained by use of fossil fuels and reconstruction or defense expenditures.

The possibility space for a ‚degrowth‘, or ‚prosperous way down‘ or, in other words, a smaller and different economy with higher welfare needs to be distinguished from recession or depression. On this basis the policy and research question posed by degrowth scholars is not: „Which negative growth rate will get us there?, but „How do we land there by design and not by collapse? How do we create an economy that is low-carbon, low-output and secures well-being for all? This is the question that motivates interdisciplinary work on degrowth.

Ecological economists study macro-economic models and the social and policy conditions under which contraction can be stable and welfare-enhancing. Anthropologists, historians and social scientists examine how pre-capitalist civilizations prospered without growth, or how and why indigenous or intentional communities today manage without it. Engineers and legal theorists ask what technological and intellectual property models can sustain innovation without growth. Political theorists rethink democracy for a post-growth era. Focusing on „degrowth in a narrow sense of GDP decline“ – which is not what those who write about degrowth understand by degrowth – van den Bergh misses this exciting research agenda.

Watch also the video of a recent debate “Agrowth or degrowth” between Jeroen van den Bergh and Giorgos Kallis

¹Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology. He is a Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS and an ICREA professor at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Before that he was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from Imperial College, London. Research & Degrowth (R&D) is an academic association dedicated to research, awareness raising, and events organization around the topic of degrowth.

Photo by Desazkundea

The post Degrowth is anything but a strategy to reduce the size of GDP appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this series of podcasts, we explore pathways for climate justice in the Anthropocene – a geological epoch shaped by humans. Should we become stewards of our planet or live in harmony with nature to achieve a good life for all? We take our listeners on a journey to find out how we can reach the Paris goals. Through the lens of activists, experts, and scientists around the world, we reflect on this exciting challenge and explore paths that might lead us into a better future.

The pictures of our planet from a distance are beautiful and insightful. They show us a fragile marble in space that is ours to protect. But these pictures have also brought us another belief: that what happens on the ground is too small to count. We think that only global solutions can solve our global problems. But at the most local level, communities are already developing solutions. And this is why it’s time to zoom in again – back down to Earth.

In this podcast series, we’ve looked at different strategies to address climate change. We’ve discussed the risky ideas of geo-engineering and heard about climate cases in courtrooms around the world. We also considered the failures of carbon markets and talked about the links between climate change and agriculture.

In this final episode, we will take a look at the broader transformations that are necessary. Climate change is such a unique challenge that each and every sector of our society will have to change. At the same time, it is just one of the many urgent crises we face today. To get to the root of all of them, we need to consider a fundamental shift in thinking about our economies and lifestyles.

Do we need a master plan to get there? Maybe not. Because right now, people are already developing local solutions. They are experimenting with new paths toward just and sustainable lifestyles across the world. It’s a diverse set of approaches, but they share a common vision: The idea, that a good life for all is possible.

Do you know these moments when you reflect on your life and it feels like everything is accelerating?  We feel pushed to work more, to work harder and to always compete. Not because we want to move forward, but just because we want to keep up with everyone else.

This treadmill is part of a larger paradigm that we live in. It’s the logic of growth, says Barbara Muraca. Barbara lives in the United States and teaches Environmental and Social Philosophy at Oregon State University:

Modern, capitalistic societies are completely built around the idea of increasing economic growth. The retirement system in many countries, the taxation system, employment etc. So, if modern industrialized societies stop growing, they collapse. We call one year with reduced growth recession or crisis!

When you read the news, it may seem as if we’d be lost without an ever-growing economy. Growth is considered essential for a stable and booming society, and it comes with huge expectations. It’s supposed to guarantee employment, ensure peace, and provide wealth for everyone. We treat growth as the promise of a good life for all. But unfortunately, growth hasn’t delivered on its promise.

Now, the problem is that we have reached a point at which growth has turned from a means to improve quality of life to a goal of its own. Now, we can imagine what it means if we apply that to our own body. What would it mean if we grew every year 3 percent more than the year before? That would be completely crazy, and the balance of our body would indeed collapse, says Barbara Muraca

What seems crazy for our bodies is an accepted paradigm in economics: that we can grow and grow forever. In the process, our societies have become more and more divided. A few people get very rich, but the vast majority struggles. Growth doesn’t mean employment for everyone. And the financial market has stumbled into crisis. So why do so many of us still believe in the logic of growth?

I like the idea of mental infrastructures. You can imagine the highways that are built in our mind that we are used to take and stop seeing the side-roads and possible alternative paths, because we are used to take these highways, says Barbara Muraca

We want both: More energy, and clean energy. Can the two go together without doing harm to nature and other people? Technology is the focus of the so-called Green Economy, but it doesn’t come without side-effects. And while we green our energy systems, we are also consuming more and more resources. So if we really want to reduce our footprint, we need to change our lifestyles and habits. Like eating less meat for example, since breeding livestock produces high carbon emissions.

So, the good news is that especially in countries, like Europe and the US, meat consumption has been significantly reduced in the last years. The bad news however, is that, precisely because of the logic of growth and profit, the export of meat from Europe and the US has increased in the last years as well. And the OECD countries have really been celebrating the creation of new markets for meat in China and India and even issued dietary recommendation to increase meat consumption in these countries, says Barbara Muraca

This is just one example of how the logic of growth reproduces itself  against our best intentions. We are unable to simply stop growing no matter how much we try to size down. Sowe must change the basic structure of our societies in order to make them less dependent on economic growth.

Did you know that many rich countries have already hit their limits of growth? Their economies don’t grow as much as they used to anymore. This is the case in Germany, Canada or the U.S. In such countries economies grow only slowly by just one or two percent each year.

At the same time, many developing countries are growing quickly, like China and the Senegal. Their growth can be as high as five or six percent a year. The rate is much slower than it used to be but still high compared to some of the old industrialized countries. A big part of this boom happens in Asia.

In India’s, for example, the economy is expected to grow by up to eight percent each year. And this boom comes with huge changes. We reached out to AshEEsh Ko(h)thar(EE) to understand how such a fast-growing world looks like. Ashish is based in Pune in the West of India:

It’s a very large city, well small by Indian standards, about 4 million people.

Ashish is an environmental activist and co-author of the book “Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India”. The miraculous growth of his country has come at a huge cost, he explained to us:

Well, in India, as I guess across the world, we have a model of development which essentially focuses on economic growth and industrialization and commercialization. You know, a uni-directional approach which says that we have to move from agriculture and pastoralism to industrialization to services to digital economy etc. etc. And what this has meant for very, very large sections of India’s population is dispossession, because this kind of an economy needs the land and the forest and the waters to be taken away from those who traditionally depended on them. It holds to be primitive and outmoded their own knowledge systems, very sophisticated ways by which people have dealt with or have lived within nature. All of that is considered to be out-modeled and is supposed to be discarded.

The city of Pune has become one of India’s tech centers. International companies working in information technology, agribusiness and renewable energy have set up camp in the region. The car industry here accounts for a third of the Indian market. More and more Indians are buying cars. And they are finding jobs in the tech sector – and not just in Pune:

In all the schools if you look at the kind of teaching that happens, people are taught that doing farming, and pastoralism or fisheries or forestry work is no longer cool. It’s not something that one needs, should be doing in the 21. Century, the 21. Century should be about computers, it should be about being in industries, it should be about learning sophisticated technologies, being savvy with gadgets and so on. So, what we’re seeing is a kind of dispriviledging and displacement of nature-based livelihoods, which in India, most of the population actually still is living that.

Half of India’s people still work on farms, in forestry or in fishing. But their numbers are decreasing. People are moving away from the rural areas and into the cities. They give up their traditional livelihoods, hoping to succeed in the new economy.

And from those livelihoods where people are being offered are what I call deadlihoods. Because essentially their mass jobs there, there is no dignity, there is no meaningfulness with this, people are just part of a much larger chain of production. They are subject to the whims and fancies of a small number of owners, whether it’s government or it’s capitalist. And even in the so-called modern sector, things like computers and all, most of the jobs that people have are extremely deadening, there is no liveliness and then there’s no passion. And so, really, the replacement is by jobs with actually what I call deadlihoods, says Ashish Kothari.

Oftentimes, this means repeating the same action in a factory over and over again for a tiny payout. As you heard, AshEEsh calls these jobs ‘deadlihoods’. They separate people from nature and from the products they make, and expose them to tough and toxic working conditions that can be extremely dangerous. Here, global companies can produce at a lower cost, because the rules for the protection of workers and the environment are still less stringent. In many cases, the products are then shipped abroad.

So, there is also then a significant impact on the environment. In India, we already know that we are on a very steep, unsustainable path, using twice the amount of natural resources that can be regenerated. We’re already seeing severe, very severe shortages of water, problems of deforestation, flooding, droughts. And, of course now, combined with all that, the impacts of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

India is both fueling climate change and suffering from its consequences. More and more cars are crowding the streets, and coal-fired power plants pollute the air. To AshEEsh, the current system perpetuates inequalities, to the benefit of a small elite. Simply greening the economy, he says, won’t solve the larger problem.

If one wants to change the situation we’re in, we have to tackle the system at its roots. We have to tackle the system in terms of the political concentrations of power in the state, the economic concentrations of power in capitalism, the gender concentrations of power and patriarchy. And depending on where we are in the world, in India for instance, castism, which is very old. These fundamental actors of society have to be challenged and changed, if we’re really want to try and solve this problem, says Ashish Kothari.

You’ve heard it from our guests in the United States and India: Ashish and Barbara are convinced that we need a new kind of thinking and a new way of doing. They say we need to work on creating a fundamentally different world. This might sound utopian. But there are already projects emerging that try to do just that. Take the concept of Degrowth:

The movement on Degrowth in Europe, is a very, very important one, because we have to really challenge and say that not only have we gone too far and too much, too big. Actually, we have to degrow, we have to scale down considerably our use of materials and energy. Especially if we are genuine about other parts of the world that have got left behind. Being able to at least meet their basic needs. I’m not saying they should be able to develop in the same pattern, but at least be able to do away with the kind of deprivation that there’s an unequal form of development has caused.

The Degrowth idea comes in many shapes. Initially, the movement formed in France, under the name décroissance. It was taken up in Italy and Spain, where Degrowth is called Descrescita, or Decrecimiento. And in Germany, economists are working on so-called post-growth societies. Barbara is among those who support this Degrowth movement.

I do not think that growth is in the long term possible at this rate and I think that if we don’t move on with a radical transformation, we will end up in recurrent crisis, even worse than the crisis of 2008. So, for me, Degrowth is not just a utopia, it’s a necessary path to transform society, says Barbara Muraca.

But Degrowth seems a rather vague term. So what would this transformation actually look like? The people working on Degrowth won’t be able to send you a copy of their master plan. They don’t claim that they even know how it’s going to work. Instead, they are all about leaving the beaten path, and venture into uncharted territory.

And for this we need spaces in which we can experience and experiment what the difference might be like.) We have to experience what it means to live differently. Not only to think about that, but to make the experience in our bodies, in our minds, and in our desires. And I don’t think that this is not just an abstract idea or wishful thinking. Around us, there are so many different projects, social experiments and initiatives, that are already embodying this perspective. And they are already creating spaces where we can experiment alternative futures and start working on them. And I think they are contagious and powerful, says Barbara Muraca.

One space in which such alternative worlds are being explored is the Transition Town movement. Barbara says this is a great example of how we could develop new solutions.

You have small towns or neighborhoods, where people get together and the leading idea is to develop a plan to make their community no longer dependent on fossil fuels. But it is more than that. People build learning networks and start from their potentials and the skills that are there at the local level and they start to re-imagine the place where they live. They really rethink the economy, they reimagine work, they re-skill in order to develop the competences that are necessary to implement a different way of living, but they are also very concerned about social justice for example, says Barbara Muraca.

One of the most well-known Transition Towns is Bristol in the United Kingdom. The people there have developed creative ideas like the Bristol Pound. It’s a local currency, and it cannot be accumulated like normal money in the bank. Instead of generating profit, the Bristol Pound sustains the local economy. There’s a food network and there’s a community-owned farm. In these projects, what’s also being tested are new models of ownership:

It’s not just about sharing the use of tools, but about really rethinking the way we produce stuff. If we can generate production which is independent from the logic of profit, we don’t have to keep going with the idea of mass production and mass consumption. We can produce things that are modular, that can be highly recycled by local communities, that can tackle and address the needs of communities, and that are completely independent from the necessity of generate, recreate and accumulate increasing profit – which is what is happening now with the standard model of production.

If we produce locally, share our stuff and repair things when they are broken, we can decrease our footprint on the planet. And we can defy the logic of growth, by taking back control over our local resources. An interesting example of this comes from Mendha Lekha in India.

And this village in the last 40 years has kind of declared that in its village and for all the ecosystems around it, the…nobody else will be taking decisions but the village assembly itself. So their slogan is that while we elect the government in New Delhi and Mumbai, in our village, we are the government. (Now, through all of this they have upturned 200 years of colonial and forced colonial history, where the forests have been taken control off by the state.) They’ve taken control back to themselves and they now manage the entire forest, 2000 hectares around them, and they manage it in such a way that it is sustainable, that the conservation is taking place, they also recently agreed communized all the agricultural land, which means there’s no private land on the village anymore. And this also helps them to control cropping patterns, to make sure what lands are not being sold off for mining or industries, and so on, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish calls it a form of direct and radical democracy. Around the world, communities have reclaimed control over important resources, such as water. In another case, in the Western Indian district of Kachchh (Kutch), local people are taking care of their water in a new way. It’s an area where water is extremely scarce. So one hundred villages have banded to collect and use rainwater in a local, equitable and decentralised way. They manage it through local committees. In this way, the system provides enough water for the basic needs of every village:

This becomes very important because when one is talking about  the mainstream model of water, creating a big dam somewhere and then transporting that water somewhere else,  we now know that large reservoirs can also be serious sources of emissions.

When a valley is flooded to build a dam, it buries the soil and vegetation. The plants start rotting and emit methane. This powerful greenhouse gas can warm the planet. The second issue is that big dams often change the agricultural practices around it. Farmers shift from dryland farming to irrigated farming and start using chemical fertilizers, says Ashish. So the people of Kutch are saving planet-warming emissions, as well as their traditional farming practice.

When they are able to do local water harvesting, they continue with mostly their dry land farming agriculture, which necessarily is more diverse, it’s more localized, has less emissions, it’s mostly organic – and because it is diverse it is also more adaptable and able to deal with aspects of climate change, says Ashish Kothari.

Our addiction to growth has reached its limits. It’s threatening our environment as well as human dignity. Can we imagine a world beyond growth? Let’s look at our bodies when we get older.

After a certain threshold, our bodies stop growing physically, but do not stop being creative and learning and developing in a different way. And for the economy it’s similar, says Barbara Muraca.

Degrowth activists like Barbara are convinced that another world is possible. But she also says we need more than small reforms and green technologies. We need a fundamental change. What could this look like? There are many people already out and experimenting. Barbara says that the key is to build alliances among them:

So, stopping coal extraction in Germany for example, per se is not enough, because it leads to coal being imported now from Colombia. And in Colombia, pristine forests are destroyed and indigenous people are evicted for the coal mines. So, we to have to combine the blockage of coal mining in Germany with the things that the Transition Town people are advocating which is transforming the economy and society to make it less dependent on fossil fuels at the same time.

Modern culture tells us that we count mainly as individuals. We are divided into producers and consumers. This makes us easy to control. But if we reconnect as collectives, we can realize our power to shape the world:

If all goes well I think the world is moving towards what I call the radical ecological democracy, where the basic unit of decision-making is the collective, in the village or in the city neighborhood or in a school or college or wherever there are electives and communities are forming and being self-defined, says Ashish Kothari.

Ashish tells us more about his vision for the future. It’s a world, where people take back the means of production from states and corporations, and organize locally. Here progress is not measured by growth, but in terms of happiness and relationships. His is a vision of justice without the great inequalities between genders and classes we know today. It’s a world where humans are much more in tune with nature, and their knowledge is a common good.

These are the sorts of things we are seeing already in hundreds of initiatives in India, thousands across the world. And I think the more we are able to network them, bring them together, the more we can actually practice, bring into practice, a very very different vision for what the world would look like in 2050, says Ashish Kothari.

Does it sound idealistic? Well, yes. But idealism is the start of any meaningful process of change. And it’s about time that we take our knowledge on crucial issues like climate change and social justice, and turn them into reality.

This is a radical change in the view that we have. So, in other words, moving from the globe to the home, to the Oikos which is the word that is in the word ecology and in the word economy. Starting to shape together an alternative house, an alternative home for us, and not considering the globe as an abstract thing that can be organized from above, and managed from above and reproduce the logic of management as the solution to our problems, says Barbara Muraca.

The first photograph of planet Earth was taken in the late 1960’s. It made us conscious of the fragile place that we share. But it also planted a bias into our minds: That any solution to a global problem must be global in scale as well. But maybe that’s not true. We can start on the ground now, and develop our own, local solutions. In this respect, climate change is a wake-up call, and a real opportunity: To change our world for the benefit of everyone.

The post The great transition – Alternative paths for a better and climate just future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Why we need a new story

In 1971 a geologist called Earl Cook evaluated the amount of energy ‘captured from the environment’ in different economic systems. Cook discovered then that a modern city dweller needed about 230,000 kilocalories per day to keep body and soul together. This compared starkly to a hunter-gatherer, 10,000 years earlier, who needed about 5,000 kcal per day to get by.

That gap, between simple and complex lives, has widened at an accelerating rate since Cook’s pioneering work. Once all the systems, networks and equipment of modern life are factored in – the cars, planes, factories, buildings, infrastructure, heating, cooling, lighting, food, water, hospitals, the internet of things, cloud computing – well, a New Yorker or Londoner today ‘needs’ about sixty times more energy and resources per person than a hunter-gatherer – and her appetite is growing by the day.

To put it another way: modern citizens today use more energy and physical resources in a month than our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime.

It’s a shame, in retrospect, that Earl Cook’s easily-grasped comparison was overshadowed by the publication of Limits to Growth a year later. That book, based on a computer model at MIT,  warned of environmental ‘overshoot and collapse’ if the perpetual growth economy continued unchecked.

The apocalyptic story in Limits generated plenty of fear – but it was also demoralising.

In the 45-year stream of films, books, and campaigns that followed its publication, the enormity of the challenges facing he planet contrasted starkly with the tiny actions proposed as a response.

Two simple examples: We were exhorted to take our shopping home in a reused plastic bag, and to feel good about doing so – only to be told later that the bag is responsible for about one-thousandth of the environmental footprint of the food it contains.

In the same spirit of every little helps, we were urged to turn off our phone chargers at night – and then it emerged that the energy thus saved was equivalent to driving a car for one second.

In retrospect, our design focus on messages and things distracted attention from the system behind the thing – the societal values, and economic structures, that shaped our behaviour in the first place. We committed to “do less harm” within a system that, because it must grow in order to survive, unavoidably does more harm as it does so.

This lesser-of-two evils approach has also compromised one of the alternative words to sustainability being proposed, resilience. Described by one commentator as “the ability to take a punch”,  resilience planning has resolutely evaded an obvious question: “why did that guy – or system – punch you in the first place?”

The answer is an economic system whose core purpose is to produce, produce produce, and grow grow grow.

Signals of transformation

The good news is that, around the world, grassroots projects are proliferating that are shaped by a different logic. This global movement contains a million active groups – and rising.

Its ranks include energy angels, wind wizards, and watershed managers. There are bio-regional planners, ecological historians, and citizen foresters.

Alongside dam removers, river restorers, and rain harvesters, there are urban farmers, seed bankers, and master conservers. There are building dismantlers, office-block refurbishers, and barn raisers.

There are natural painters, and green plumbers. There are trailer-park renewers, and land-share brokers.

Their number includes FabLabs, hacker spaces, and the maker movement. The movement involves computer recyclers, hardware re-mixers, and textile upcyclers. It extends to local currency designers. There are community doctors. And elder carers. And ecological teachers.

Few of these groups are fighting directly for political power, or standing for election. They cluster, instead, under names like Transition Towns, Shareable, Peer to Peer, Open Source, Degrowth, Slow Food, Seed Freedom, or Buen Vivir.

These edge projects and networks, when you add them together, replace the fear that has so hampered the environmental movement with a story of love – a joyful new story about our place in the world.

In contrast to a global economy that degrades the land, biodiversity, and the people it touches, these projects signal a growing recognition that our lives are codependent with the plants, animals, air, water, and soils that surround us.

The philosopher Joanna Macy describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’ – and her voice is just one among many.

The Pope’s recent encyclical Laudato Si, for example, promotes the concept of ‘integral ecology’ – a reconnection between man and nature – to 1.2 billion readers.

The Pope’s transformational story has been echoed by the leaders of more than one billion Muslims, a billion Hindus, a billion Confucians, and 500 million Buddhists. The readership of these teachings adds up to 75 per cent of world’s population.

Of course, if everyone did what they were told by religious leaders, there’d be no sin in the world – and we’re not there yet. But a paradigm shift in science is adding secular credibility to this new story.

In studies at multiple scales – from sub-microscopic viruses, and slime molds,  to trees and climate systems, the story is consistent: The essence of plants, animals, air, water, and the soils is to be in relationship with other life forms —including us.

A single teaspoon of garden soil, it;’s been shown,  may contain thousands of species, a billion individuals, and one hundred metres of fungal networks – and this hidden world does not stop there.

Microbiology permeates other ecosystems, too – including our own bodies. As in the soil, so too in our stomachs, bacteria break down organic matter into absorbable nutrients. In the case of plants,  nutrients are made available to through their vast surface area of root systems in the topsoil and rhizosphere.

For Patrick Holden, the healthy topsoil, thriving with microorganisms, which covers much of the land’s surface, is in effect the “collective stomach of all plants”.

Every action we take – from feeding soil bacteria and fungi with composts or manures, to the timing of grazing and cultivation – can enhance or diminish soil life.

And because microbial processes are inter-connnected, the health of the soil, and our own heath, are part of a single story, too.

From parts, to wholes

It’s one thing for Popes and soil scientists to tell us to care for living systems – but is asking city dwellers to empathise with earthworms too big an ask? Fewer than half of us ever see or touch soil, after all.

For long time, I harboured just those misgivings – until I had an epiphany on an island in Sweden.

Fifty designers, artists and architects, gathered together for a summer workshop, were asked to explore two questions: What does this island’s food system taste like? and, How does this forest think?

My concern that living soil would not engage designers proved unfounded. It was like pushing at an open door:

Having scrabbled around the forest of Grinda like so many voles, they then staged a Soil Tasting Ceremony in which infusions from ten different berries on the island were displayed in wine glasses next to soil samples taken from each plant’s location. We were then invited to compare the tastes of the teas and soils in silence. It was a powerful moment.

Systems thinking, it seems, becomes truly transformational when combined with systems feeling – which is something we all crave.’  “We yearn for connection with one another, and with the soul,’ writes Alastair McIntosh, ‘but we forget that, like the earthworm, we too are an organism of the soil. We too need grounding”.

This lesson works surprisingly well in city design.

When this writer meets with city planners or managers, we always start with two questions: “Do you know where your next lunch will come from?” and, “Do you know if that place is healthy – or not?”

These questions help shift the design focus from the dry subject of public service delivery towards a whole-system concern with the health of places that keep the city fed and watered.

Within this frame,  the health of farm communities, their land, watersheds, and biodiversity, become integral aspects of the city’s future prosperity, too.

A focus on living systems acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibersheds, and food systems – not just  in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’.

With food, especially, the opaque subject of living systems finally makes sense.

The presence of good bread – and the microbial vitality bread making invokes – is an especially reliable indicator that a city’s food system is healthy.

In dozens of major cities, real bread pioneers are creating shorter grain chains by connecting together a multiutude of local actors in ways that reduce the distance between where grain is grown, and the bread consumed: urban farmers, seed bankers, food hubs, farmers markets, local mills and processing facilities.

In London, Brockwell Bake grows heritage wheat on allotments, in school and community gardens, and with farmers close to the city.  As this lattice-work of activity, infrastructure, and skills connects up, regional ‘grain sheds’ are beginning to take shape.

New distribution platforms pay an especiay important role. La Ruche Qui Dit Oui for example – ‘The Hive that Says Yes’ – is the brainchild of a French industrial designer and chef, Guilhem Cheron. La Ruche combines the power of the internet with the energy of social networks to bridge the gap that now separates small-scale food producers from their customers.

When someone starts a local hive, she recruits neighbours, friends, and family to join – the ideal number seems to be thirty to fifty members – and the group then looks for local food producers to work with. These farmers offer their products online at a desired price, and hive members pay 20 per cent on top that to cover a fee for the hive coordinator, a service fee to La Ruche, plus taxes and banking costs.

La Ruche makes money as a platform provider, but it is not an intermediary: the farmer receives the price asked for, and the system is fully transparent; everyone involved knows what happens to every cent transacted.

In food platforms such as La Ruche, the focus is not just on production; they embody a whole systems approach in which the interests of farm communities and local people, the land, watersheds, and biodiversity, are considered together –  with stewardship as a shared value.

A focus on food systems leads to a new design agenda for cities. New kinds of enterprise are needed: food co-ops, community kitchens, neighbourhood dining, edible gardens, food distribution platforms.

New sites of social creativity are needed: craft breweries, bake houses, productive gardens, cargo bike hubs, maker spaces, recycling centres, and the like. Business support is needed for platform co-ops that enable shelter, transportation, food, mobility, water, elder care to be provided collaboratively – and in which value is shared fairly with the people who make them valuable.

Technology has an important role to play as the infrastructure needed for these new social relationships to flourish; mobile devices and the internet of things are valuable to the extent that they make it easier for local groups to share equipment and common space, or manage trust in decentralised ways.

The most important technologies are more earthly than virtual – those to do with the restoration of soils, watersheds and damaged land. The ClimateTECHwiki lists 260 promising techniques –from beach nourishment, to urban forestry.

From soil to skin

Clothes, are another daily life necessity in which alternative forms of design and production are emerging.

Thanks to the tireless work of activists and researcherss, millions of people are now aware of the harm wrought by textiles and fashion as industrial systems – from energy and water use,  to soil depletion, waste, and toxic outputs from materials manufacturing.

But athough the fashion industry – famously sensitive to consumer attitudes – has developed sophisticated ways to measure these social and environmental impacts, exhortations to ‘buy less, wash less’ have proved ineffective, on their own, in an economy whose financial DNA compels it to grow at all costs.

Not a single fashion brand has told its customers to buy less.

Chastened, but not defeated, the new approach is to grow alternative networks at the edges of the mainstream fashion system. In California, for example, a project called Fibershed links together the different actors and technical components of a bioregional ecosystem: animals, plants and people, skills, spinning wheels, knitting needles, floor looms.

For Fibershed’s founder Rebecca Burgess, the priority  to integrate vertically – ‘rom soil to skin’.

By design, the health of soils is an integral part of this whole systems approach. Rather than constantly drive the land to yield more fiber per acre, Lynda Grose helps farmers match production to the capacities of the land whose health and carrying capacity is constantly monitored; in this way, decisions are made by the people who work the land and know it best, and fiber prices are based on yields the land can bear, and on revenues that assure security to the farmer.

‘Growth’ is measured in terms of land, soil, and water getting healthier, and communities more resilient.

A new story of place

The design world has innovated a raft of alternative methods and frameworks as  replacements for industrial mass production; they have names like cradle-to-cradle, natural step, living buildings, resilience planning,  biomimicry, the circular economy., the symbiotic economy.

Although welcome, these approaches are limited by a persistent bind-spot: They take the ‘needs of the present’’ – and the economic system that currently meets them – as their starting point, and proceed from there. (Brundtland Commission definition 1987).

Globalisation, in particular, distracted us from a fundamental design principle: complex phenomena cannot be isolated from their context – and no two places on the planet are the same.

As explained by Joel Glansberg, a pioneer of regenerative design, ecological systems, through the forces of their geology, hydrology, and biotic communities, organize themselves around certain identifiable patterns that are unique to each place.

Social and cultural systems are part of the same story. Woven over time through human settlement, they too are shaped by the ecology of the landscape.

If the regeneration of social and ecological assets cannot be practised remotely, our design focus needs to shift from things, to connections – especially the connections between people and natural systems in places which have a shared meaning and importance – such as the bioregion.

A bioregion maps the abstract concepts of sustainability, or a ‘living economy’, to the real world. ‘The economy’ becomes a place, and the urban landscape is re-imagined as an ecology with the potential to support us: the soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water and energy sources on which all life depends.

A bioregional approach, which nurtures the health of the ecosystem as a whole,  attends to flows, bio-corridors, and interactions – inside cities, as well as in the countryside. It thinks about metabolic cycles and the ‘capillarity’ of the metropolis wherein rivers and biocorridors are given pride of place.

A number of design tasks follow from this approach. Maps of a bioregion’s ecological assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity.  The collaborative monitoring of living systems needs to be designed – from soil health to air quality – and ways found to observe the interactions among them, and create feedback channels.

Many of these tasks entail diverse disciplines collaborating together – with design as the ‘glue’ that holds them together.

The reconnection of cities to their bioregion – their ‘re-wilding’ – is not much about the creation of wide open spaces and new parks; it’s more about patchworks, mosaics, and archipelagos.

When parks were built in past centuries they were called the ‘green lungs’ of towns. Decades of over-development have put an end to those expansive days; this new approach is all about  nurturing patches, some of them tiny, and linking them together.

There are cemeteries, watercourses, avenues, gardens, and yards to adapt. There are roadside verges, green roofs, and facades to plant. Sports fields, vacant lots, abandoned sites, and landfills can be repurposed.

Abandoned buildings and ruins, empty malls, and disused airports need to be adapted – not to mention the abandoned aircraft that, before too long, will be parked there.

In Vienna, the design firm Biotope City develops ‘micro green spaces’ that transform neighbourhoods.  And in the Jaeren region of Norway whose landscape has been battered by the footprint of the oil economy, the architect Knut Erik Dahl teaches young designers to look for and appreciate the tiniest examples of biological life in among the people, goods, and buildings: solitary plants, rare lichen, rare insects. It’s low-cost, hands-on work. They call it ‘dirty sustainability’.

In a project called Dartia, a coalition of statutory organisations and local people are stewarding the Dart Valley bioregion in South Devon. Based on a detaied scientific analysis of the river’s social and ecological assets by the West Country Rivers Trust, Dartia coordinates diverse physical activities such as the repair of river banks; monitoring what’s being put down drains; and the creation of rain gardens that use storm water run-off.

The health soils near the river, and flora and fauna, are monitored. Drinking water purification stations are being established. Access access to the water is being improved for kayaks, and restricted for cows. A wondrous variety of rivershed stakeholders are working together: a large estate; farms; a water treatment plant; a plant nursery; a pub; a supermarket; a restaurant; a school; house and boat owners; a dock, and more. The Guild helps the region’s citizens see Dartia through new eyes and generate new ways to realise its contribution to a local living economy.

A care economy


In the new economy that’s now emerging care – for the wellbeing of social and ecological systems – replaces money as the ultimate measure of value.

Growth, in this care economy, takes on new meaning as the improved health of soils, plants, animals – and people. And because the health of all living beings is the property of unique social and ecological context, the innovation we do is necessarily situated.

Money will not disappear as this new economy unfolds – but it will only part of the picture. in the care-based economy that’s existed throughout human history, relatively few of the ways we’ve looked after each other,  and the land, involved paid-for work; trust between people, commoning, and shared ownership, and networked models of care, were just as important – and will be again.

The notion of a care economy can sound poetic, but vague. Where, you may ask, is its manifesto? Who is in charge?

These are old-fashioned questions. The account given by Joanna Macy – of a quietly unfolding transformation – is consistent with the way scientists, too, explain how complex systems change.

By their account, a variety of changes, interventions, disruptions, and oppositions accumulate across time until the system reaches a tipping point: then, at a moment that cannot be predicted, a small release of energy triggers a much larger release, or phase shift, and the system as a whole transforms.

This between-two-worlds period of history contains myriad details of an emerging economy in which the very word ‘development’ takes on a profoundly different meaning.

Its core value is stewardship, rather than extraction. It is motivated by concern for future generations, not by what ‘the market’ needs in the next months. It cherishes qualities found in the natural world, thanks to millions of years of natural evolution. It also respects social practices – some of them very old ones – learned by other societies and in other times.

This new kind of development is not backwards looking; it embraces technological innovations, too – but with a different mental model of what they should be used for.

With every action we take, however small – each one a new way to feed, shelter, and heal ourselves, in partnership with living systems – the easier it becomes. Another world is not just possible. It is happening, now.

The above text is published in Fear and Love. It edited by Justin McGuirk to accompany his major exhibition at the Design Museum whose new home opens in Kensington, London, this week.

The post From Oil Age to Soil Age appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this light, the editorial below illustrates some of the many and diverse ways in which a call for sharing is being expressed, whether it’s by politicians, economists, activists, academics, campaign groups, or anyone else. To learn more about STWR’s campaign, please visit: www.sharing.org/global-call

The people’s voice has taken centre stage once again in recent months, in which a call for sharing is palpable in the many agendas for social justice and true democracy. To recall just some examples, mass demonstrations in Iceland forced the Prime Minister to resign following the Panama leaks; thousands marched for an end to austerity policies in the UK and other European countries; public sector workers in Costa Rica called national strikes for such demands as tax justice and the defense of public healthcare; and ordinary citizens joined migrants and asylum-seekers in the streets of Athens to march in protest against closed borders and the EU-Turkey deal.

Many are asking if we are in the midst of a new cycle of popular uprisings that are reminiscent of the movements that began in 2011, especially in light of the ongoing ‘Nuit Debout’ meetings across over 30 cities in France. Although these vast nightly assemblies arose out of opposition to labour reforms proposed by President Hollande, they have soon expanded to include major sharing-related themes on everything from tax evasion and unjust trade treaties to housing inequality. The call has now rung out for an international day of action on May 15th, a so-called #GlobalDebout, that will invoke the spirit of the Occupy and 15M movements through a worldwide ‘convergence of struggles’.

Last month also saw an unprecedented mobilisation of campaign groups and activists across the U.S. in a concerted call for getting big money out of politics. The ‘Democracy Spring’ began with a walk of 140 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to the nation’s capital, where hundreds of people participated in six-straight days of non-violent civil disobedience, leading to over 1,400 arrests. Despite a distinct lack of coverage in the mainstream media, the week of rallies and teach-ins may have been the largest democracy-focused protest actions in a generation, and they signalled the beginning of a renewed push for nationwide reforms to campaign financing and voting rights, including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. As the campaign materials emphasise, there cannot be a fairer sharing of wealth and power in American society – nor a just solution to the most pressing crises of our times – as long as many ordinary citizens are shut out of the political process, and while the campaign finance landscape allows big money to increasingly shape elections and the policymaking process.

For an altogether different take on the next stage for global activism, a book by STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi will be published this month that proposes a far-reaching vision of peaceful protest that can unite the populations of all countries through enormous and continuous demonstrations. In a unique and provocative analysis, Mesbahi proposes that men and women of goodwill adopt Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an overriding cause in the immediate time ahead, which he argues has profound implications for the future direction of international politics and global development. Yet such a simple cause is still far from the thinking of most activists who remain preoccupied with national issues of inequality and injustice, while there is scant public attention paid to the millions of needless deaths that occur due to hunger and poverty each year.

Part of the problem is a paucity of reliable global data about the true extent of the crisis of poverty, which has been addressed in some important work by Dr Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics. We’ve previously highlighted some of Hickel’s research that contradicts the “good news narrative” touted by the mainstream media that poverty levels have been dramatically reduced in recent decades, and that we are on course to end poverty altogether by 2030. On the contrary, Hickel shows that there are more people living in poverty today than ever before in history – more than 60% of humanity, and the situation is getting worse rather than improving.

In his latest research, Hickel extends his analysis to the question of whether or not the world is becoming more equal over time, which is the received wisdom from most economists, governments and United Nations agencies. By again citing some incisive data on this issue, he reveals that “inequality between countries has been increasing by orders of magnitude over the past two hundred years, and shows no signs of abating”. This assessment further underlines how unfairly the world’s resources are distributed, and the need for dramatic changes in the balance of political power in the global economy. Hickel writes: “As long as a few rich countries have the power to set the rules to their own advantage, inequality will continue to worsen. The debt system, structural adjustment, free trade agreements, tax evasion, and power asymmetries in the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are all major reasons that inequality is getting worse instead of better.”

Over recent months there has been plenty of other analysis of the growing inequalities in our societies, including a new campaign by Caritas Europa that advocates for an end to austerity policies and a major upscaling of social protection systems across the European Union. As a short animation accompanying the campaign narrates:

“Dear Europe, what is happening to you? People are losing their jobs, their homes. Losing control of their lives. Your Europe 2020 Strategy was supposed to help them, since things have only gotten worse. Now, around 123 million people live in poverty. And yet luxury goods consumption has never been so high. In all your history, the gap between rich and poor has never been so dramatic. So why do you keep undermining your protection systems? When did you become so focused with finance, with growth? Excluding people, leaving them behind? Isn’t it time to make people your priority again? Please, abandon your obsession with austerity, and focus on what really matters…”

In the U.S., leading analysts from the Institute of Policy Studies have also published a series of articles with the Nation magazine that propose eight bold solutions that can rewrite the rules that protect the richest Americans, thereby closing the wealth gap and ensuring a future of shared prosperity. Recognising that the unprecedented focus on inequality among politicians has not yet translated into any significant policy changes, the authors propose concrete measures that can “challenge entrenched wealth and power with policies that reduce the share of treasure at the top.”

Most of these proposals focus on reforms to the U.S. financial and tax systems, such as ending preferential tax treatment for capital-gains income; steep taxes on luxury consumption to help underwrite a just transition to a clean-energy economy; funding tuition-free public higher education through a modest wealth tax; and a serious crack-down on tax havens through a new worldwide register of financial wealth, among other reforms. But the authors recognise that we can’t address structural and cultural unfairness through redistributive tax policy alone; we also need to challenge the powerful narratives that justify extreme inequality, and forge campaigns that empower large constituencies to fight for game-changing solutions.

Excellent article on #inequality and how to address it: https://t.co/iGqxHIG4W7 @IPS_DC Ultimately, it's about creating a #sharingsociety

— sharing.org (@global_sharing) February 19, 2016

Another valuable contribution to the inequality debate comes from a newly released report by ActionAid called The Price of Privilege, which provides an accessible overview of current civil society thinking on the various forms of inequality that mar the global community. As the report emphasises, we already know what it takes to reduce inequality within countries, as history shows how a combination of strong social protections, industrial policy and progressive taxation lead to economically more equal societies.

However, considering the alarming scale of inequality within most nations – particularly inequality in the distribution of wealth, which underlies many other injustices – the report recommends a number of measures to “rebalance power” in our political systems and “change the mindset” that sees no alternative to the status quo. See in this regard the second chapter on how to challenge the dominant economic narrative by exposing its 7 key lies, such as “Inequality is necessary to generate economic growth”, or “If people can’t get as rich as they like, economies will grind to a halt as wealth creators ‘go elsewhere’.” Citing the hopeful signs from the past that a shift towards greater equality is ever viable despite current trends, the report concludes on an optimistic note that a fairer sharing of the world’s resources is not only possible, but on its way. To paraphrase from an article by one of the report’s contributors, it’s not enough to ask global leaders to agree that inequality is a problem; we need to build people’s power from below to pressure leaders to act, which is the only path to achieving transformative social change.

In this brief and very selective round-up of recent highlights on the inequality debate from within the progressive community, we should also mention the much-anticipated documentary, The Divide, that was recently released across the UK (in the same week that the revelations from the Panama Papers were being pored over internationally). Based on the bestselling book The Spirit Level, the film does an estimable job of bringing to life the basic arguments made by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – that income inequality is the underlying cause of most modern social ills, from violence and depression to drug abuse and ill health. Although the narrative of the documentary (like the book) is not positively framed around the need for a renewed culture of genuine economic sharing and cooperation within our societies, the message is implicit throughout its sweeping portrayal of how the past 35 years of divisive economic policies have led to greater unhappiness, disaffection and hardship for the majority.

Amidst these many discussions on inequality that are inherently related to the case for sharing, there’s one subject that has seemed almost impossible to avoid so far this year, which is the enormously popular idea of a universal basic income (UBI). Long supported by all manner of thinkers from both the left and right of the political spectrum, this previously fringe policy idea is now being seriously considered by some governments as a solution to precarious employment models, inadequate social protection systems, and a future low-work society due to technological unemployment. Switzerland will be the first country in the world to vote on a launch of the idea in June, while Finland, Holland, Canada, New Zealand, Namibia and other countries are discussing or testing out the policy.

So could state-administered UBI schemes help or hinder the creation of truly sharing societies, and can such policies benefit citizens in developing countries and ultimately help to end poverty or protect the global commons? While there isn’t space here to go into these questions (although see here for a big picture vision from STWR on funding basic income schemes by sharing the value from common pool resources), a number of public events this month are debating the implementation of a UBI with various prominent speakers. For example, the Future of Work conference in Zurich this week was attended by Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Reich and other well-known progressive academics; Caroline Lucas in the UK, who tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI, is headlining an event in Westminster later this month to discuss the prospect of implementing a scheme within Britain; and a UBI conference in Hamburg, Germany on 21st May aims to create a dialogue between the movements for degrowth and basic income within Europe. There is even a proposal from Scott Santens that May 1st, known as International Workers Day in celebration of the historic achievements of labour unions, should also be championed worldwide as Basic Income Day.

The Panama Papers may have underlined how there is no justification for the argument that governments cannot afford a basic income scheme, considering the huge amount of untaxed assets that are hidden by the global elite in overseas jurisdictions. However, there is another area of the debate on a UBI that is less prominent in most discussions, yet of critical relevance to the growing call for sharing – which is the question of the unsustainability of an employment and taxation system that is predicated on endless economic growth. To quote from a recent article by Ralph Callebert in The Conversation;

“Furthermore, as the Club of Rome already realized in 1972, the productivist bias of our usual answers to inequality – grow more, produce more and grow the economy so that people can consume more – is ultimately unsustainable. Surely, in a world already characterized by overproduction and overconsumption, producing and consuming more cannot be the answer. Yet, these seem to be the answers with which we are stuck: grow, grow, grow.

“…The problem of global inequality is not that we do not produce enough to provide for the world’s population. It is about the distribution of resources. This is why the idea of a basic income is so important: it discards the assumption that in order to get the income you need to survive, you should be employed or at least engaged in productive labor. Assumptions of this kind are untenable when for so many there are no realistic prospects for employment.”

This leads on to a final issue that is worthwhile to mention in this short roundup of sharing-related news and developments, which is the limits to growth debate that has recently been given a high profile in both policy and campaigning circles. In the UK, an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was launched in the House of Commons in April to review the scientific merits of the controversial report by the Club of Rome that was published over 40 years ago. The aim of the APPG is to stimulate a cross-party dialogue on “prosperity within limits”, exploring the economic risks associated with resource constraints and planetary boundaries. A short review of the limits debate was compiled by Tim Jackson and Robin Webster, two academic specialists on the issue, who found unsettling evidence that society is still following the “standard run” of the original study, in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards.

In other words, the limits to growth arguments are more relevant today than ever, and present a stark challenge to the prevailing assumption that the only way to bring about widespread affluence, as well as greater equality, is through the perpetual growth of GDP. The APPG report’s analysis makes clear that new impetus must be given to efforts to redefine prosperity in a way that is more in tune with human nature, the natural environment, and their interrelationships. And the relevance of sharing in all its forms could not be more pertinent to these new visions of a better world that “provide the capabilities for everyone to flourish, while society as a whole remains within the safe operating space of the planet”.

There are plenty of resources available that give an inspiring insight into what it means to embrace this new ethic of sharing and sufficiency, among which is a recent paper by Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute that explores the government policies that could facilitate a planned transition beyond growth. The latest campaign from The Rules team also makes a compelling case to “connect the dots” between the great converging crises of our time, beginning with a realisation that the logic of “growth at all costs” is at the root of our problems, the “one sacred rule” that we will eventually have to break.

As always, the summary above is merely an overview of some of the debates, events, campaigns and activism that relate to the growing call for sharing, and there are invariably many other issues that could be highlighted. This would include progress on trade justice campaigns in light of the TTIP leaks from Greenpeace; the shameful politics of the refugee crisis within the European Union; the state of play with overseas aid as we approach the World Humanitarian Summit (tweeting under the hashtag #ShareHumanity); or the fading vision of ‘fair shares’ in tackling climate change now that nations have signed the COP21 agreement. We’ll continue to highlight and frame some of these issues in terms of sharing in future blogs and editorials, and you can keep abreast of what we’re reading at STWR by following our Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well our Scoop.It! page that is regularly updated.

The post The renewed debates on sharing, inequality and the limits to growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The post Video: Living the Limits to Growth with Heather Menzies appeared first on P2P Foundation.