E. F. Schumacher Society Blog

Democratic Dignity

2010-03-17T18:46:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

Local currencies are designed to encourage trade at locally owned businesses. At the same time their very design can reflect and honor the history and culture or an area. This is true of BerkShares.

On the 20 BerkShare note, for example, you find Herman Melville, novelist, essayist, poet, and mariner. Melville is best known as the author of one of the greatest of all American novels, “Moby Dick” (1851). Written at his Arrowhead farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it places Melville amongst a prestigious host of literary figures to emerge from the Berkshire area.

An excerpt from “Moby Dick” follows, capturing its universal appeal.

This Saturday at 7PM, author and historian David Boyle, a senior fellow at the New Economics Foundation of London, will speak for BerkShares. The title of his talk is “Money Changers: Local Currencies and the New Economics.” David will draw from his experience with a number of British towns that have replicated BerkShares for their communities. Please join us at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge to welcome David Boyle. Admission is 5BerkShares or $5.

Best wishes,

Susan Witt, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society transitioning to the

New Economics Institute

www.smallisbeautiful.org

www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Dan Levinson, Richard Norgaard, David Orr, Connie Packard, Will Raap, Gus Speth, Stewart Wallis, and Peter Victor.

******************************

In the passage below Melville, as the narrator, has just praised the character of Starbuck, the first mate. But Melville anticipates that Captain Ahab's madness will ultimately dominate even Starbuck's best self and this man of valor will lose courage to stand for what is right in face of the stronger personality. Melville is reluctant to show this weakness in Starbuck. He debates this in the passage.

“ . . . it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meager faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

Rather amazing this sentiment at a time in our political history where commentators vie to criticize the character of a leader rather than let shine the best. But it is a true sentiment to our own inner impulses -- we

are happier when we can praise and rejoice in the noble in each other.

A New Economics for a New Environmentalism

2010-02-23T20:32:00.006-05:00

Dear Friends,

James Gustave Speth has devoted much of his professional life to care of the environment. He is the Sara Shallenberger Brown Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy at Yale where he served as Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies from 1999 to 2009. Dean Speth was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme and chair of the UN Development Group, founder and president of the World Resources Institute, chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, and senior attorney and cofounder of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

As a long time environmentalist, he is concerned. He, as others, sees that all the increased professionalism, all the resources, all the sophisticated techniques, all the advances of the modern environmental movement have failed to save our fragile ecosystems. He has come to realize that the elephant in the room raising havoc with our climate and waters and soil quality and biodiversity is the current economic system fed on excessive consumption and growth. He argues that if environmentalists are to achieve their goals, they must join with social activists, cultural innovators, and neighborhood advocates in creating a New Economics -- one that shares wealth, encourages diversity and decentralization of production, is responsible to the environment, and puts community accountability ahead of profits.

This New Environmentalism is as much a political movement as an economic one. It will take rethinking policies at the national, state, and local levels to encourage a "sustaining" economy. It can be done. At least Gus Speth feels we have no choice but to make the effort. This passion has put him at the head of multiple initiatives to define a New Economics and implement a New Economy.

We are delighted to welcome Gus Speth to the board of the E. F. Schumacher Society as the organization transforms into the New Economics Institute. His lecture "A New American Environmentalism and the New Economy" delivered in January to the National Council for Science and the Environment is excerpted below for your interest. The full text may be read at:

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/speth10.html

Best wishes,

Susan Witt, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society transitioning to the

New Economics Institute

www.smallisbeautiful.org

www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Dan Levinson, Richard Norgaard, David Orr, Connie Packard, Gus Speth, Joseph Stanislaw, Stewart Wallis, and Peter Victor.

* * * * * * * *

Excerpts from:

A New American Environmentalism and the New Economy

The 10^th Annual John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture

National Council for Science and the Environment

Washington, D.C., January 21, 2010

To begin, I would like to invite you to join me in a journey of the imagination. I want you to join me in visiting a world very different from the one we have today.

As the new decade begins in this world, the President, early in his first term, stands before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. He says the following:

"In the next ten years we shall increase our wealth by fifty percent. The profound question is – does this mean that we will be fifty percent richer in a real sense, fifty percent better off, fifty percent happier?...

"The great question… is, shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water?

"Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. … It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans – because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later….

"The program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field ever in the nation's history.

"The argument is increasingly heard that a fundamental contradiction has arisen between economic growth and the quality of life, so that to have one we must forsake the other. The answer is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it…

"I propose, that before these problems become insoluble, the nation develop a national growth policy. Our purpose will be to find those means by which Federal, state and local government can influence the course of … growth so as positively to affect the quality of American life."

And Congress acts. To address these challenges, it responds with the toughest environmental legislation in history. And it does so not with partisan rancor and threats of filibusters but by large bipartisan majorities.

In this world that we are imagining, the public is aroused; the media are attentive; the courts are supportive. Citizens are alarmed by the crisis they face. They organize a movement and issue this powerful declaration: "We, therefore, resolve to act. We propose a revolution in conduct toward an environment that is rising in revolt against us. Granted that ideas and institutions long established are not easily changed; yet today is the first day of the rest of our life on this planet. We will begin anew."

Meanwhile, the nation's leading environmental scholars and practitioners, and even some economists, are asking whether measures such as those in the Congress will be enough, and whether deeper changes are not needed. GDP and the national income accounts are challenged for their failure to tell us things that really matter, including whether our society is equitable and fair and whether we are gaining or losing environmental quality. A sense of planetary limits is palpable. The country's growth fetish comes under attack as analysts see the fundamental incompatibility between limitless growth and an increasingly small and limited planet. Advocacy emerges for moving to an economy that would be "nongrowing in terms of the size of the human population, the quantity of physical resources in use, and [the] impact on the biological environment." Joined with this is a call from many sources for us to break from our consumerist and materialistic ways – to seek simpler lives in harmony with nature and each other. These advocates recognize that, with growth no longer available as a palliative, "one problem that must be faced squarely is the redistribution of wealth within and between nations." They also recognize the need to create needed employment opportunities by stimulating employment in areas long underserved by the economy and even by moving to shorter workweeks. And none of this seems likely, these writers realize, without a dramatic revitalization of democratic life.

Digging deeper, some opinion leaders, including both ecologists and economists, ask, "whether the operational requirements of the private enterprise economic system are compatible with ecological imperatives." They conclude that the answer is "no." Environmental limits will eventually require limits on economic growth, they reason.

"In a private enterprise system," they conclude, "[this] no-growth condition means no further accumulation of capital. If, as seems to be the case, accumulation of capital, through profit, is the basic driving force of this system, it is difficult to see how it can continue to operate under conditions of no growth." And thus begins the thought: how does society move beyond the capitalism of the day?

You can see that the world we are imagining is one of high hopes and optimism that the job can and will be done. It is also a world of deep searching for the next steps that will be required once the immediate goals are met.

Now, at this point, I suspect there may be a generational divide in the audience. Those of you of my vintage have probably realized that this is not an imaginary world at all. You do not have to imagine this world – you remember it. It is the actual world of the early 1970s. That is really what President Nixon said to the Congress in 1970. Congress really did declare that air pollution standards must protect public health and welfare with an adequate margin of safety and without regard to the economic costs. The revolutionary Clean Water Act really did seek no discharge of pollutants, with the goals of restoring the physical, chemical and biological integrity of the nation's waters and making our waters fishable and swimmable for all by the mid-1980s. Many scientists, economists and activists supported the longer term thinking about growth and consumerism that I just mentioned, and they recognized the ties to social equity issues. They saw the challenge all this posed to our system of political economy. I have quoted John Holden, Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Barry Commoner, opinion leaders in this era, but there were many others, including Kenneth Boulding who famously noted, "Anyone who thinks exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

It was in many respects a great beginning. Not perfect, not to be romanticized, but still a remarkably strong start. And now four decades have passed. So let us fast forward to the present and take stock. What do we find today?

* * * * * *

We opted to work within the system and neglected to seek transformation of the system itself.

* * * * * *

And it is here that we arrive at the central issue – the paradox which every U.S. environmentalist must now face. The environmental movement – we still seem to call it that – has grown in strength and sophistication, and yet the environment continues to go downhill, fast. If we look at real world conditions and trends, we see that we are winning victories but losing the planet, to the point that a ruined world looms as a real prospect for our children and grandchildren. And the United States is at the epicenter of the problem. So, a specter is haunting U.S. environmentalists – the specter of failure. The only valid test for us is not membership, staff size, or even our victories but success on the ground – and by that test we are failing in our core purpose. We are not saving the planet. We have instead allowed our only world to come to the brink of disaster. Some who look at the latest science on climate change and biodiversity loss would say we are not on the brink of disaster, but well over it.

* * * * * *

The size of the world economy doubled since 1960, and then doubled again. World economic activity is projected to quadruple again by mid-century. At recent rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in two decades. It took all of human history to grow the $7 trillion world economy of 1950. We now grow by that amount in a decade! We thus face the prospect of enormous environmental deterioration just when we need to be moving strongly in the opposite direction.

* * * * * *

It seems to me one conclusion is inescapable. We need a new environmentalism in America. The world needs a new environmentalism in America. Today's environmentalism is not succeeding.

* * * * * *

We must build a new environmentalism in America. And here is the core of the new environmentalism: it seeks a new economy. And to deliver on the promise of the new economy, we must build a new politics.

* * * * * *

But the new environmentalism will not get far if it is focused only on greening the economy, as important as that is. As David Korten, John Cavanagh and I and others in the New Economy Working Group are saying, the old economy has actually given rise to a triple crisis, and they are tightly linked. The failure of the old economy is evident in a threefold economic, social, and environmental crisis.

* * * * * *

. . . the new economy – the prime objective of the new environmentalism – must be about more than green. We need a broader, more inclusive framing of our goal. We need to answer the probing question posed by John de Graaf in his new film: What's the economy for anyhow? The answer, I believe, is that we should be building what I would call a "sustaining economy" – one that gives top, over-riding priority to sustaining both human and natural communities. It must be an economy where the purpose is to sustain people and the planet, where social justice and cohesion are prized, and where human communities, nature, and democracy all flourish. Its watchword is caring – caring for each other, for the natural world, and for the future. Promoting the transition to such an economy is in fact the mission of the New Economy Network, which I'm now working with many others to build. It will be a broad, welcoming space for all those pursuing diverse paths to these goals.

To build the new economy we need innovative economic thinking and new models. There is today wide-spread dissatisfaction with much of current economic orthodoxy. Enter the New Economics Institute, which is now being launched in the United States. The new economy needs a new economics. The new economy also needs a journal to focus our attention beyond problems to solutions, and I applaud Bob Costanza for launching the new journal Solutions.

* * * * * *

Beyond the generalities, it is fair to ask for more on how this new economy might look. As an early step in building a new economy, I believe we must begin to question the current centrality of economic growth in our economic and political life, what Clive Hamilton has called our "growth fetish." With recent books like Peter Victor's "Managing Without Growth," Tim Jackson's "Prosperity Without Growth," and the New Economics Foundation's "The Great Transition," this is no longer as quixotic a cause as it was when I wrote my "Bridge" book just a few years ago. Peter Brown's wonderful book, "Right Relationship," also deserves mention in this context.

* * * * * *

. . . . The new environmentalism must be about more than green. Mainstream American environmentalism to date has been too limited. In the current frame of action, too little attention is paid to the corporate dominance of economic and political life, to transcending our growth fetish, to promoting major lifestyle changes and challenging the materialistic and anthropocentric values that dominate our society, to addressing the constraints on environmental action stemming from America's vast social insecurity and hobbled democracy, to framing a new American story, or to building a new environmental politics. The new environmentalism must correct these deficiencies.

* * * * * *

I have concentrated [in the full lecture] mostly on needed policies, I suppose because that is my background. But there is another hopeful path into a sustainable and just future. This is the path of "build it and they will come" and "just do it." One of the most remarkable and yet under-noticed things going on in our country today is the proliferation of innovative models of "local living" economies, sustainable communities and transition towns and for-benefit businesses which prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. The work that Gar Alperovitz and his colleagues are doing in Cleveland with the Evergreen Cooperative is a wonderful case in point. An impressive array of new economy businesses has been brought together in the American Sustainable Business Council, and a new Fourth Sector is emerging, bringing together the best of the private sector, the not-for-profit NGOs, and government. The seeds of the new economy are already being planted across our land.

* * * * * *

The new environmentalism must work with this progressive coalition to build a mighty force in electoral politics. This will require major efforts at grassroots organizing; strengthening groups working at the state and community levels; and developing motivational messages and appeals — indeed, writing a new American story, as Bill Moyers has urged. Our environmental discourse has thus far been dominated by lawyers, scientists, and economists. People like me. It has been too wonkish, out of touch with Main Street. . . . Now, we need to hear a lot more from the poets, preachers, philosophers, and psychologists.

And indeed we are. The world's religions are coming alive to their environmental roles – entering their ecological phase, in the words of religious leader Mary Evelyn Tucker. And just last year, the American Psychological Association devoted its annual gathering to environmental issues. The Earth Charter text and movement are providing a powerful base for a revitalization of the ethical and spiritual grounds of environmental efforts. The Charter's first paragraph says it all: "We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms, we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Toward this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations."

* * * * * *

The new environmental politics must be broadly inclusive, reaching out to embrace union members and working families, minorities and people of color, religious organizations, the women's movement, towns and cities seeking to revitalize and stabilize themselves, and other groups of complementary interest and shared fate. The "silo effect" still separates the environmental community from those working on domestic political reforms, a progressive social agenda, human rights, international peace, consumer issues, world health and population concerns, and world poverty and underdevelopment, but we are all in the same boat.

And the new environmental politics must build a powerful social movement. . . .– demanding action and accountability from governments and corporations, protesting, and taking steps as citizens, consumers and communities to realize sustainability and social justice in everyday life.

* * * * * *

And, finally, remember that most of the ideas I have sketched this evening are not new. As we saw, they actually take us back to where we began, in the 1960s and 1970s. They gained prominence then and they can again. Perhaps they are now, belatedly, ideas whose time has come. We can't recreate the 1960s and the 1970s; we shouldn't even try. But we can learn from that era and find again its rambunctious spirit and fearless advocacy, its fight for deep change, and its searching inquiry.

Thank you.

* * * * * *

Gus Speth may be reached at gus.speth@yale.edu

* * * * * *

To support our transition to the New Economics Institute, send a tax-deductible donation to E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230 with NEI in the memo line, or donate online at:

https://www.smallisbeautiful.org/donation_form.html

A Great Transition

2010-02-16T07:42:00.002-05:00

February 11, 2010

Dear Friends,

There is no doubt that the number of new ideas emerging in the field of humane, sustainable economics is accelerating. But complete blueprints are still pretty few and far between. Even so, our British colleagues, the New Economics Foundation (nef), have tested the waters with exactly that.

Their outline is impressive and hopeful. It still requires the econometric framework for a sustainable model of the economy and it requires a translation to a North American setting, but those are projects we will work on together. Their blueprint offers a coherent foundation on which to build a future economics. They have called it "The Great Transition."

All of us at the E. F. Schumacher Society look forward to collaboration with nef as we undertake our own transition to become the New Economics Institute. David Boyle, a senior research fellow of nef, and his family have joined us in the Berkshires to further that organizational transformation.

At the end of this email David shares his thoughts on nef's Great Transition report for your information. The full document is at www.neweconomics.org.

Warm wishes,

Susan Witt, Stefan Apse, and Kate Poole

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

140 Jug End Road

Great Barrington, MA 01230

www.smallisbeautiful.org

www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

* * * * * * *

The Great Transition

The main question we need to know about any vision of the future is what it is that has driven the change. In the case of The Great Transition, it is the rising costs of going back to ‘business-as-usual’, the huge cumulative cost of climate change (they estimate this at $3.75 trillion in the UK by 2050) and the cumulative cost of high levels of inequality (they estimate this at $6.75 trillion for the UK in 2050).

Drivers of change are often uncomfortable, and this one is no exception. What is exciting about The Great Transition is that it sets out a believable path whereby Britain can take big, radical steps toward a society and economy that delivers long, happy and equitable lives and fits within the planet’s carrying capacity.

It means that the UK's conventional GDP will fall by a third. This is offset by making better use of what they have, and by an economic boost from increasing social and environmental value. The costs of climate change can be partly avoided and the costs of social breakdown can be avoided too.

New Economics Foundation policy director Andrew Simms put it like this. “For years we have been told that there is no alternative to an economy that wrecks the environment and worsens inequality. We’ve been told that we live in a time of prosperity, when really we’re no happier than we were thirty years ago. We’ve been told that crashes, bubbles and recessions are all part of the ‘natural cycle’ of economies. But faced with potentially irreversible climate change and corrosive inequality, these are dangerous fairy tales. The Great Transition shows we have a chance of a better reality.”

The point is that, as we know, GDP is a very poor measure of progress: the revenues skimmed off the financial system by traders in the City of London as they built a pyramid of ‘toxic’ derivatives added to GDP. So does cleaning up the effects of pollution and paying the costs of high rates of crime increases. This isn’t just an academic point: what we measure ends up driving what we do. The Great Transition proposes a move beyond GDP, to start measuring the things which really produce value, for our communities, our societies and our environment.

The report sets out seven main interventions. These include:

· A Great Revaluing to make sure that prices reflect true social and environmental costs.

· A Great Rebalancing that sets out a new productive relationship between markets, society and the state.

· A Great Economic Irrigation that helps money and investment flow to where it is most needed.

But how do we get there? The Great Transition suggests a universal Citizen’s Endowment of between £40,000 and £50,000 to give every adult an equal chance in life and the opportunity to invest in education, a business or local productive assets. This would be funded by a phased rise in inheritance tax on all estates up to 67 per cent and would go a long way to reducing the massive inequalities of inherited wealth in the UK.

Community land trusts are also central to The Great Transition. The report also proposes redistributing working time by setting out a four-day working week for everyone that would cut GDP by a third without a major loss of jobs.

There would be a major reorganisation of business, with publicly listed companies progressively transferring shares to their staff, giving them real control over the companies where they work. This would lead to the creation of a series of co-operatives, operating in regulated markets, and subject to competition from new companies. This is designed to change power relations within workplaces, creating a form of economic democracy.

There would be new variable consumption taxes, replacing income tax, reflecting the social and environmental costs of goods. A windfall tax on the profits of fossil fuel companies, for example, could channel funds into clean energy projects. There would be government lending for large-scale green energy and transport projects, channelled through a national Green Investment Bank. There would be a new national Housing Bank, more along the lines of those in the USA, offering people the opportunity to transfer a portion of their mortgage debt into equity and paying social rent on the balance.

There would be new regulations on the reserve requirements of private banks, which would be related to the social and environmental value of their investments. This is intended to engineer a ‘race to the top’, avoiding the more familiar race to the bottom, at the same time as reducing speculation and credit bubbles.

The purpose of The Great Transition is to inspire debate. It was designed for the UK not the USA. Many of the measures will be controversial. Some will be wholly unacceptable to people who are already steeped in sustainability. But it is a bold and coherent vision, with details and figures – using the skills of novelists, as much as the skills of economists, to create a believable world. And it suggests that other kinds of economic worlds are possible. That, in itself, represents hope.

Tellus Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute have made significant  contributions to defining a Great Transition (www.greattransition.org). More  research and discussion is ahead.

David Boyle may be reached at:

davidboyle@smallisbeautiful.org

Small Change/Big Impact

2009-12-30T20:01:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

One of the features of BerkShares, the local currency circulating in the Southern Berkshire region of Massachusetts, is that it fosters this wealth of sidewalk contacts (www.berkshares.org).

Use of BerkShares, a paper currency, requires face to face economic exchange. The citizen/buyer must meet the merchant/owner and enter into conversation about the item purchased. In the course of these multiple transactions an understanding begins to grow of the nature of the business, how it fits in the streetscape of the town, the working conditions of its employees, availability of locally made goods, the impact of new regulations, the necessity to respond to the changing tastes of consumers, the hurdles to prosperity, the many roles the merchant plays in the community as volunteer ambulance squad member, school board official, community theater player.

When purchasing directly from a producer with BerkShares the information shared may be even more deeply sourced in the local landscape. You may learn how to detect the first signs of a blighted maple tree plaguing the maple syrup industry, or learn how heavy spring rains kept bees from pollinating the apples blossoms, resulting in fewer apples to market.

BerkShares are a "slow money" to borrow a term coined by Woody Tasch. It takes more time to process a transaction, time for graciousness, time for building connection with community of place.

"Inconvenient," some will say. Yes, when compared to the hastiness and anonymity of an internet purchase. But rich with information needed for conducting public life. A democracy only thrives when its citizens are informed and engaged by public issues.

Slow money is not sleepy money but awake to the flow of economic life pulsing through a region, shaping its future, providing warning signs and creating options for public policy and private initiative. Perhaps the greatest task of concerned citizens in the twenty-first century is to reclaim responsibility for the consequences of our economic transactions--personally, institutionally, and in public spending. Slow money is the start of this process.

The function of money is to serve as an abstraction for real economic exchange. This is both its flaw and its almost mystical power.

If we did not have the tool of money, we would be we left with direct barter, limited to what we could trade at a particular place and time--carrots for cordwood. Without the carrots I could not acquire the cordwood. Money stands for a value created at a different time, stored, and used to exchange for goods needed in the present time. Money allows values to be collected together and applied to an entirely new type of venture in the future. This accumulation allows the entrepreneur to organize human initiative and raw materials and create some before-unrealized product for healing the sick, producing energy, transporting goods. Quite wonderful.

However this tendency in money to abstract actual exchange can rapidly escalate unchecked, so that ultimately money begets money through sheer movement of capital. The living consequences of the working of capital--the conditions of laborers, the processes used in manufacturing, the effect on eco-systems to obtain raw materials, the fossil fuels used in transportation of goods to consumers, the pockets of accumulation--all tend to be obscured. Our private discussion and public debate accordingly narrows to cost of goods and return on investment--shaping personal habits of consumption and public policy that drive a global economic system unimpeded by environmental, social, or cultural concerns.

Slow money again makes us conscious of the impact of our economic transactions--not just as purchasers, but as tax-payers, investors, and philanthropists.

Last December BerkShares, Inc. took out a full page ad in a local paper listing the seventy-one non-profit organizations that would accept year-end donations in BerkShares. These ranged from the volunteer fire department, to arts groups, to social service agencies, to the plethora of environmental organizations in the Berkshires. By accepting BerkShares, these groups were committing to re-circulate the BerkShares back in the community by purchasing needed goods and services locally.

A woman in the area, known for her generous support of many different initiatives, called to ask exactly how would someone make a donation in BerkShares. We explained that you would walk or drive to the project's office, call staff together, look them directly in the eyes, tell them what important work they were doing for the community, explain that you wished to thank them for this good work, and hand them an envelope with a big stack of BerkShares. To calculate the tax value of your gift, you would use the BerkShares exchange rate with federal dollars--10 BerkShares equals $9.50.

Such direct acknowledgement of good work exponentially increases the value of the gift by inspiring staff. Slower, yes. It would take more time to deliver the BerkShares in person than to simply write a check. Inconvenient, yes. In the short run that is, or so it seems.

I recall the wonderful scene in "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in which the prince encounters a salesman extolling the benefits of a pill to quench thirst. The salesman explains that by not having to collect water for drinking, people will have more time to do other things. The prince responds by saying that if he had more time there is nothing he would rather do then locate a well from which to draw water to quench his thirst.

As residents of the Southern Berkshires shift to trade in slow money, they are at the same time re-imagining their local economy. It is fair to say that everyone in the Southern Berkshires knows what BerkShares are—that they are in fact a currency that can be spent only in the region. And it is fair to say that at least fifty percent of the people in the Southern Berkshires have already engaged in long conversations about BerkShares in coffee shops and other "sidewalk contacts." BerkShares have ignited a community discussion about local businesses and their problems, about local trade and the reasons for it, about the economic role of non-profits, about local currencies in general and their importance, about the role of local banks, about establishing import-replacement business, about economic sovereignty, about changing deeply engrained financial habits, and about a sustainable future.

These small/slow exchanges are balancing the abstract tendency of money by reconnecting financial transactions with the people, culture, and landscape of a particular place, while at the same time building the community wealth which is the foundation for a newly imagined economic system.

As the year comes to a close, consider the staff members of your favorite organizations and take time to acknowledge their good work.

Like other non profits, the E. F. Schumacher Society welcomes financial support of its programs. Your tax-deductible donations in BerkShares or federal dollars may be delivered or mailed to:

E. F. Schumacher Society

140 Jug End Road

Great Barrington, MA 01230

Or made online by credit card at:

https://www.smallisbeautiful.org/donation_form.html

Best wishes for the New Year,

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, and Kate Poole

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

www.smallisbeautiful.org

www.neweconomicsinstitute.org

Board of Directors: Gar Alperovitz, Jessica Brackman, Neva Goodwin, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Dan Levinson, Constance Packard, Will Raap, Gus Speth, Joseph Stanislaw, and Stewart Wallis.

An Economics Informed by Salmon

2009-12-11T09:52:00.005-05:00

Imagine leading economists spent time in the wilderness. Perhaps the chair of the Federal Reserve could spend an afternoon standing at the mouth of the Tsiu River on central Alaska's little explored lost coast, as the sleek bodies of silver salmon everywhere swelled upstream pushing against him.

Andrew Kimbrell, driven by his personal experience of the Coho salmon on the Pacific Coast, is on a quest for an economic ecology, a consideration of our economic system as subservient to and informed by nature. As a result of that afternoon in the river, he "began to imagine a world where the economist knows the salmon." For Kimbrell, the salmon embodies the qualities of nature abandoned and ignored by our competitive free market system, namely redistribution, reciprocation and gift-giving.

Appended to this email you will find a selection from Kimbrell's "Salmon Economics (and other lessons)" E. F. Schumacher Lecture pamphlet. The section, titled "Return to Sanity," provides an outline of the salmon's natural economy and its core principles.

The pamphlet goes on to address the crises the salmon are facing due to environmental degradation, bioengineering, and the forces of the competitive market, and then he shows how these crises are our own. Kimbrell offers persuasive arguments about the deleterious effects of the commodification of land and labor, nature and man. He shows how the salmon offer inspiration for living well: "The salmon teach a different lesson. For them there is no linear progress or search for perfection; instead, they seek and fight doggedly to complete their cycle of life."

Salmon returning from the sea to the precise river inlet in which they were spawned bring with them nutrients from the ocean. This vital gift-giving represents an essential part of the economy of all living systems. Kimbrell writes how: "Unlike the self-interest of the market, embodied in legal contracts, gift-giving affirms a sense of community, charity, reverence, and a spontaneous sense of the relationship between humans and the natural world."

As the year comes to close and many gift-giving opportunities arise, we urge you to consider giving the gift of visionary voices, like Andrew Kimbrell's. For twenty-nine years the E. F. Schumacher Annual Lectures have been a forum for new economic thinking. The lectures are edited and published in pamphlet form and sold for $5 each or 5 BerkShares, including postage. A full publication list and order form are available online or on request. We would be pleased to include a gift card with your name in your order.

The full text of Andrew Kimbrell's "Salmon Economics (and other lessons)" is available as a pamphlet or can be read in its entirety here.

Best Wishes for the Holiday Season,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

* * * * * * * * * * *
The Return to Sanity
“To live on the land we must learn from the sea.”
George Sumner

What can the salmon offer that will move us toward a new paradigm in economics? Can their homeward journey help us rid ourselves of the obsolete, dangerous, and somewhat pathological market mentality? To answer these questions we will need to look more closely at the “economy” of the salmon’s life cycle.

When the Pacific salmon return to the rivers of their birth, they carry in their bodies a number of nutrients, including nitrogen and phosphorous garnered from their ocean sojourn. In fact, isotopic analyses indicate that riverside vegetation near spawning streams receives 22 to 24 percent of its nitrogen—the nutrient that most commonly encourages plant growth—from salmon. As a result, trees on the banks of salmon-stocked rivers grow more than three times faster than their counterparts along a salmon-free river. Alongside spawning streams Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) have been found to take eighty-six years instead of the usual three hundred to reach 50 cm. in thickness. Research also shows that at least one-fifth of the nitrogen in the needles of Sitka spruce trees and other plants near spawning sites comes from the ocean via Pacific salmon carcasses. These same trees that have been fertilized by the carcasses enhance the quality of breeding and rearing habitats for the fish by providing shade, sediment and nutrient filtration, and large woody debris.

It is not just the vegetation that profits from these nutrients. Muscle samples taken at these riversides from vertebrate herbivores (deer mice, voles, shrews, and squirrels) show increased levels of nitrogen compared with samples taken from animals farther away. The animals eating the salmon also help with the spread of these nutrients. It has been estimated that 70 percent of a black bear’s annual protein comes from salmon. During a 45-day spawn each black bear catches about seven hundred fish and leaves half of each carcass in the forest. At 2.2 kg. per fish, this amounts to 120 kg. of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare of land. British Columbia’s 80,000 to 120,000 bears could be transferring, through salmon carcasses and the bears’ dung, as much as 60 million kg. of salmon tissue into the rainforest, accounting for half of the nitrogen fixed by old-growth trees

Salmon are also the principle source of food for the brown bear. And analysis of hair from grizzly bears, who became extinct in Oregon’s Columbia River Valley in 1931, has shown that 90 percent of their diet came from salmon. Additionally, the salmon’s eggs and carcasses are the major source of food for sea otters and several trout species. The carcasses also provide critical nutrient resources for aquatic invertebrate scavengers, detritivores, and aquatic microbes—organisms that in turn help enrich the nutrient capital of the wetland itself. And perhaps most crucial of all, 50 percent of the nutrients that young salmon receive comes from their dead parents.

In contemplating this “salmon economics” we find no trace of the self-interest and laws of supply and demand endemic to the human market mentality. What alternative economic values are taught by the cohos’ life cycle and final journey? One value is redistribution. The riches of the ocean are redistributed to the wetlands and the rivers. It is an intricate, diverse, and egalitarian redistributive system, extending to the needles of the Sitka spruce, the muscles of the vole, the intertidal microbes, the bodies of the fry, and then even to the bear dung that becomes fertilizer for the trees farther inland.

We do, course, have redistribution in our current economy. Through taxation, for example, we redistribute wealth to aid those in need, whether the unemployed, elderly, disabled, or poverty stricken. But these programs are constantly under attack by free-market advocates and are often eliminated under the rubric of tax relief. Unfortunately, those defending these programs never amplify and undergird their argument by pointing to the natural and ecological archetype of redistribution as found in the salmon cycle and throughout nature. Redistribution is not only altruistic or an expression of largesse, it is the fundamental element in successful and sustainable natural economies. In sum, redistribution is the way nature survives and thrives. It is a kind of natural law. By contrast, the purported free-market laws of supply and demand are recent intellectual constructs with no foundation in nature.

Then too, the salmon teach us about the value of reciprocity. There is a complex reciprocal relationship between the salmon and future animal and plant generations. As noted, the salmon’s nutrients help the growth of riverside vegetation, which in turn provides shade, protection, and nutrients for the growing parr and smolts, preparing them for their ocean journey and the repeating of the cycle. Moreover, the nutrients given to the animals help fertilize the trees, whose roots in turn protect the rivers and streams from erosion. Overall, it would be virtually impossible to comprehensively describe the entire reciprocal interaction between the salmon and the life around them, from microbes through mammals.

As with redistribution, our current economy also contains many reciprocal elements. We pay our taxes so that we can have roads, schools, and other basics that will be there for us. We participate in civic associations, on zoning boards, or in local governments, with the assumption that our time spent will benefit us, our families, and future generations. But perhaps more importantly, the vast majority of Americans’ work is based on reciprocity. My research indicates that more than 70 percent of us get up every morning to take care of something or someone, not to make a profit by selling something for more than we paid to produce or buy it.

This is what I term “the care economy,” which I contrast with “the profit economy.” Teachers, doctors, nurses, firemen, policemen, social workers, and all those working in government and the public-interest community, including those protecting our fellow creatures and the natural world, will not make more or less profit depending on how much they produce. They are the care economy and are paid a flat-rate salary for their service. Firemen will not pick one house to save and turn down another based on making a profit for saving the more expensive house. Teachers will not pick one child to teach over another because they will be paid more for teaching the richer child. After a natural disaster, animal rescuers save mutts and purebreds with equal energy without wondering whose owner will pay more.

The tragedy of September 11, 2001, provided a graphic contrast between the profit and care economies. During and after the terrorist attacks Wall Street closed down, and there was a virtual halt in trading for days as brokers looked to foreign investment until they could assess whether it was safe and profitable to invest once again in America. Meanwhile, from the very first the care economy was fully invested. Emergency workers, police, and fire personnel worked tirelessly and under great personal risk for days and weeks as did health professional, government, and nonprofit organizations. Everyone seemed to grasp intuitively the reciprocal nature of this sacrifice, to understand that the greater community can function only when each of its members gives in this way, knowing that it would will be reciprocated should tragedy strike elsewhere. The fate of each is wedded to the care and skills provided by the other.

The care economy, though it represents a solid majority of us and we all depend on it, is not privileged in our society. Even progressives often call it the “service” economy, which is more suggestive of entry-level restaurant workers than of the vast majority of Americans who are part of this care economy. Instead, America is often portrayed as the land of “entrepreneurs,” where “the business of America is business.” Never do we hear in defense of reciprocation that it is a fundamental principle of natural economic life and has the imprimatur of eons of successful natural economies behind it, whereas the market system with its profit mandate is just over two hundred years old and is already unsustainable.

Along with redistribution and reciprocation, the salmon teach yet another a third economic value—gift-giving. Unlike the self-interest of the market, embodied in legal contracts, gift-giving affirms a sense of community, charity, reverence, and a spontaneous sense of the relationship between humans and the natural world. In a way it is the antidote to the market system. As ethicist Thomas Murray explains:

Gifts create moral relationships that are more open-ended, less specifiable, and less contained than contracts. Contracts are well suited to the marketplace, where a strictly limited relationship for a narrow purpose—trading goods or services—is desired. Gifts are better for initiating and sustaining more rounded human relationships, where future expectations are unknown, and where the exchange of goods is secondary in importance to the relationship itself.

Salmon provide the ultimate relational gift—a gift for the otters, the bears, the rainbow trout, their own offspring, and a gift for all of us who witness and learn from them. This gift is an eternal promise, always kept if not sabotaged by the intrusion of humans and their technology. It is an intrinsic aspect of the very being of the salmon, not given in calculation of receiving something in return. There are so many in our society who give without looking for a return: the teacher staying late to help a student, the neighbor helping the elderly couple next door, those millions giving their time, work, and money to help in a cause they believe in or to help others more needy than themselves. This generosity represents a major sector of our economy but is usually marginalized as exceptional altruism instead of being understood for what it is—an essential part of the economy of all living systems.

One additional and critical economic lesson of the salmon I will mention is the profound importance of the local. Salmon provide remarkable instruction about the fundamental value of place. Father Thomas Berry has spoken about the importance of the “smell of home,” the odor of place. No creature better embodies this teaching than the salmon. An Alaskan Fish and Wildlife study found that just one drop of water from the home stream of salmon added to 250 gallons of water will take these salmon in the direction of that water. It is impossible not to be astonished by the great odyssey of the salmon and their uncanny ability to ultimately find the exact stream or even rivulet of origin and to mate there, with all the redistribution, reciprocation, and gift-giving going to that local place and its environs.

Every Thanksgiving, when tens of millions crowd the airplanes and jam the roads, we catch a glimpse of the homing instinct, however alienated, that survives in each of us. Mobility is prized and privileged in our society (just think of the automobile, which embodies the glorified values of autonomy and mobility—ergo “auto-mobile”). And this is a necessary attribute of the supply-and-demand market economy, which may cause extreme dislocation many times in our lives as we—purported human commodities—move about, often involuntarily, to find work, economic survival, or increased opportunity. Although this dislocation corresponds to the logic of capital, it is not what most of us seek. Reminiscent of the salmon’s journey is the yearning we still carry for home, place, and community.

Moreover, in economic terms the idea of the local is becoming ever more important. For millennia human economics was local, but over recent decades we have seen a massive expansion in the global economy. Now transnational corporations—obeying the call of the market, whose only motive is profit and their own self-interest—roam the world in search of resources and markets for their products. They forcibly bring down trade barriers and any protections that localities might have against this economic onslaught. Corporate-led globalization brings a corresponding contraction, and destruction, of the local economies it replaces. The corporate enclosure of these local communities and eco-systems devastates the natural world, homogenizes cultures, disrupts communities, and deprives their members of any meaningful control over their lives.

How is this process to be halted and reversed? The salmon give us the answer: local production for local consumption. Note that the salmon travel freely as they grow and become mature but always ultimately return to provide their local community with what it needs. I like to think of this as a kind of internationalism based in the local as opposed to the homogenizing juggernaut of market-based globalization. Internationalism allows each of us to travel and learn from all peoples and cultures and geographies, but unlike globalization it understands that the purpose of this travel is to return and nourish the local with a diversity of knowledge and experience.

Fortunately we are beginning to see a rebirth of the local around the world in food and energy production, local currencies, and emphasis on local governance. To those who inevitably will state that this localization is contrary to the ersatz laws of free trade and the market we need only point to the salmon and note that localization corresponds with the laws of nature.
Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the field of ecological economics, a field that infuses certain ecological realities into current economic thinking. Much good work has been done in this area, but perhaps it is time to reverse the adjective and noun in ecological economics and call it economic ecology, not privileging thereby human economy but recognizing that our economic needs fit into the larger ”economy” of our eco-systems. The tendency in ecological economics can be to “greenwash” capitalism or socialism, By contrast, an earth economics would base the allocation of resources primarily on ecological principles, including those so beautifully embodied in the salmon life cycle and other of the earth’s living systems. It is a call for the economist to truly meet and learn from the salmon, a call for an economics of earth that is based not on the abstractions of thinkers but on the study of, and wonder at, its creatures.

This new and important discipline is not without its precedents. Indigenous societies were never based on market economies but on a mix of reciprocal service and exchange, redistribution of resources, and gift-giving in local situations. These societies based their economic behavior—redistribution, reciprocation, gift-giving, and localization—on the archetypal patterns of the natural systems around them. To survive we must follow their lead, and without delay. We must learn and integrate the great economic lessons of the salmon.

Currency Recirculation Equals New Jobs

2009-12-03T18:44:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

The Christian Science Monitor quotes Schumacher Society on currency recirculation as a jobs development tool.

Best wishes,
Staff of E. F. Schumacher Society
www.smallisbeautiful.org

http://features.csmonitor.com/economyrebuild/2009/12/01/‘buy-local’-movement-gives-new-life-to-corner-stores/

‘Buy local’ movement gives new life to corner stores
Communities urge residents to think and spend locally in a bid to boost area businesses.

By G. Jeffrey MacDonald | Correspondent/ December 1, 2009 edition

AMESBURY, MASS.

This working-class town of 18,000 on Boston’s North Shore has a plan for revitalizing its industrial sector, which long ago bade goodbye to textiles, carriage manufacturing, and a hat factory. It starts with an unlikely target: residents’ spending habits.

Local merchants’ “Amesbury First” campaign, due to launch early next spring, aims to get downtown bustling again by inspiring residents to do more shopping there – and less at chain stores in nearby New Hampshire. As more cash moves among local businesses, town boosters say, Amesbury will grow more prosperous and become a destination for shoppers and manufacturers alike.

“The initial goal is to get everybody – business owners, residents – spending money in their town,” says Stefanie McCowan, executive director of the Amesbury Chamber of Commerce. “Then the more people hear ‘Amesbury’ [as a place for business], it becomes natural for somebody to want to move their large industrial business here or bring operations that are going to help support our tax base.”

As recession gives way to the prospect of a slow recovery, communities are increasingly giving traditional development a turbo boost. In addition to courting outside businesses to get more wages and money flowing into their local economies, they’re also looking to increase the local money flow in hopes it will create jobs – and perhaps even lure outside businesses. This practical, two-pronged strategy is taking hold in Canada and the United States, involving entire provinces, like Saskatchewan, as well as small cities and towns in states as diverse as Vermont and North Carolina.

“If you asked what they’re doing to grow their economies, historically they would have said: ‘We’re recruiting business,’ ” says Billy Ray Hall, president of the North Carolina Rural Economic Development Center in Raleigh. “Now they’ll talk about: ‘We’re growing our existing businesses [in part by recirculating funds locally], and if we have an opportunity to recruit a business, we will aggressively pursue that, too.’ ”

To make the transition, communities have to measure their economies in new ways, notably their “leakage” – the amount of local money that moves to faraway hubs of commerce. Successful towns and cities minimize leakage by making sure most dollars spent locally recirculate to other area businesses. Less successful ones have plenty of leakage as dollars get spent once locally, then disappear.

Local merchants in New Orleans, for example, spend 32 percent of their revenues locally, twice as much as a typical chain retailer would, according to a study released in September by Civic Economics, a consulting firm with offices in Austin, Texas, and in Chicago. That’s largely because independent stores spend more of their profits locally and use local service providers, such as printers and marketing agencies, instead of corporate staffers based in other cities. The same study projected New Orleans residents could pump $235 million into their economy just by shifting 10 percent of their spending from national chains to locally owned businesses.

Other studies have projected similar results elsewhere. With a 10 percent shift, Kent County, Mich., could add 1,600 jobs that pay nearly $60 million in additional wages, according to a Civic Economics 2008 study.

“That’s really something,” says Civic Economics principal Dan Houston. “If somebody came to some town in western Massachusetts and said, ‘We would build a plant with 1,600 jobs and a $60 million payroll,’ what would that town do? They would roll over for that proposal and subsidize the daylights out of it.”

Recirculating currency entails more than a switch in consumer spending patterns, according to proponents of the strategy. To blunt leakage in the long term, communities need to focus on producing more of what they currently import from other geographic areas, according to Michael Shuman, author of “The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition.” That means creating new businesses and, sometimes, new industries.

For a model, Mr. Shuman points to Hardwick, Vt. There, businesspeople have focused on supplying more of the region’s local food needs by creating new markets for area farmers. Entrepreneurs have built infrastructure to turn local soybeans into tofu, for instance, and to age cheese for area cheesemakers. Such enterprises, along with growing businesses in related trades, account for as many as 100 new jobs in this remote town of 3,000.

Other towns could take similar steps to depend less on imports from faraway places, Shuman notes, but financing is often a challenge. He argues that if regulations were changed to allow small investors to buy stakes in local private enterprise, then businesses could more easily grow operations to meet communities’ existing needs.

States and provinces are trying the same idea. The Saskatchewan Economic Development Authority this year launched a “virtual incubator” – an Internet clearinghouse to help firms source as much of their inputs as possible from other Saskatchewan-based businesses. Rhode Island state government has expanded RI Nexus, a Web-based forum where the state’s high-tech professionals find one another and do business.

Back in Amesbury, businesses are a long way from growing new industries to make the town or region more self-sufficient, but they are making a point of keeping money moving locally. Five local restaurants buy produce from Amesbury’s 145-acre Cider Hill Farm and tout their locally grown ingredients on menus. Cider Hill co-owner Glenn Cook, in turn, raises particular varieties of lettuce to suit the color preferences of Flatbread, a downtown pizzeria. He also makes a point to put money back into the economy by contracting, for instance, with Amesbury’s R.E. Kimball & Co. to turn his peaches into jellies. Sometimes local businesses charge more than others might, he says, but he finds the extra costs worthwhile.

Higher costs present a recurring challenge in the quest to stem leakage. Companies in many industries work with distributors that aren’t used to using local suppliers. Nonlocal suppliers sometimes beat local prices with high-volume shipments from other states or countries, where input costs are lower. To grow a vibrant local economy, businesspeople and consumers must accept that they’re going to carry higher expenses as a consequence, according to Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, a Great Barrington, Mass.-based advocacy group for strong local economies.

“It’s changing our thinking from home economics to community economics,” Ms. Witt says. “When we do that, the home economics will be stronger because our neighbors, [schools, arts, and social services] will be stronger. That will come back to make our lives richer.”

Changing shoppers’ habits is a challenge, says Ms. McCowan of the Amesbury Chamber, even when local merchants charge competitive prices.

“Trying to convince people to not stop at Lowe’s on their way home – and instead to make sure that they run down to Amesbury Industrial [Supply Co.] on Saturday morning to get what they need – it’s a really long road in educating people,” McCowan says.

Some don’t concede that higher costs necessarily come with the territory of fighting leakage. Mr. Hall in North Carolina says consumers and businesses can grow their local spending sometimes just by finding deals that suit their needs. Even then, he says, towns need to recognize that local spending alone isn’t an economic panacea.

“Turning dollars around locally [through recirculation] will help to limit the amount of dollars flowing out of the region and be a stabilizing influence,” Hall says. “But it’s when you sprinkle entrepreneurship into the mix and have a commitment to grow businesses locally that you have a sustainable base.”

Mondragon: Reclaiming Regional Production Capacity

2009-12-03T14:10:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

Judith Schwartz's article on the Mondragon Cooperatives was posted today at Miller-McCune.

The loss of productive capacity and skills leaves regional economies vulnerable. Mondragon provides an example of how to reverse that trend and create new jobs.

Best wishes,
Staff of E. F. Schumacher Society
www.smallisbeautiful.org

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/this-import-might-preserve-a
merican-jobs-1634

This Import Might Preserve American Jobs
Might a cooperative model that arose from ashes of a civil war serve the Rust Belt economies of America's Midwest?

By: Judith D. Schwartz | December 03, 2009 | 05:00 AM (PST) |

The Mondragón Corporation, a cooperative that arose from ashes of a civil war, may be a model that could serve the Rust Belt economies of America's Midwest.Konstantinos Kokkinis

As the U.S. unemployment breaches the 10 percent mark — with manufacturing sector rates even higher — policymakers and industry representatives in the Midwest are seeking strategies to keep the Rust Belt from getting even rustier. In this war for economic survival, groups in cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago, as well as the million-plus-members-strong United Steelworkers Union, have turned to a model borne of another war-torn region: the Mondragón Corporation in the Basque area of Spain.

The Mondragón Corporation (MCC) is a multilayered organization with worker-owned cooperatives and participatory governance at its core. The corporation is a group of cooperatives and cooperative members, a seat of governance as well as planning, researching and generating funding for new businesses — a kind of meta-cooperative.

The network is comprised of more than 250 distinct, independently run businesses across several industries; more than 100 are worker-owned cooperatives. Some 90,000 people work under the Mondragón umbrella. Taken together, MCC's companies are the seventh largest corporation in Spain and rank among Europe's leading providers of appliances and industrial equipment.

Mondragón has long been a mecca for Americans interested in worker cooperatives. This is in part for the democratic values — shared financial stake in business' success without the threat of outside ownership; one-worker, one-vote governance; and an ethos that values people over profit — but also because of its success. Last year, while Spain's economy languished, Mondragon Corp.'s income rose 6 percent, to 16.8 billion euros. During the 1980s, when Spain's unemployment hit 27 percent, Mondragón's hovered below 1 percent.

Brownfield Development
In 1941, Catholic priest Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta found a Basque community — Arrasate, as Mondragón is known in Basque — where the striking mountain vistas and picturesque medieval architecture couldn't hide the ravages of the recently concluded Spanish Civil War, rampant unemployment and a once-thriving manufacturing infrastructure in disrepair. Two years later he opened a polytechnic school. And in 1956, the first cooperative, a stove factory, was launched. A bank and credit union soon followed and new cooperatives sprung up in electronics, tools, bicycles and on.

At MCC, the resources of all the cooperatives are pooled in the corporation, which gives small and upstart companies financial ballast and economies of scale. A portion of each worker's earnings is retained as "the patronage dividend," which gathers interest; another portion goes to a collective account of the cooperative, as an investment in the business' future. Workers pay membership fees but receive a percentage of revenues, plus higher interest on their accounts when businesses show a profit. Worker-owners are guaranteed employment; should one enterprise fail — and the failure rate is extremely low — jobs will be found in another cooperative.

The bulk of profit is reinvested into the cooperative network: to an education fund, to research and development, to cover potential losses, etc.; a percentage is directed to regional cultural institutions, maintaining vibrant community life. In order to promote economic equality, there are only five pay scales; in a given firm, the highest-paid employee earns no more than eight times the salary of a beginning worker. (The average Fortune 500 CEO's compensation is more than 400 times what his employees make.)

While the very word Mondragón has evoked an "if only" longing for many co-op watchers, the model hasn't taken root in the United States, even if the broader idea of the cooperative has. Michael Peck, the North American delegate for the Mondragón Corp., noted, "There are over 29,000 cooperatives in the U.S., and 80 to 100 million Americans belong to them." These range from small food purchasing co-ops to large credit unions, and account for $3 billion a year in assets.

But new developments in the industrial Midwest may broaden this. In inner-city Cleveland, the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry opened late last month, the first in a projected consortium of three cooperatives run according to the Mondragón template. On Oct. 27, the United Steelworkers and MCC announced an agreement to team up in forming Mondragón-style manufacturing cooperatives in the U.S. and Canada. Civic leaders in Detroit have consulted with Mondragón representatives and in southwest Wisconsin, plans are underway for the Mondragón-inspired Driftless Foods Co-op, beginning with an agricultural processing plant.

Meanwhile, on Chicago's West Side, Austin Polytechnic Academy is into its third year of offering high school students a combined college-prep and technical training curriculum. In September, a group of Austin Polytech students traveled to Spain and spent four days in Mondragón.
"The school is training the next generation of manufacturing leaders," explained Dan Swinney, executive director of the Center for Labor and Community Research, which helped develop the school. He said that the polytech, part of an effort to revive manufacturing in the now downtrodden Austin neighborhood, is "modeled in part on the Mondragón Polytechnic."

While Mondragón has a business presence in the U.S. — upwards of $200 million a year in mostly industrial products — the Steelworkers agreement marks the first time the Spanish cooperative has joined forces with a North American group.

"The general idea is that, in light of today's economic problems, there's much interest in trying to figure out a way to create jobs that are sustainable and accountable to the workers," said Rob Witherell of the Steelworkers. "This is certainly a step in the right direction." He did not specify a timeline.

Mondragón's Peck said that the disconnect between Wall Street profits and Main Street layoffs has created a hunger for new business structures. "People are beginning to understand that workplace ownership is just as valuable as home ownership," he said.

The newly-opened Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a state-of-the-art commercial laundry designed for LEED Silver certification, is the culmination of extensive preparation and research on the Mondragón model among several organizations: The Cleveland Foundation; the Democracy Collaborative; ShoreBank Enterprise and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University. Many business ideas were floated, among them a laundry that would serve the local health care community, which includes the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and the Veterans Administration Medical Center.

"The University Circle area has wealthy anchor institutions that are part of the history of the city's industrial past," said Jim Anderson, who will function as Evergreen Laundry's CEO and is program coordinator at the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. "The neighborhood that surrounds The Circle is poor and underserved, with an average household income of $18,500. We asked: Is there a way to enhance community wealth by employing folks from the neighborhood in worker cooperatives and, at the same time, for them to provide a service to these institutions? Of the nearly $3 billion spent on services and procurements, only about 10 to 15 percent is spent right here in northeast Ohio. We saw in this the opportunity for a for-profit enterprise. The anchor institutions are going to stay here, so why don't' we get jobs that are anchored with them?"

Rather than thriving despite their surroundings, business leaders have an investment in helping the surrounding neighborhood thrive. "We needed to create businesses that would sustain themselves," Anderson says. "These had to be real jobs that would keep people working for the long term."

In fall 2008, a group of a dozen community leaders, professionals and leaders from several universities traveled to Mondragón, which generated yet more enthusiasm about the project, Anderson noted. Alas, this was when the financial system began to unravel. "When we got off the plane, we learned that the bank we were dealing with was sold to a bank in another state," he recalls. "But, still, we got up and kept this process moving — and got here. It's a model we're convinced is replicable, city to city."

Oliver Henkel, chief external affairs officer at the Cleveland Clinic, just returned from a follow-up trip to Mondragón. "These neighborhoods are a base of employment for us, and we prefer to draw on services close by for environmental as well as economic reasons," he says. "While here in Cleveland we can't replicate this model down to the last detail, elements are particularly attractive. In Mondragón, I saw a workforce secure in their jobs working as teams with extraordinary results, plus the security that enhanced wealth creates."

Mondragón is not without its critics. The corporation has subsidiaries in more than 20 countries and so far, these do not have the same cooperative framework. Their retail company, Eroski, has grown rapidly — it operates the largest Spanish-owned food chain — and has more employees than worker-owners. But the company is planning to offer membership to the 40,000 people who work for it.

And no business model can insulate workers from a global economic slide. But worker-members can choose how to confront it and, as has happened, vote to take a temporary pay cut of, say, 8 to 10 percent, to ride out a downturn rather than trim any staff. And, boosters say, the results speak for themselves.

Like many from the U.S. who travel to Mondragón, Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, was struck by the lack of economic disparity when she visited in 2007. "You could tell that no one was wealthy — but everyone was well off," said Witt. Beyond the sense of worker equity she observed, what makes her hopeful about bringing the Mondragón model stateside is the chance to build a resilient production sector. "A huge concern of mine is the loss of production in this country," she said. "The outsourcing of production skills makes us so vulnerable; the memory of production is disappearing. Mondragón shows that there's a dignity and potential in production. That's the lesson to bring here."

The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry is now humming, processing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of laundry a day from three health care customers. Edward Cole is one of the six workers who run the machines. Cole, 59, learned of Evergreen while living and working at a homeless shelter and was assisted in the application process through Cleveland's Towards Employment program. "It's really great here. It's a good team," said Cole, a Vietnam combat vet who spent 10 years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit. He likes that he has been trained in the use, mechanics and maintenance of every machine.

"If I'm going to become an owner, I want to know what I'm owning." For Cole, the worker-owner model sends a powerful message that he is valued, plus that he can build personal wealth.

Said Evergreen CEO Anderson, "If we're right — and we've been conservative because we've felt obligated not to let this fail — the worker-owners will have in their patronage account $60,000 in eight or nine years. That can help someone buy a home, send a child to college."
"My dream is to own part of this company," Cole said. "Now I have the dreams but don't have the nightmares," he says, referring to longstanding problems with PTSD. "This place is putting that dream in me. I can walk down the street and say, 'That's my company.'"

Schumacher lectures/Amherst Community TV

2009-11-23T22:16:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,

Ernie Urvater of Amherst Community TV filmed the 2009 E. F. Schumacher Lectures in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His films of Bill McKibben and Benjamin Barber's talks will be aired on ACTV.

Scheduled times for the airings are below. You can also stream the shows from the links below.

We hope you enjoy these presentations as much as those attending the lectures enjoyed and were inspired by them.

Benjamin Barber
11/23/2009 at 12:00 PM
11/26/2009 at 6:35 PM
11/30/2009 at 12:00 PM

Bill McKibben
11/22/2009 at 10:30 AM
11/29/2009 at 10:30 AM
12/6/2009 at 10:30 AM

Schumacher Lectures: Benjamin Barber
http://204.213.244.104/Cablecast/Public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=5239

Schumacher Lectures: Bill Mckibben
http://204.213.244.104/Cablecast/Public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=5241

Best wishes,
E. F. Schumacher Society staff
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

Ralph Nader/Nov 28/Stockbridge MA

2009-11-14T22:44:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

Ralph Nader has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer environments for more than four decades. "The Atlantic" named him one of the hundred most influential figures in American history.

Mr. Nader's new book "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is a work of fiction but it rests on the fervent hope and belief that if we all, as engaged citizens, turn our talents and resources to the most pressing problems before us, we can achieve unimaginable success.

The E. F. Schumacher Society, The Orion Society, and the Bookloft invite you to a talk by Ralph Nader, Saturday, November 28th, 7PM at the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Admission is free at the door. Space is limited. Donations in BerkShares and federal dollars are welcome.

Mr. Nader will be introduced by H. Emerson Blake of The Orion Society. The talk will be followed by a book signing courtesy of The Bookloft.

Please join us on November 28th,

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Jasmine Stine, and Kate Poole
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

smallisbeautiful.org
berkshares.org
youtube.com/efssociety
twitter.com/neweconomics

Brief Introduction to the BerkShares Currency

2009-11-03T15:55:00.003-05:00

Over the past year BerkShares has received an incredible amount of media attention. The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, BBC News and even Fox News have all covered our local sustainable currency. Enjoy this brief collage of media coverage:

Introduction to BerkShares

Economic Ideas that Matter/Jane Jacobs

2009-10-27T19:02:00.004-04:00

Dear Friends,

Judith Schwartz turns to Jane Jacobs for ideas that matter when it comes to economics. See her Miller-McCune article below.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/what-jane-jacobs-can-teach-u
s-about-the-economy-1537

What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy

Late urban champion's notions about decline and imports newly resonant during this recession.

By: Judith D. Schwartz | October 24, 2009

How is that economic stimulus package working for you? Think TARP was worth those billions? Perhaps our financial system is back from the brink, but just how far — or how long until we're staring down that same precipice — is not clear. Aside from healthy investment-house bonuses and the fact that General Motors still exists, most have seen little change. While our
financial pundits are still scratching their heads over why our financial structure plummeted so spectacularly let alone what to do about it, many economic thinkers are turning to urban pioneer Jane Jacobs.

Who?

Most know Jane Jacobs as the ultimate champion of cities, who stood up against neighborhood demolition and saw a vibrant ballet where others saw urban squalor. But three years since her death — and a year into a downturn marked by bailouts, foreclosures and sky-high unemployment — her economic vision has come into the spotlight.

"People in economic policy and development are looking carefully at Jacobs' work," says David Boyle, an author and researcher at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based independent economic think tank. "She's been very influential, but subtly so. People aren't always aware of where the ideas come from. This is true from the right and left."

In the landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs called out the folly of urban "improvement" projects that left city districts barren. (Who guessed that people liked to see their neighbors, and that vacant courtyards and hallways invited crime?) In the same way, her 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, zeroes in on how well-intended subsidies can deplete growth and block innovation. Wealth, she argues, is not merely a matter of assets but rather the capacity to 1) engage those assets in production and 2) adapt to changing circumstances and needs.

According to Jacobs, the engine of economic life is "import-replacement." What this somewhat clunky term means is making the products you have been buying. For example, much of New England, where I live, is rich in hardwood forest. But there is no large-scale furniture manufacturing here. Aside from what a few artisans produce for a mostly upscale market, it's imported: Our tables, chairs and bed frames are made from fast-growing trees in Southeast Asia, shipped over and stained to look like oak, maple or cherry. If made here, we'd no longer be dependent on furniture from elsewhere; workers here would apply their own innovations to create their own products and techniques and we'd have more products to trade with other places.

This process, replicated over and over and on a large or small scale, invigorates the economy. Workers gain skills, capital gets invested in new equipment, trading partners emerge, consumer taste gets more sophisticated, etc.

This does not happen when a large corporation plunks a factory down in a derelict neighborhood or rural outpost. But that has been the favored approach to perk up an area's economy. The upshot is that the population becomes reliant on one industry that may not be appropriate for the setting. Supplies get shipped in from elsewhere and other wealth-producing activity
languishes.

"Jacobs pointed out that to boost an area's economy, the normal plan is to bring in a branch of some big business. But then you have an industry without roots. They're not using local accountants and local printers," says Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Mass., which, since its inception in 1980, maintained a close working relationship with Jane Jacobs. "It's through those roots that you get the economic multiplier effect of small businesses. And a branch or factory based elsewhere can leave as easily as it arrived."

Michael Shuman, research and public policy director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says research suggests that subsidies to attract and retain development are not effective at jumpstarting economies. One unpublished study he led recently looked at the three largest economic development programs in 15 states and found that fewer than 10 percent of companies involved devoted even a small majority of expenditures to local businesses; in most cases 90 percent of the money spent went out of state.

"The economic developers I speak to no longer even try to defend these subsidy strategies," Shuman says. "They've run out of excuses except for the fact that the politicians like them. Politicians get more mileage from one big deal that brings 1,000 jobs than an entrepreneurship program that generates 10 jobs in 100 local businesses. Even when the rhetoric has shifted to the importance of local, in terms of where the money goes, it's still following an old and entirely discredited mode of economic
development."

As for the stimulus bill, Shuman says it has "the worst features of economic development on steroids. If in a typical year, millions [are] spent on pork, this year more than a trillion is spent on pork." Even if the stimulus package is a success, he says, the program "could have been more successful with less money if we had followed Jane Jacobs' ideas" of local resilience
through import-replacement.

She wasn't omniscient, and her modern acolytes aren't claiming that. "Where was Jane Jacobs wrong?" Shuman asked. "What she didn't anticipate was the Internet. The argument that cities were the only important economic engines is weakened considerably by Web-based businesses, which have diversified and strengthened rural economies. Another thing she didn't entirely anticipate was climate change, which makes trade as a tool of growth a little more suspect."

Cities and the Wealth of Nations came out 25 years ago. But the dynamics described are eerily familiar. Take, for instance, what Jacobs called "transactions of decline" — trade encouraged to prop up the economy. An example she uses is ongoing, entrenched military production. This appears productive, but it sucks the oxygen out of the economy. Innovation and
entrepreneurship (import-replacing processes) slow down, there's less inter-city trade to spark new products and ideas, and the economy loses complexity and the ability to adapt. Entire regions become dependent on military spending; they need a war for growth to occur.

The real estate market crash followed a similar trajectory, says Sanford Ikeda, associate professor of economics at SUNY Purchase. "Look at all the incentives in the run-up to the bubble," he says. "People were encouraged to take more risk than optimal, and [many were] making money on unproductive transfers. Not only is this not productive, but it's an obstacle to growth."

One could look at the derivatives market in the same way, as all the entrepreneurial energy goes into the transactions themselves rather than productivity.

The economic downturn has prompted many to question assumptions about growth. "There is a new focus on what happens on the local level, on import-replacement businesses and what it takes to encourage them," says Schumacher's Witt. "Chambers of commerce are putting more into networking and training for small businesses. There's less talk of tax incentives.
These are all Jane Jacobs concepts."

Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, and the founder and chairman of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, says her business decisions have been informed by Jacobs' economic vision. "I took seriously the notion of 'local supplies with local labor for local consumption,'" she says. "I asked, 'What are we importing that we can make
locally?' That's what builds community wealth. Instead of starting another White Dog in another location, I started a Black Cat because there was no store nearby that focused on locally made and fair-trade products."

Jane Jacobs was an advocate of decentralization; her belief that economies function on a regional, as opposed to national, level has helped spur recent interest in launching local currencies.

But her suspicion of bigness was pragmatic rather than ideological: In her view, the larger and more complex the institution or economy, the less accurate the feedback it provides. And accurate feedback is crucial for a system to self-correct. One way to look at our financial near-crash is as the result of crisscrossing feedback loops: mixed messages coming from GDP,
foreign exchanges, the stock exchange, housing sales, the data from different parts of the country contradicting each other so that when policy adjusts for one area it destabilizes another like a seesaw that veers up and down but never finds equilibrium.

With so many layers in our financial system, feedback gets lost.

"A large economy is floated by so many factors," says Mary W. Rowe, who runs the New Orleans Institute for Resilience and Innovation, and for several years directed Ideas That Matter, a Toronto institute based on Jane Jacobs' work. "The more opportunity you have to see feedback, the better you can course-correct. This is what the sustainability movement is doing-tightening up feedback loops so that people are aware of [a product's] real costs, such as the environmental impacts, and true costs, of their production, consumptions and disposal."

One advantage of local, as opposed to centralized, production, is that there's more transparency, she says. Efficiency, in the sense of economies of scale, does not always promote wealth and productivity, she says. "You don't want so much control in one place. Most innovation happens on the grassroots level."

It's easy to lapse into theory with economics. But money matters get very real when people are losing their jobs. Could these ideas — import-replacement, adaptation, small feedback loops — help put people back to work? Wicks says yes: "If we start making products at home then we can start dealing with the problem of unemployment."

Everyone is an Activist

2009-10-11T17:53:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

In this fragile economy discussion of a new, re-envisioned, economics is a common topic, bridging political affiliations. People are eager to join in practical action that addresses a system in crisis, driving an activism in which every citizen is a participant.

For twenty-nine years, the E. F. Schumacher Society, joined by a circle of partners and allies, has imagined, implemented, and shared information about citizen-initiated projects for shaping sustainable local economies.

Headed by Alisa Gravitz, Green America (http://www.greenamericatoday.org)- formerly Coop America – has long been a dynamic leader in this constellation, promoting an economics where people and planet matter. Its work involves a deep commitment to whole-story economics, asking not only how and where a product is made but also by whom and under what conditions. From advancing Fair Trade supply chains and reducing sweatshop labor worldwide to promoting socially and ecologically responsible business and investment at home, Green America empowers citizens to make informed and responsible choices when they enter into economic exchange.

Heeding E. F. Schumacher's tenet that education must clarify our central convictions, Green America boldly advocates for a world where all people have enough, where all communities are healthy and safe, and where the bounty of the Earth is preserved for the generations to come. Green America provides resources and tools for individuals and institutions as they make economic decisions.

For more than twenty-five years Alisa Gravitz has led Green America in developing marketplace solutions to social and environmental problems, with emphasis on climate change, community investment, corporate responsibility, green business, and fair trade. Ms. Gravitz is also a nationally recognized leader in the social investment industry. She co-authored Green Amerca's “Guide to Social Investing” and is a recipient of the prestigious Socially Responsible Investing Service Award.

Ms. Gravitz promotes a green economy as the solution to both the environmental needs of our planet and the current financial crisis, inspiring myriad grassroots actions to “reduce consumption and waste of the world’s resources and totally reshape the global economy in the direction of sustainability.” (alternet.org) Her innovative work to create a more socially just and environmentally sustainable society generates as much concrete action as it does enthusiasm and hope for the future.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Alisa Gravitz at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. She will be joined by speakers Bill McKibben and Benjamin Barber. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

Manufacture Goods, Not Needs

2009-10-11T10:01:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

As part of his vision for diverse regional economies, E. F. Schumacher advocated for production and manufacturing from local resources for local needs. “It is not a question of choosing between modern growth and traditional stagnation,” Schumacher advised, but rather “of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility…” More than ever before, the current economic crisis implores us to identify contemporary articulations that support Schumacher’s Buddhist Economics and tools and vehicles for its advancement.

Distinguished author and senior fellow at Demos (www.demos.org), Benjamin Barber provides one such articulation, by first offering an incisive portrayal of global capitalism at its worst. It’s what he calls ‘push capitalism’: manufacturing needs for the goods we’re producing – a disastrously far cry from producing useful goods to meet real human needs. Barber explains in his 2007 book, “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole,” that capitalism “seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain.” In it he offers a vivid critique of the market’s fabrication of needs and its branding and commercialization of just about everything.

Nevertheless, Mr. Barber encourages idealism as the new realism and points to possibilities for liberating ourselves from the “civic schizophrenia” brought about by the modern age of consumerism. He points to various seeds of resistance: consumer boycotts, renewed funding for the arts, micro-lending, and the corporate responsibility movement. He challenges business to earn profits through creative innovation that serves instead of endangers. Most urgently however, Mr. Barber encourages us to take informed responsibility for our role in economic exchange, and calls for deep change in our cultural and civic lives:

“The struggle for the soul of capitalism is…a struggle between the nation's economic body and its civic soul: a struggle to put capitalism in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants. Saving capitalism means bringing it into harmony with spirit--with prudence, pluralism and those "things of the public" (res publica) that define our civic souls. A revolution of the spirit. “ (The Nation, 2009)

Benjamin R. Barber is a Senior Fellow at Demos (www.demos.org), as well as president and director of the international NGO CivWorld at Demos, and its annual Interdependence Day event. An internationally renowned political theorist, Dr. Barber brings an abiding concern for democracy and citizenship to issues of politics, culture and education in America and abroad. He consults regularly with political and civic leaders in the United States and around the world.

Benjamin Barber's 17 books include the classic Strong Democracy (1984); the recent international best-seller Jihad vs. McWorld (1995 with a Post 9/11 Edition in 2001) and Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, published by W.W. Norton & Co. in March, 2007.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Benjamin Barber at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. He will be joined by speakers Bill McKibben and Alisa Gravitz. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine

Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

David Boyle at launch of Brixton Pound

2009-09-27T18:04:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

David Boyle is one of the senior staff at the New Economics Foundation in London and well known for his writings on local currencies. He is part of the NEF team working with the E. F. Schumacher Society to form the New Economics Institute in North America.

David gave the following address last week at the launch of the Brixton Pound.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
www.smallisbeautiful.org
www.berkshares.org

http://transitionculture.org/2009/09/18/david-boyles-speech-at-the-launch-of-the-brixton-pound/

David Boyle’s speech at the launch of the Brixton Pound

“One of my first experiences of currencies along the lines of the Brixton pound was in Ithaca in upstate New York, where they have had an amazing printed currency for the last 15 years. You can get loans in it. The biggest loan was for $36,000. Not bad for a local currency. Some of the notes are printed on paper made from Angora rabbit fur, which is an innovative solution to the problem of counterfeiting which has not yet struck the Bank of England. But I met a man there who had been mugged in Manhattan. The mugger searched through his wallet and said, hey what are these?. He brandished a pile of Ithaca notes.

My friend explained that they were a way to keep local economies moving, and the mugger was fascinated. Wow, he said. You’re right about the world: money doesn’t work for people like us, does it. And of course it doesn’t work very well. It works beautifully for a very few, for whom it is endlessly elastic and flexible and forgiving. When Robert Maxwell fell off his yacht, he owed twice as much as Zimbabwe. But he had a yacht.

For the rest of us, it is very concrete. We have to pay what little we borrow back according to the rules. Because otherwise, well its moral jeopardy, isn’t it. We might learn bad habits. We might get perverted somehow from the straight and narrow. Then there wouldn’t be enough to bail out Citibank again! But then Americans, it seems to me, understand these things better than we do. Their new kinds of money caused the War of Independence in the first place. Benjamin Franklin with his printing machine. They had 5,000 depression currencies in the 1930s which luterally kept people alive through the Great Depression. Some of them were made of wood, which is a bit bizarre.

We have Captain Mainwraing. Or we did. In fact, that whole tradition of dull, careful bank managers has been swept away in this country. When American investigators began looking into the subprime mortgages which cause the great bank crash of 2008, they looked down the list of borrowers and – on the very first page – they found one paid to someone called M. Mouse.
Other cartoon characters followed. When you start shelling out mortgages willy nilly to anyone, whether they can afford it or not, because they are considered risk free to the bankers – that’s what happens. That’s the opposite of the kind of money we need, and the opposite of the imaginative self-help money we are launching today.

Worse than that. It is a kind of lie. A kind of theft. There used to be 144 breweries in New York a hundred years ago. Now there are six. There used to be ten thousand local papers in this country then. Now there are about a few hundred. We are experiencing a money system that is driving out this diversity because it is monocultural. It makes everywhere the same. One kind of measuring stick. One kind of business. Monoculture money systems drive out other cultures, other species, other languages, other opinions, other forms of wealth. We can see this everywhere.

The great harbours and rivers that have bustled for a thousand years. Empty. The farming communities and fields of the world covered with weeds. Even the great corporations – whatever else we may think of them – shedding all the real work until they are just shells that just do financial services. There’s a great silence descending on the world. It’s a kind of death. The very opposite of life creating, and that’s why I am so excited about the Brixton pound.

There’s a kind of thrill about it, it seems to me. You hold those notes and you say, Can you do this? Can we just print it then? It seems too simple. Aren’t there laws against it? The answer is you have to make sure you’re not claiming it is a bank of England pound, a promise to pay the bearer on demand pound. In fact, the organiser of the Liberty Dollar in the States, who mints sterling silver coins he calls dollars, has just been arrested. Ten years, the Isle of Wight County Council were prosecuted for minting their own coins. But they would have been fine if they hadn’t called them euros.

So no, it IS legal to print your own. You can use what you like as money after all, if someone will accept it. We still have that freedom at least. But there’s still a moment of breathlessness when you hold these things in your hand. As if you were somehow touching the stuff of life. And in a way you are. Because money is like blood. It circulates around us, and when it disappears somewhere – because of some squall on Wall Street – our lives seize up a little.

And let’s stay with the idea of lifeblood for a moment. Before William Harvey announced his theory about how blood works in 1616, most people thought it was made in the liver and the heart and swallowed up by the other organs. Harvey showed that it was the circulation of the blood that really mattered. If nothing circulates, the patient dies. It’s the same with economics, and local economies. If the money goes round, or any medium of exchange, the place lives. If it doesn’t, it dies.
It doesn’t matter really how much money there is in total.

But economics hasn’t reached William Harvey yet. It still adds up the bottom line, and if doesn’t work, they get the scalpel out and bleed the patient. So money is life, and we can make our own. That’s why I say those Brixton pound notes are alive. It is a small liberation to use one. A bit like the moment Gandhi made salt for the first time. a symbolic moment of revolt, using the stuff of life. So every time we use one of these notes, it seems to me – and we are going to have to use them if this is going to work – it is a moment of liberation.

To run our own lives. To set us free just a little bit from dependence on the government or Tesco. Or are they the same thing these days? To make Brixton a place, knitted together, with its own money and its own life, not just a tube station with housing attached. I don’t pretend it’s going to be easy. I don’t pretend there are no great issues to face, and decisions to make. I don’t pretend we can possibly get there in one leap. There are going to be disappointments and frustrations along the way.

But every time we invest in this money and take it out of our pockets, to exchange it for something – looking the shopkeeper in the eye as we do so – we are shaping our futures. We are clawing back just a little control over that great global money system that swirls above us like the gods. It may be a bit of paper now. But it is a small lever with which we can move the world. Good luck to it.

Washington Post on BerkShares and Brixton Pound

2009-09-27T10:30:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

Today's "Washington Post" credits BerkShares local currency with inspiring launch of the Brixton Pound as a citizen-driven economic development tool in London's poorest neighborhood.

E. F. Schumacher Society staff
www.smallisbeautiful.org
www.berkshares.org

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092602427.html

When Going Gets Tough, Local Currency Gets Going

By Karla Adam
Special to the Washington Post
Sunday, September 27, 2009

LONDON -- Throughout Britain, people are hanging on to their hard-earned pounds, scrimping and saving as they ride out the recession.

But in a few communities, people are taking a different tack: printing their own money and spending it. No, the queen's image on the iconic British pound isn't being counterfeited. Instead, some communities are producing their own scrips -- some of the latest have painter Vincent van Gogh's face on them -- which can be used much like cash at participating businesses.

The latest community to do so is Brixton, the second area in Britain this month that introduced its own currency. With an initial run of 40,000 notes in various denominations, it is the most ambitious project here of its kind so far.

Sometimes called Britain's Harlem, the Brixton is a multiethnic area in south London with a large African Caribbean population and a vibrant atmosphere. The kind of mind-set seen in this bustling and close-knit community is crucial for any local currency plan to work, say economists, adding that like any other form of exchange, the success of the Brixton pound will hinge on the continued confidence and willingness among people to use it.

The first Brixton pound entered into circulation last week when Christopher Wellbelove, mayor of Lambeth, the borough that encompasses Brixton, waved a sepia-toned one-pound note in the air at a town hall meeting where it was unveiled and used it to buy a box of tomatoes. (He got a good deal, said many at the scene.)

"It's a modern-day IOU," said Bruce Weber, a London Business School professor who teaches a course on alternative currencies.

History offers many examples of people developing alternative currencies in tough times. After the financial meltdown in Argentina in 2001, for instance, bartering clubs sprung up nationwide. When Germany was hit by hyperinflation in the early 1920s, many towns issued special money that was not recognized as legal tender but was widely accepted by businesses.

People can buy Brixton pounds with standard British currency -- a pound for a pound -- at a half-dozen local outlets. The incentive for consumers, beyond an altruistic desire to support local businesses, is that many restaurants and stores will offer a 10 percent discount to people using the currency. Those businesses, in turn, hope to build customer loyalty. They will make change for purchases using the Brixton currency to continue its circulation, though customers can insist on standard British money if they wish.

"It can stimulate the local economy," Weber said. "It gets done in tightknit communities where people feel they have a shared stake in things. It's a response to recession conditions. . . . If we issue a certain kind of currency amongst ourselves, maybe it keeps someone to do grocery shopping within the community."

Brixton pounds were launched by Transition Network, an environmental group that promotes low-carbon living and believes that by promoting local businesses people will travel less and reduce impact on the environment. Inspired by the BerkShares currency launched in western Massachusetts three years ago, Transition Network also has helped launch currencies in the town of Stroud this month and in Totnes and Lewes earlier.

The British are usually embarrassed to discuss money. But in Brixton, cash is the talk of the town, with residents curious to know which businesses will accept the new currency (participants include a local grocer, a pharmacy and a belly-dance instructor) and which ones will not (a popular movie theater and cafe.)

Ossie Bash-Taqi, 44, who is accepting the notes at his catering company, said he has more faith in the Brixton pound than he does in its official counterpart.

"In a community like this, if you break the chain, you'd have a lot of angry people. We all know each other, and you can't hide behind an empty bank counter," he said.

There is no law against using alternative currencies, be they pieces of paper or beaver pelts or seashells, as long as they are not passed off as official money. Tax authorities also have no problem with the currencies as merchants continue to account for all of their trade.

"There is still some apprehension," said Tim Nichols, project manager for the Brixton pound. "But there's also a lot of buzz, and we're hopeful it will strengthen the local economy."

Nichols said it cost about $16,000 to have the Brixton pounds printed and to pay for the public information campaign. Most of that was donated by local businesses. The notes bear pictures of significant Brixton residents, including van Gogh, who is said to have lived there in his early 20s, as well as watermarks and security measures that the organizers hope will prevent counterfeiting.

Any effect on the greater economy will be "probably nil," said Nick Mayhew, an expert on the history of currencies at Oxford University. The upshot of alternative currencies, he said, is mostly increased community spirit.

"It's a constant reminder to shop in Brixton," said Leon Rothera, 28, owner of a local restaurant called Honest Foods, the first business to sign up for the new currency. "But let's see what happens when the novelty wears off."

The Most Important Number in the World

2009-09-27T10:13:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

Concept2 Rowing and the Craftsbury Green Nordic Racing Program are organizing a worldwide rowing/skiing challenge that will cover 350 million meters all before October 24. Volunteers in Panama City’s Parque Nacional Soberania gathered to plant 350 native species trees and almost doubled their target. Community members are gathering in Vancouver for a 350-person salsa dancing extravaganza. Five thousand school children in the Netherlands created a giacantic installation using their bodies as the medium, highlighting Holland’s trademark windmills, and featuring one important number - 350.

Why 350? It is the number leading scientists have indicated as the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide (measured in "Parts Per Million") in our atmosphere. We have already exceeded that limit. But renowned environmentalist and author, Bill McKibben is urging a world-wide effort to reverse the current course of climate change. His campaign is named 350.org and will culminate on October 24th with citizen actions in communities around the world.

It is not too late to join the campaign, lead an initiative in your community, or support an action already in progress. To see what others are doing, find projects near you, or learn more about the implications of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, go to: http://www.350.org/mission

For two decades, Bill McKibben, has used his skills as a writer to enlighten readers about global warming and advocate for creative responses to the problem. His books include “Deep Economy” (2007), “Fight Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community” (2007), and “The End of Nature” (1989). In 2007 he organized Step It Up -- the largest coordinated demonstration against global warming in American history.

Now he is organizing 350.org, an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis--the solutions that justice demand. Its mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet. In order to bring together the
public, media, and our political leaders behind the 350 goal, McKibben and friends are harnessing the power of the internet to coordinate the October 24th planetary day of action, six weeks before the world's leaders meet in Copenhagen to formulate a new global treaty on carbon emissions.

Events are scheduled at hundreds of iconic places around the world - from the Taj Mahal to the Great Barrier Reef – with local community efforts across 100 countries. The Day of Action will showcase the tremendous efforts of existing individuals, organizations and communities working to tackle climate change from the ground up, joining them together on a powerful platform borne of hard science and inspired activism.

Please join us on Saturday, October 17th in welcoming Bill McKibben at the 29th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures. He will be joined by speakers Benjamin Barber and Alisa Gravitz. The location is the First Congregational Church of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Tickets are 25 BerkShares/Dollars (15 for members of the E. F. Schumacher Society, seniors, and students). We recommend registering in advance.

For more information on the event or to pre-register please visit:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

Email: efssociety@smallisbeautiful.org

Or call (413) 528-1737.

Best Wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

Transitioning to a New Economy

2009-09-14T04:20:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

We are pleased to announce speakers for this year's Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture program on October 17th in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and invite you to attend (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/events/29th.html). Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz have each made important contributions in articulating characteristics of a new economy.

Over the past year we have all watched in amazement as the old economy unraveled before us—banks failing, established corporations seeking bankruptcy protection, unemployment increasing, climate change progressing unabated, and governments nervously printing currency hoping to buy their way out of these problems. The urgency of shaping a new economy—one that is fair and sustainable, that functions within ecological limits, and takes into account people and cultures throughout the world—has never been clearer.

A successful transition to a new economy in which people and the earth have a higher priority than financial return will require a restructuring of institutions and governance frameworks; changes in values and behavior; hard decisions; and decisive actions on the part of individuals, communities, civil society, firms and governments throughout the world. If such a transition is to be successful, it will need to be rooted in robust systemic analysis, employ effective hard-hitting advocacy, and offer proven, practical solutions. In addition, it will require a coherent and encompassing narrative that is both compelling and accessible and that draws together the various components of a complex picture in such a way as to stimulate and support action at all levels.

Parts of the new economy are already known and underway.

In North America, Wendell Berry is our finest poet of a new vision, describing the mutual support at the heart of a community economics in his stories and essays about rural life. Jane Jacobs vividly paints the picture of vibrant, complex, import-replacing city regions as engines for diversified production in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations.” David Morris’s Institute for Local Self Reliance is developing local and national ordinances that encourage rather than discourage small business development. Judy Wicks has united green entrepreneurs in regional Business Alliances for Local Living Economies. Peter Barnes reminds us that land and air and oceans and minerals are all part of the commons and as such their use should be limited, with income derived from their use distributed to all stakeholders. Gar Alperovitz has long articulated the benefits of distributed ownership and has promoted the tools for accomplishing such shared wealth. Winona LaDuke is re-inventing the economy of tribal nations by regathering lands lost to tribal control and reintroducing traditional production methods. Majora Carter and Van Jones understand that green jobs—retrofitting homes and workplaces to make them more energy efficient and restoring polluted sites—can help to renew our inner cities while providing dignified employment opportunities. Amory Lovins’s Rocky Mountain Institute is exploring technologies for a new economy and how to make such products economically viable. The Center for a New American Dream and Green America are teaching the individual and corporate consumer to change long-established patterns of buying to cause less impact on the Earth. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmers are making the growing of food a visible process and educating a new generation about the importance of sourcing food locally. Wes Jackson’s Land Institute is challenging our agriculture system’s dependence on annual crops by breeding perennial grains; his is a 100-year vision. Woody Tasch’s Slow Money Institute and other innovative social investment groups are devising how to finance a new economy. The Transition Town movement is energizing discussions in town after town about what citizens can do to reduce dependency on global imports and return to using locally sourced goods. Local currencies such as BerkShares have captured the imaginations of activists and economists alike as an effective tool for keeping wealth circulating in a region and effecting greater economic self-determination.

Academic institutions such as the Ecological Economics program at the University of Maryland under Herman Daly, Robert Costanza’s Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, and Neva Goodwin’s Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University are reshaping the study of economics to factor in the social and environmental costs of production. Hazel Henderson, a pioneer thinker on green economics, continues to influence a younger generation to challenge existing financial systems and create change. Joseph Stiglitz is setting an example for fellow economists to rethink all established economic assumptions in order to forge a new economy. Gus Speth, Bill McKibben, David Boyle, Peter Victor, Benjamin Barber, Michael Shuman, David Korten, and Juliet Schor are among a growing list of authors writing about a new economy, and through their writing, building the imagination to get us there.

And there are others.

What is needed now is some entity to bring these various organizations and individuals together, to frame a common story, to tell it in multiple voices, to strategize the steps towards implementation, and to take collective action to achieve the transition.

We see a New Economics Institute as a collaborative, open, inclusive, value-added think tank working closely with existing organizations and research programs to:

1. Identify and fill gaps in knowledge;

2. Package together various presently isolated strands of work into a coherent and encompassing narrative;

3. Present these so as to achieve maximum impact on public and political debate, individual and business behavior, and public policy;

4. Support existing organizations by building the profile of a coherent new economics; and

5. Build a network of fellows from partnering organizations to engage in specific projects, research, or campaigns.

Building a New Economics Institute

In "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" economist Fritz Schumacher drew from a broad palette to develop what he called "an economy of permanence." He wove together culture, society, ecology, scale, technology, and governance as necessary and related factors in shaping a new economy.

The E. F. Schumacher Society in the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts has a thirty year history of building on Schumacher's interdisciplinary approach to economics—stewarding his library and archives, providing a venue for new voices in the field, convening conferences, publishing papers, and transforming ideas into action through model economic programs in its home region. It is gaining extensive media recognition for its work on decentralizing and democratizing the institutions of land, labor, and capital.

In its twenty-two years of work similarly borne out of Schumacher's thinking, the New Economics Foundation (nef) in London (www.neweconomics.org), has developed an impressive record of applied research and public policy initiatives at the local, national, and international level. nef is acknowledged by British media as the voice of a New Economics. Its diverse campaigns have gathered organizations together in common cause and have bettered the lives of people in small villages around the world and in the neighborhoods of bustling European cities.

The E. F. Schumacher Society and nef recognize that their combined fifty-year history of providing the theory and application of a new economics on both sides of the Atlantic, uniquely positions them to contribute to the building of a new initiative. Accepting this responsibility, the Schumacher Society is partnering with nef to form the New Economics Institute, a US based organization. We will keep you informed of developments.

A friend commented that what she likes about the proposed Institute is that it is addressing multiple issues from one root source—the transformation of our current economic system. That engages and inspires her, as it does us.

We welcome your comments and support.

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

When you damage the outer world, you damage the inner world

2009-09-02T07:42:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

Father Thomas Berry first spoke for the Schumacher Society in 1984, then again in 1991, and finally in 2004.

An inspired student of Teilhard de Chardin, he was deeply in love with the planet itself, as a living being. Its visible signs of deterioration grieved him. Concerned, he thought at first to use his gift of speech to describe the scope of Earth's devastation, believing that such a picture would lead his listeners to acts of restoration.

But his approach, he admitted candidly, had the opposite effect. His audience grew depressed and disempowered.

So instead of a history of destruction, he began to describe a Universe that might be -- a future Ecozic Era in which human-earth relations were again in harmony. And this Universe Story moved his audience to new action. Neglected lands of monastaries and convents were put in fruitful production growing vegetables for the local region and creating sites for affordable housing. Groups met in church basements and Grange halls, in town meetings and UN gatherings to discuss their responsibilities to shape a healthier world for the children, because of Thomas Berry.

Thomas Berry passed away in June of this year, but the example he set also applies to those concerned to shape a new economy—one that is fair and sustainable, that functions within ecological limits, and takes into account people and cultures throughout the world. We could, with justice on our side, focus on what is wrong with the current economy. Or we could take another path and strive to come together, consumers and producers, in our neighborhoods, towns, and regions, to implement new ways of conducting economic life based on a vision of possibility and right conduct. Thomas Berry never tired of pointing to such small examples that add up to big results.

We are pleased to share Nic Tuff's 2006 interview with Father Berry (see below) as a small way of honoring his large influence on the life of the Schumacher Society and to declare openly, that we miss him.

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, Kate Poole, and Jasmine Stine
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
(413) 528-1737
www.smallisbeautiful.org
* * * * * * * * *
A Conversation with Thomas Berry by Nicholas Tuff [Abridged]
June 28th, 2006

NT: How does the Universe Story that you developed with Brian Swimme fit in with the cosmologies of other religions?

TB: The Universe Story is the [creation] story as understood by the scientific world. The scientific world has been able to identify the stages through which the Universe has passed in 4 ½ billion years.
There are several ways in which you can approach the telling of how the Universe came into being. The scientific story is the account that emerges from an examination of the Universe as it communicates to us at the present time. It is a technical story told by measurements and numbers. It tells us something about the mechanics of the Universe, but doesn’t say anything about meaning.

Cosmology means, “understanding the Universe.” The scientific story cannot help us understand the essential things, like meanings or values, but it can tell us the mechanics of how things function. It can help us with medicine. It can help us with communications. It can help us by giving us the means to travel. But it cannot guide us in how to use these instruments.

There is another way of understanding the Universe—the way in which we experience the wonder and the majesty and the awe. Language is our way of understanding the Universe. Science in this sense doesn’t give us a meaningful language. It gives us language as measurement, but not as meaning.

We’ve lost cosmology. We still have religion, but we’ve lost cosmology. When we got Science we lost cosmology, because science began to think that only science gives you the reality of things; everything else tends to be imagination or religious belief, whereas science has this precision and exactness. The sense of the Universe is really what is missing. Science needs to be a function within a cosmology. When science thinks it is a cosmology, science will destroy the planet. When science functions within an acceptable cosmology, it becomes wisdom. At the present time, we either say something is scientific or that it is religious. If we don’t resolve things as science, we say that they are religious.

NT: What is the biggest problem in education?

TB: What I am concerned with in education is establishing an appreciation of Universe as Universe.

Why do you want the children to walk in the woods? Why do you want them to experience the rain and the wind and the dawn and the sunset and the whole amazing flurry of existence. The reason is to awaken in the children a sense of who they are and the context in which their life unfolds. In this way, the integral relatedness of the Universe will be preserved.

The Universe is composed of three aspects: Identity, Diversity and Community. There is no particular value in sameness. Sameness doesn’t add anything. Sameness is a value simply to accommodate what exists, but there’s no enrichment… numerically, sure, but not as a mode of being. Children need to be educated about the three aspects. They need to learn that to be is to be unique. We must foster these ideas of identity, diversity, and community: people are not the same.

One of my main interests of late is law. Every being has rights. People have figured out human rights. Animals and birds and rocks and rivers also have rights. Everything has rights.

What do I mean that everything has rights? A tree needs tree rights. A bird needs bird rights. The rights of a tree are not appropriate for a bird. Everything has its rights by the same source: that which brought them in to being.

To say that something exists is true, but not the same. Persons need to learn how to be different, to develop their own individuality, and talents. Identity requires an inner core of meaning independent of everything else, but the differance needs to be bonded with relatedness. A person needs to be distinct, but also needs to identify with otherness to make community. And that’s education.

Humans need to develop as humans. They are different from other modes of being and need to be identified as different, but then they need to relate to other modes of being in a positive way that’s beneficial for everybody. So the child needs to relate to otherness in a positive way, so it creates community.

It is this sense of the Universe that is lost. We have so exaggerated the value of the human that instead of relating positively, we are relating negatively, in an exploitative way, to otherness.

NT: So would you say this is our greatest challenge?

TB: Our greatest challenge is to fulfill those three roles (Identity, Diversity and Community). We must face this greatest challenge not simply as individuals, but also as a species. Species need to relate to other species, and humans need to relate to the other modes of being, because we are nothing without everything else. If you damage the outer world, you damage the inner world. You can not succeed when you are harmful to the other species. It is a losing game if you are harmful to the surrounding world.

NT: This makes me think about how much indigenous communities have to offer us.

TB: Indigenous communities, at their best, are fulfilled [in these three roles]. Indigenous communities have this intimacy of relationship, and understand the roles that people play. Again, that’s the value of roles, of people being trained to fulfill a certain role. I think it is good that we aren’t overly fixated on specified roles in education, but on the other hand, it is regrettable that a person grows up with no particular skills to their larger life purpose.

NT: So offer them tools.

TB: Offer them tools, but also strengthen their vision, whereby they can fulfill their own inner spontaneities that they inherited with their life program.

NT: I am curious what you think about what is going on today [in 2006] in politics and with the wars in the Middle East?

TB: I think it belongs to an age of ultimate devastation… I believe I put it in my book, "A Dream of the Earth," that what is happening is that we are making the planet Earth uninhabitable by anything. We are just devastating planet Earth… and I don’t know of any other species that has had this effect on other species. There are conditions--physical, biological conditions that disturb the life systems of species--but the idea of something like this happening… I just don’t know.

What I say is that we have gone through three phases of life. The Paleozoic, the Old Life period, which terminated several hundred million years ago, 220 million years ago, when 95 percent species became extinct. The Middle Life Phase, the Mesozoic, which terminated 75 million years ago… that’s when the dinosaurs died out, when some 60 percent of all species became extinct. Then it was the Cenozoic, which was the recent life period. We are terminating the recent life period after some 75 million years, and, I suggest that we are entering an "Ecozoic Era." We are leaving one phase and entering another. We are entering the fourth biological age.
What I am suggesting is that we have to restore some kind of Human-Earth relations. It’s the only remedy I know. That is where the problem is. That is where the remedy is.

Economic Wisdom

2009-08-15T08:36:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

This Sunday, August 16th, would have been Fritz Schumacher's 98th birthday. In honor of this occasion we have included a selection of our favorite quotes from "Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered."

Even thirty-five years after the publication of this text, one can see that Schumacher's seminal collection of essays is filled with pertinent and appropriate wisdom for today's economic climate. You can access our complete list of quotes, sorted by chapter, at: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/about/efs_quotes.htm

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, and Kate Poole
E.F. Schumacher Society Staff
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230, USA
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A Selection of Favorite Quotes from "Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered"

Now that man has acquired the physical means of self-obliteration, the question of peace obviously looms larger than ever before in human history. And how could peace be built without some assurance of permanence with regard to our economic life? (10)

From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study an economics of permanence. (19)

Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it equally their products. (39)

As the world's resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men. (44)

When people ask for education…I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. (63)

What is to take the place of the soul and life-destroying metaphysics inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction… Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices. (79)

It might be said that energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails. (98)

…we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence. (114)

[Scientists] must work on public opinion, so that the politicians, depending on public opinion, will free themselves from the thralldom of economism and attend to the things that really matter. What matters, as I said, is the direction of research, that the direction should be towards non-violence rather than violence; towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day sciences. (116)

In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of life is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of man… (116-7)

Taking stock, we can say that we possess a vast accumulation of new knowledge, splendid scientific techniques to increase it further and immense experience in its application. All this is truth of a kind. This truthful knowledge, as such, does not commit us to a technology of giantism, supersonic speed, violence, and the destruction of human work-enjoyment. The use we have made of our knowledge is only one of its possible uses and, as is now becoming ever more apparent, often an unwise and destructive use. (124)

Although we are in possession of all requisite knowledge, it still requires a systematic, creative effort to bring this technology into active existence and make it generally visible and available. It is my experience that it is rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again. (127)

Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers, while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place in the countryside. (170)

Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organization, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance. (170)

Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not an exact science; it is in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom. (201)

Ideals can rarely be attained in the real world, but they are none-the-less meaningful. They imply that any departure from the ideal has to be specially argued and justified. (208)

The answer is self-evident: greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment. (222)

In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. (248)

There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different order of priorities…Today, however, this message reaches us not solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution, exhaustion. (248-9)

Everywhere people ask: "What can I actually do?" The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind. (252)

Page numbers refer to the following edition: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 25 years later…with commentaries by E.F. Schumacher. Hartley & Marks Publishers, Inc., 1999.

Wall Street Journal - Story on BerkShares

2009-07-31T16:28:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

Wall Street Journal's Andy Jordan posted the following video about BerkShares:

Handmade, Homemade Community

2009-07-30T20:04:00.002-04:00

John McKnight's 1984 E. F. Schumacher Lecture "John Deere and the Bereavement Councilor" is one of the most circulated of a treasure of fine lectures. It describes the effects of the professionalization of social services on the fabric of community life. It calls for the trusting of our capacities as neighbors and friends to give comfort and solace when needed and how those acts of human kindness enrich our multiple lives together.

"John Deere" is one of many lecture pamphlets that may be ordered through the publication section of the E. F. Schumacher Society's website (smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html), or you may read and copy and circulate the full text to others for free.

John McKnight offered to share his July 8, 2009 address to the Coady Institute with E. F. Schumacher Society friends. You will find it copied below.

Registration is now open for the Twenty-Ninth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures on October 17th in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Speakers are Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz. Details are at smallisbeautiful.org/events/29th.html. Please join us.

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
E. F. Schumacher Society

* * * * * * * *

Community Capacities and Community Necessities
By John McKnight

There is a new worldwide movement developing, made up of people with a different vision for their local communities. They know that movements are not organizations, institutions or systems. Movements have no CEO, central office, or plan. Instead, they happen when thousands and thousands of people discover together new possibilities for their lives. They have a calling. They are called. And together they call upon themselves.

In many nations local people have been called to come together to pursue a common calling. It would be a mistake to label that calling ABCD, or Community Building. Those are just names. They are inadequate words for groups of local people who have the courage to discover their own way -- to create a culture made by their own vision. It is a handmade, homemade vision. And, wherever we look, it is a culture that starts the same way:

First, we see what we have -- individually, as neighbors and in this place of ours.

Second, we know that the power of what we have grows from creating new connections and relationships among and between what we have.

Third, we know that these connections happen when we individually or collectively act to make the connections -- they don't just happen by themselves.

We also know that these three steps leading to our way can often be blocked by great corporate, governmental, professional and academic institutions. They often say to us, "You are inadequate, incompetent, problematic, or broken. We will fix you."

It is our calling to ignore these voices that create dependency, for we are called to find our way -- not follow their way.

We are striving to live in a democracy. A democracy is a politics that gives us the freedom to create our vision and the power to make that vision come true. We strive to be citizens -- people with the vision and the power to create our own way, a culture of community capacity, connection and care.

Unfortunately, many leaders and even some neighbors think that the idea of a strong local community is sort of "nice", a good thing if you have the spare time, but not really important, vital or necessary. However, we know strong communities are vital and productive. But, above all they are necessary because of the inherent limits of all institutions.

No matter how hard they try, our very best institutions cannot do many things that only we can do. And what only we can do is vital to a decent, good, democratic life.

People in the new movement know what only we have the power to do as local neighbors and citizens.

First, our neighborhoods are the primary source of our health. How long we live, how often we are sick is determined by our personal behaviors, our social relationships, our physical environment, and our income. As neighbors, we are the people who can change these things. Medical systems and doctors cannot. This is why scientists agree that medical care counts for less than 10% of what will allow us to be healthy. Indeed, most informed medical leaders advocate for community health initiatives because they recognize their systems have reached the limits of their health -- giving power.

Second, whether we are safe and secure in our neighborhood is largely within our domain. Many studies show that there are two major determinants of our local safety. One is how many neighbors we know by name. The second is how often we are present and associated in public -- outside our houses. Police activity is a minor protection compared to these two community actions. This is why most informed police leaders advocate for block watch and community policing. They know their limits and call to our movement.

Third, the future of our earth -- the environment -- is a major local responsibility. The "energy problem" is our local domain because how we transport ourselves, how we heat and light our homes and how much waste we create is a major factor in saving our earth. That is why our movement is a major force in calling us and our neighbors to be citizens of the earth and not just consumers of the natural wealth.

Fourth, in our villages and neighborhoods, we have the power to build a resilient economy -- les dependent on the mega-systems of finance and production that have proven to be so unreliable. Most enterprise begins locally, in garages, basements, and dining rooms. As neighbors, we have the local power to nurture and support these businesses so that they have a viable market. And we have the local power to capture our own savings so that we are not captives of our notorious large financial institutions. We also are the most reliable sources of jobs, for in many nations word-of-mouth among neighbors is still the most important access to employment. The future of our economic security is now clearly a responsibility, possibility and necessity for local people.

Fifth, we are coming to see that a part of our domain is the production of the food we eat. So we are allied with the local food movement, supporting local producers and markets. In this way, we will be doing our part to solve the energy problem caused by transportation of food from continents away. We will be doing our part to solve our economic problems by circulating our dollars locally. And we will be improving our health by eating food free of poisons and petroleum.

Sixth, we are local people who must raise our children. We all say that it takes a village to raise a child. And yet, in modernized societies, this is rarely true. Instead, we pay systems to raise our children -- teachers, counselors, coaches, youth workers, nutritionalists, doctors, McDonalds, and MTC. We are often reduced as families to being responsible for paying others to raise our children and transporting them to their paid child raisers. Our villages have often become useless -- our neighbors responsible for neither their children nor ours. As a result, everywhere we talk about the local "youth problem". There is no "youth problem". There is a village problem of adults who have forgone their responsibility and capacity to join their neighbors in sharing the wealth of children. It is our greatest challenge and our most hopeful possibility.

Seventh, locally we are the site of care. Our institutions can only offer service -- not care. We cannot purchase care. Care is the freely given commitment from the heart of one to another. As neighbors, we care for each other. We care for our children. We care for our elders. And it is this care that is the basic power of a community of citizens. Care cannot be provided, managed or purchased from systems. Our way is made possible by the power to care. Democracy is the way we care for our freedom and responsibility. So it is the new connections and relationships we create locally that build community because in joining each other together, we manifest our care for the children, neighbors and the earth.

Health, safety, economy, environment, food, children and care are the seven responsibilities of our movement. They are the necessities that only we can fulfill. And when we fail, no institution or government can succeed. Because we are the veritable foundation of the society.

Fortunately, at the heart of our movement are three universal and abundant powers. The three basics of our calling are:

The giving of gifts -- the gifts of the people in our neighborhood are boundless. Our movement calls forth those gifts.

Second, the power of association -- In association we join our gifts together and they become amplified, magnified, productive, and celebrated.

Third, hospitality -- We welcome strangers because we value their gifts and need to share our own. Our doors are open. There are no strangers here. Just friends we haven't met.

Ours is the movement of abundance. There is no limit to our gifts, our associations, and our hospitality.

We have a calling. We are the people who know what we need. What we need surrounds us. What we need is each other. And when, we act together, we will find Our Way. The citizen's way. The community way. The democratic way.

We are called to nothing less. And it is not so wild a dream.

* * * * * * * *
John McKnight is Co-Director, of the Asset Based Community Development Institute at Northwestern University. His talk "Community Capacities and Community Necessities" was delivered as part of the opening remarks at the "From Clients to Citizens Forum", at the Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia on July 8, 2009. John McKnight may be reached at jlmabcd@aol.com

Recover the Simple Life

2009-07-19T13:49:00.002-04:00

Better to keep your
Country small
Your people few
Your devices simple
And even those for
Infrequent use.

Let people measure life
By the meaning of death
And not go out of their way
To visit far off places
With nowhere to travel
And little care for the display of great ships
And shining weapons become
Mere relicts of the past.

Let people recover
The simple life
Reckoning by knotted cords
Delighting in a basic meal
Pleased with humble attire
Happy in their homes
Taking pleasure in their
Rustic ways.

So content are they
That nearby towns
So close, the sound
Of dogs and roosters
Forms one chorus --
Folks grown grey with age
May pass away never having
Strayed beyond the village.

Lao Tzu

Time Magazine writes of Local Currencies

2009-07-19T13:31:00.004-04:00

Dear Friends,

Continuing national media attention to BerkShares, the local currency for the Berkshire region, Time Magazine carried a story by Judith Schwartz in its July 12th issue.

Proceeds from the August 22nd service auction in Great Barrington will help support the BerkShares program and draw attention to the many Berkshire businesses offering a variety of service items. Watch for details at www.berkshares.org.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1908421,00.html

Local Currencies
by Judith Schwartz

With local economies flailing, communities across the U.S. are trying to drum up more action on Main Street. "Buy Local" campaigns are one way to go. But many towns--from Ojai, Calif., to Greensboro, N.C.--are considering going a step further and printing money that can only be spent locally.

Issuing an alternative currency is perfectly legal, as long as it is treated as taxable income and consists of paper bills rather than coins. In the U.S., where local currencies were popular during the Depression, the biggest alterna-cash system is in Massachusetts' Berkshire County. Go to one of several banks there, hand a teller $95 and get back $100 worth of
BerkShares, a nice little discount designed to reel in users. BerkShares are printed on special paper (by a local business, naturally). And since the program's inception in 2006, more than $2.5 million in BerkShares have circulated through bakeries, vets' offices and some 400 other businesses that choose to accept the colorful bills, which feature famous former Berkshire residents, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Norman Rockwell.

What's the point of all this pretty, community-printed currency? Money spent at locally owned companies tends to create more business for local suppliers, accountants, etc. The New Economics Foundation (NEF), a London think tank, compared the effects of purchasing produce at a supermarket and at a farmer's market and found that twice the money stayed in a community when folks bought locally. A study of Grand Rapids, Mich., released last fall by consulting firm Civic Economics, concluded that a 10% shift in market share from chain stores to independents would yield 1,600 new jobs and pump $137 million into the area. "Money is like blood," says NEF researcher David Boyle. Local purchases recirculate it, but patronize mega-chains or online retailers, he says, and "it flows out like a wound."

Interest in cash alternatives has skyrocketed in recent months BerkShares.org logged nearly 42,000 hits a day in April) as the recession has encouraged more innovation. For example, a Vermont business association is getting ready to launch a statewide cashless trading network. Ithaca, N.Y., which has the nation's longest-running independent currency, agreed in June to let people start using the 18-year-old bills to buy transit passes.

But how hard is it to manage and maintain these trade boosters? Ed Collom, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine, has studied volunteer-run programs like Ithaca's and found that about 80%
failed, chiefly because of administrative burnout. That's why many newer models, like BerkShares, are now set up as nonprofits, complete with administrative support.

Beyond spurring local trade, alternative currencies build awareness about the effect of consumers' choices. "It has started a conversation: Why local currency? Why buy local?" says Oliver Dudok van Heel, who last fall helped launch the Lewes pound to help a British town become more self-sustainable.

Local currency can generate customer loyalty, but not every business feels as though it can offer a discount like the one built into BerkShares. "They just aren't viable for us," says Beth Parsons, whose family owns a grocery store in Lenox, Mass. But as a consumer, she likes the idea. Parsons recently drove to a nearby town to buy some shoes instead of getting them online. Afterward, she says, she passed a BerkShares sign "at the bank and thought, 'Oh, I should've bought BerkShare bucks to save money on these.'"

Dollars with Good Sense: Do It Yourself Cash

2009-06-23T14:45:00.001-04:00

June 2009, Yes! Magazine

by Judith Schwartz

Visit Judith Schwartz's Blog at http://litadventuresinpod.blogspot.com/

Local currencies value time, build community, and keep business moving even when credit dries up.

Total dependence on one currency is like total dependence on one crop, or, for that matter, a single energy source: there’s always the risk that crop failure or a cutoff in supply will topple the whole system. This is the scenario we’re seeing now—credit has dried up and unemployment is soaring. In small pockets throughout the world, in rural areas and inner cities, and spots as far-flung as Bavaria and Thailand to Massachusetts and Michigan, people are responding by launching their own currencies. Such monetary renegades are not simply thumbing their noses at the dollar (or the yen, or the euro, or the baht…) They are making a carefully considered choice to promote the well-being of their communities.

“From the beginning we had two objectives—to promote the region and promote local charities,” says Christian Gelleri. In 2003, Gelleri and a group of his students at a Waldorf School developed the Chiemgauer currency in the Lake Chiemsee region of Bavaria, Germany. Since then, some 3 million Chiemgauer notes (equivalent in value to the euro) have been placed in circulation. The currency, accepted by 600 businesses in the region, typically is spent and spent again 18 times a year, three times more than the Euro. This means that the currency is encouraging trade and cooperation in the region, which keeps the shops and restaurants and artisans active. Think of this faster rate of use (what economists term “velocity”) as a kind of reinvestment in the community.

Local currencies can help a community counter some of the problems with conventional money. For example, bank-issued currency tends to flow toward the money centers for investment. If you shop at a chain store, the profit gets whisked out of town and into the corporate coffers and then, often, to the speculative market. A local currency stays in the community, encouraging local business and trade, adding value to local products and services, and supporting the local infrastructure.

Reliance on national currency means being at the mercy of the national credit situation. As we’ve recently seen, credit constriction can paralyze local economies. Despite the availability of goods and the need for business, when there’s no money, consumers don’t buy. Stores don’t sell. Start-ups can’t get a toe-hold. An alternative currency gives people another way to buy, sell, lend, and borrow. If the community creates its own currency, local business can go on even if the supply of national currency dries up.

At the most basic level, currency functions as a means of exchange (I give you a dollar and you give me an ice cream cone), a unit of value (a dollar, pound, etc.) and a store of value (you can hold onto a dollar as it maintains its worth). It’s also a source of information about relative value, and about what is needed to keep trade flowing, for instance, by adjusting the supply of money or the exchange rate so that those in other markets can afford your goods.

With local currency, a community can meet currency needs that the national tender isn’t fulfilling. If the idea seems fanciful, here are models up and running—some for many years.

BerkShares

Author and urban activist Jane Jacob’s work was one inspiration for the monetary experiment called BerkShares—considered the best-designed and most successful local currency in the United States, with more than $2.4 million-worth passing from bank to hand to till and around again since fall 2006. The attractive paper bills—one BerkShare is worth $1, but is sold into circulation for 95 cents—are accepted at more than 400 businesses in the Berkshire region of western Massachusetts.

Jacobs pointed out that national currencies cover such broad geographical areas that they provide no local feedback. The way our system is now, regions subsidize each other, and weaknesses are not corrected. Local currencies, however, have clear feedback loops so that trade and production imbalances can be addressed more quickly.

As Susan Witt, executive director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, explains, “Whenever a BerkShare must be returned to the bank [instead of recirculated], that means there is not a source or product available locally to fill that business’s needs.” For example, say a toy store finds itself stuck with the currency. This presents an opportunity for a local craftsperson to provide the store with wooden figures, games, or puzzles to be purchased with BerkShares.

Witt, co-founder of the BerkShares program, took to heart Jacobs’ belief that regional economies need their own currencies to grow and thrive. “Businesses are now trading with other local businesses, so that they’re sourcing their printing, accounting, and food products locally rather than out of the area,” says Witt. “People are getting off Amazon.com and back to the local bookstore and camera store. They like the personal exchanges and the ambiance, so they stay.”

The currency belongs to the community, Witt stresses. And its use has been a valuable exercise in community empowerment. “The use of BerkShares is educating people on the importance of supporting local businesses. With that comes a sense of empowerment—that people can make positive changes in the local economy. The fact of BerkShares raises questions like: Can we issue currency that is not backed by the U.S. dollar? It’s prompting people to think about other ways of thinking about money.”

On a recent visit to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I purchased Berkshares at Lee Bank and spoke to Branch Manager Paula Miller, who expressed enthusiasm about the currency. “Customers love it. We’ve gotten to know other businesses better,” she said, adding that it’s always fun when clients recognize the work of local artists who designed the bills. “It makes it a little more real.”

Time Banking

Time Dollars, now used in settings as varied as small towns, retirement homes, schools, and prisons, respond to conventional currency’s limited capacity to measure worth. “Dollars don’t measure value very well,” says David Boyle, a Fellow at the New Economics Foundation in the United Kingdom. They are good, he says, at measuring “the instantaneous value of Microsoft or currencies on the international exchange. But not the value of, say, a local shop, or of me if I’m very old or young. I might have skills, but not those that are conventionally marketable.”

Time Dollars were developed in 1980 by law professor Edgar Cahn, who lamented that crucial work to improve people’s lives—such as child and elder care—is much needed but little valued. He saw that many who could do these tasks were idle and felt useless. To get people economically engaged, Cahn proposed a system where people earn credit according to the number of hours they work. These Time Dollars can then be “cashed in” for services, like yard work, tutoring, etc.

Not only does Time Banking promote social justice by connecting people, promoting reciprocity, and improving neighborhoods—it has also proved quite versatile: People have exchanged Time Dollars for wool spinning, “rune making,” and having a baby delivered by a midwife. And there’s always an ample supply since no community is going to run out of hours.

TimeBanks USA offers a start-up kit that includes instructions and software for starting a Time Bank anywhere. Rose-Marie Pelletier is working on launching a Time Bank in her town of Pownal, Vermont, an economically diverse rural community of 3,500. At a town meeting, Pelletier looked at the listings of delinquent taxes over recent years and saw that they had increased geometrically. She’s a math teacher, and the numbers spoke to her; she saw the extent to which people were hurting. “People want to help each other—when we know how to do it,” she says. “I see Time Banking as a way of building community, one hour at a time.”

Chiemgauer Regional Currency

Conventional currency excels at serving as a store of value—so much so that use of money for actual trade slows down, leaving some local economies stuck. Coin and paper currencies do not lose value like the products one buys with them can, which makes hoarding and speculation attractive, particularly with the enticement of interest. Argentine economist Silvio Gesell described this phenomenon in 1913 and said that money also should lose value: that it should “rust” or go moldy like other commodities, and suggested a penalty, or demurrage fee, for holding onto it. Nearly 75 years later, then-teenager Christian Gelleri read Gesell’s work and was fascinated. As a high school teacher, he saw the chance to test the model with a local currency. This is how it works: Each quarter, every Chiemgauer bill loses 2 percent of its value. In order to spend the money later, the consumer needs to put a special sticker on the paper currency.

In the beginning, Gelleri got complaints. Then people figured out how to make the model work for them. For instance, one cinema owner said that business went way up at the end of the quarter when people wanted to shed their currency. Increased cash flow at quarter’s end was helpful for accounting, he said. The 2 percent loss, he added, was insignificant compared to the advertising he’d have to buy to secure the same level of customer loyalty he has from accepting the Chiemgauer.

A consumer can exchange euros for Chiemgauers at 50 offices in the region.Three percent of the purchase price goes to a nonprofit the buyer chooses. So far, more than $100,000 euros have gone to charities such as school athletic programs and environmental groups. The “good cause” component reinforces people’s investment in the currency, and in their community.

Maybe we’re asking national currencies to do too many things. As Thomas H. Greco, Jr. points out in his new book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, some functions are inherently contradictory: If money is for trading, you want to use it; if money is to store value, you want to save it. Greco and others such as David Boyle say that people could be better served by separating out the functions of money—and using different currencies, depending on whether you are, say, meeting friends at a local café or saving for college.

Back on Main Street in Great Barrington, Matthew Rubiner, of Rubiner’s Cheesemonger & Grocers, says the issue of local currency has shifted quickly from the theoretical to the here and now. “When BerkShares started we talked about what would happen if the economy falls apart and we were really forced to look local.” The economic downturn, he says, has “brought the question into bolder relief.”

Judith D. Schwartz wrote this article as part of The New Economy, the Summer 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Judith is an author/journalist in Bennington, Vermont now writing about alternative/complementary currencies and localization movements. www.judithdschwartz.com

Buying Local: How It Boosts the Economy

2009-06-23T12:59:00.002-04:00

By Judith D. Schwartz, Time.com

Visit Judith Schwartz's Blog at http://litadventuresinpod.blogspot.com/

June 11, 2009

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1903632,00.html

"Buy Local"—you see the decal in the store window, the sign at the farmer's market, the bright, cheerful logos for Local First Arizona, Think Boise First, Our Milwaukee, and homegrown versions across the states. The apparent message is "let's-support-local-business", a kind of community boosterism. But buying close to home may be more than a feel-good, it's-worth-paying-more-for-local matter. A number of researchers and organizations are taking a closer look at how money flows, and what they're finding shows the profound economic impact of keeping money in town—and how the fate of many communities around the nation and the world increasingly depend on it.

At the most basic level, when you buy local more money stays in the community. The New Economics Foundation, an independent economic think tank based in London, compared what happens when people buy produce at a supermarket vs. a local farmer's market or community supported agriculture (CSA) program and found that twice the money stayed in the community when folks bought locally. "That means those purchases are twice as efficient in terms of keeping the local economy alive," says author and NEF researcher David Boyle. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

Indeed, says Boyle, many local economies are languishing not because too little cash comes in, but as a result of what happens to that money. "Money is like blood. It needs to keep moving around to keep the economy going," he says, noting that when money is spent elsewhere—at big supermarkets, non-locally owned utilities and other services such as on-line retailers—"it flows out, like a wound." By shopping at the corner store instead of the big box, consumers keep their communities from becoming what the NEF calls "ghost towns" (areas devoid of neighborhood shops and services) or "clone towns", where Main Street now looks like every other Main Street with the same fast-food and retail chains.

According to Susan Witt, Executive Director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, "buy local" campaigns serve another function: alerting a community about gaps in the local market. For instance, if consumers keep turning to on-line or big-box stores for a particular product—say, socks—this signals an opportunity for someone local to make and sell socks. This is the way product innovations get made, says Witt. "The local producer adds creative elements that make either the product or materials used more appropriate to the place." For example, an area where sheep are raised might make lambs wool socks and other goods.

The point is not that communities should suddenly seek to be self-sufficient in all ways, but rather, says Boyle, "to shift the balance. Can you produce more locally? Of course you can if the raw materials are there, and the raw materials are often human beings."

And what about that higher cost of local goods? After all, big-box stores got to be big because their prices are low. Susan Witt says that the difference falls away once you consider the increase in local employment as well as the relationships that grow when people buy from people they know. (Plus, one could argue, lower transportation, and therefore environmental, costs, and you know what you're getting—which as we've recently seen with suspected contamination in toys and other products from China, can be a concern.)

There's also the matter of local/regional resilience. Says Witt: "While now we're largely a service-providing nation, we're still just a generation away from being a nation of producers. The question is: what economic framework will help us reclaim those skills and that potential." Say, for example, the exchange rates change or the price of oil rises (and it has started to creep up, if not at last summer's pace) so that foreign-made goods are no longer cheap to import. We could find ourselves doubly stuck because domestic manufacturing is no longer set up to make all these products. While no community functions in isolation, supporting local trade helps "recreate the diversity of small businesses that are flexible and can adjust" to changing needs and market conditions, says Witt. (Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up.")

Another argument for buying local is that it enhances the "velocity" of money, or circulation speed, in the area. The idea is that if currency circulates more quickly, the money passes through more hands—and more people have had the benefit of the money and what it has purchased for them. "If you're buying local and not at a chain or branch store, chances are that store is not making a huge profit," says David Morris, Vice President of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a nonprofit economic research and development organization based in Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. "That means more goes into input costs—supplies and upkeep, printing, advertising, paying employees—which puts that money right back in the community."

One way to really make sure money stays in the community is through creating a local currency. Christian Gelleri, a former Waldorf high school teacher in the Lake Chiem area in Germany, has launched a regional currency, the Chiemgauer, equivalent in value to the Euro. According to Gelleri, the Chiemgauer, accepted at more than 600 businesses in the region and with about $3,000,000 Euros worth in circulation, has three times the velocity of the Euro, circling through the economy an average of 18 times a year as opposed to 6. One reason for the fast turnaround is that the Chiemgauer is designed to encourage spending: there is a 2% demurrage fee for holding onto the bills beyond three months.

As an economic principle, velocity has been considered a constant. According to Gelleri, it was stable in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s but starting in the '80s velocity has decreased as more money has been diverted to the financial sector. This scenario may benefit financial centers, but money tends to drain away from other places. Gelleri says that both the Euro and the U.S. dollar have slowed way down. "In the last several months velocity has declined sharply because there's less GDP and more money," he says. "The money doesn't flow. More money is being printed, but it's not going into circulation."

As the nation limps through the recession, many towns and cities are hurting. "Buy-local" campaigns can help local economies withstand the downturn. Says Boyle: "For communities, this is a hopeful message in a recession because it's not about how much money you've got, but how much you can keep circulating without letting it leak out."

Economic Transition Moment

2009-06-20T16:53:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

Our economy is in transition. A new economic system must respond to the realities of climate change, collapsing financial markets, disparities in wealth, and industries too big to manage sustainably.

Inspired by the writings of Fritz Schumacher, Jane Jacobs, Martin Buber, the Gandhian J.C. Kumarappa and other decentralist economic thinkers, the E. F. Schumacher Society has worked for three decades to develop the theory and application of place-based economic institutions that link people, land, and community.

These small examples of positive citizen action are now helping to inform a vibrant national and international dialogue about creating solutions to our common economic problems. The BerkShares local currency program alone is drawing over 43,000 hits per day to the Schumacher Society’s information rich websites.

A big thanks to our members who have supported the E. F. Schumacher Society in the past. Your new donations are most welcome to enable staff to respond to the opportunities of this transition moment with economic models carefully framed and shaped on the ground. Donations may be made on-line (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/donation_form.html) or by mail to 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230.

Several conferences over the next few months are addressing the economy in transition including the Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures on October 17th in Stockbridge, Massachusetts with Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz and the Economics of Peace conference in October in Sonoma, California. You will find links below and at the events page of the E. F. Schumacher Society’s website.

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
E. F. Schumacher Society
smallisbeautiful.org
berkshares.org
youtube.com/efssociety
efssociety.blogspot.com
twitter.com/efssociety

Board of Directors: Jessica Brackman, Starling Childs, Merrian Fuller, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Daniel Levinson, Constance Packard, Joseph Stanislaw, Nancy Jack Todd, and Charles Turner.
Board of Founders: Ian Baldwin, David Ehrenfeld, Satish Kumar, John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale.
Advisory Board: Tanya Berry, Wendell Berry, Lisa Byers, Olivia Dreier, Hazel Henderson, Wes Jackson, Amory Lovins, John McKnight, David Orr, Michael Shuman, Cathrine Sneed, Lewis Solomon, John Todd, Greg Watson, Barbara Wood, and Arthur Zajonc.

* * * * * * * * * *
June 25th and 26th Washington, DC, Convergence on Zero conference on tools for moving to zero emissions (www.convergenceonzero.org)

September 10th and 11th, Santa Fe, NM, Slow Money National Gathering (www.slowmoneyalliance.org)

October 17th, Stockbridge, MA, E. F. Schumacher Annual Lectures (www.smallisbeautiful.org)

October 18th-23rd, Sonoma, CA, Economics of Peace (www.praxispeace.org)

October 22nd-25th, New Bedford, MA, Bioneers by the Bay (www.marioninstitute.org)

October 24th, 350.org, International Day of Climate Action led by Bill McKibben (www.350.org)

Radical Rethinking of Our Economies

2009-06-11T09:37:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

Stewart Wallis of London’s New Economics Foundation (www.neweconomics.org) says of Peter Victor that he is one of the few economists who is describing the practical steps needed to transition from our current economic system to one that is more sustainable. Wallis says we will need more economists like Victor to shape a new economy.

We are pleased to share Peter Victor recent essay “Bigger isn’t Better.”

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

* * * * * * *

Bigger isn’t Better

By Peter A. Victor
May 2009

There’s nothing like a good crisis to make us rethink old ideas. The depression of the 1930s led to the rejection of the prevailing idea that unemployment would right itself if only people would work for lower wages. Governments could do very little to help. These ideas were overthrown by experience and by the invention of modern macro economics by British economist, John Maynard Keynes. By the end of World War II, most Western governments had adopted Keynesian economic policies designed to ensure that total expenditures were sufficient to maintain full employment.

Keynesian economists soon discovered that full employment today meant a bigger economy tomorrow because some of the investment expenditures required to keep unemployment down: on infrastructure, buildings and equipment, also expanded the productive capacity of the economy. So does an expanding population and labour force. Initially, governments pursued economic growth to meet the more pressing concern of maintaining full employment, but this soon changed. In the 1950s, economic growth became the number one economic policy objective of governments and all others, such as productivity, innovation, free trade, competitiveness, immigration, even education, became a means to that end.

Until a year or so ago all seemed to be going reasonably well. Then came the breakdown in the financial sector followed quickly by a recession that through globalization, spread further and faster than swine flu. Now governments are congratulating themselves for acting together to stimulate spending to get the economies back on course, much as Keynes might have recommended. But times have changed since his day. World population has increased almost three times, world economic output has increased ten times and with this massive expansion of the human presence on earth, we are confronting limits to the availability of cheap energy, to fresh water, and to the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. At the same time we are destroying the habitat of numerous species of flora and fauna and the security of our own food supplies is threatened.

It is time to rethink the old idea that the solution to all our problems lies in the incessant expansion of the economy. Rich countries like Canada should explore alternatives, especially if poorer countries are to benefit from economic growth for a while in a world increasingly constrained by biophysical limits. Some deny or simply ignore these limits and argue that economic growth in rich countries is necessary to stimulate growth in poorer ones. Others say that with ‘green’ growth we can expand economic output as we reduce the demands we place on nature through more efficient production, better designed products, fewer goods and more services, compact urban forms, and organic agriculture. While these measures may well help in a transition they are an unlikely prescription for the long term. What is required is a radical rethinking of our economies and their relation to the natural world.

Although no 21st century Keynes has emerged to prepare the intellectual ground for such a change in thinking, we do have a body of knowledge built up over many decades and now thriving under the name of ‘ecological economics’. Ecological economists understand economies to be subsystems of the earth ecosystem, sustained by a flow of materials and energy from and back to the larger system in which they are embedded. It is understandable that when these flows were small relative to the earth they could be ignored, as they have been in much of mainstream economics. Economists are not alone in treating the economy as a self-contained, free standing system largely independent of its environmental setting. It is a widely held view that environmental protection is just one among multiple competing interests to be traded off against the economy. And anyway, this mainstream perspective teaches that if resource and environmental constraints are encountered, scarcities will be signalled by increases in prices that will induce a variety of beneficial changes in behaviour and technology. Should this system of scarcity, price, response fail then economists can estimate ‘shadow’ prices which can be imposed directly through taxes or used indirectly through policies based on cost-benefit analysis to fix the problem.

To ecological economists, this is an inadequate response to the myriad problems of resource depletion, environmental contamination and habitat destruction confronting humanity in the 21st century. They question the pursuit of endless economic growth and contemplate a very different kind of future.

In my own work, I have examined whether and under what conditions a country like Canada could have full employment, no poverty, much reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and maintain fiscal balance, without relying on economic growth. Using a comparatively simple model of the Canadian economy I have explored scenarios in which these objectives are met. The ingredients for success include a shorter work year to reduce unemployment yet retain the advantages of technological progress, a carbon price to discourage greenhouse gas emissions, and more generous anti-poverty programs.

In such an economy, success would not be judged by the rate of economic growth but by more meaningful measures of personal and community well-being. We would adjust to strict limits on our use of materials, energy, land and waste, guided by prices that provide more accurate information about real rather than contrived scarcities. We would enjoy more services and fewer but more durable and repairable products, and we would value use over status when deciding what to buy. Rampant consumerism would be history, advertising would be more informative and less persuasive, and new technologies would be better screened to avoid problems to be fixed later, if at all. Infrastructure, buildings and equipment would be more efficient in their use of energy and we would think and act more locally and less globally. With more free time at our disposal we would educate ourselves and our children for life not just work.

Is all this simply wishful thinking of a sort that flourishes in troubled times? I think not. The undercurrent of discontent with modern life is rich with ideas for a better future, one that is not dependent on economic growth. For example, in March of this year the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission delivered its report ‘Prosperity without Growth?’ to the British Government endorsing and amplifying many of the ideas expressed here. The Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy based in the USA has obtained over 3000 signatures on its position statement designed to help change the goal of the economy from growth to sustainability. At the local level, Transition Towns has spread in less than four years from the UK to many countries including Canada, to raise awareness of sustainable living and to build local resilience in response to the combined threats of peak oil and climate change. Even mainstream economists are moving with the tide. Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow said last year: “It is possible that the US and Europe will find that…either continued growth will be too destructive to the environment and they are too dependent on scarce natural resources, or that they would rather use increasing productivity in the form of leisure.” Let’s add Canada to the list and go from there.

Economist Peter A. Victor is Professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of Managing without Growth. Slower by Design, not Disaster, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008. “Bigger isn’t Better” first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen (www.ottawacitizen.com).

Towns print money to help local merchants

2009-05-30T14:58:00.000-04:00

By Matthew Cardinale, Inter Press Services

http://www.berkshares.org/press/09May30.htm

Jun 19, 2009

ATLANTA, (IPS/GIN) - In the face of an economic system in full crisis mode, a handful of communities across the U.S. and the globe have begun experimenting with alternative forms of local currency as a pathway to sustainability.
Local currencies existing today in the U.S. include the Humboldt Community Currency in Eureka, California; Berkshares in the Massachusetts Berkshire region; Bay Bucks in Traverse City, Michigan; Ithaca Hours in Ithaca, New York; Cascadia Hours, Corvalis Hours, and RiverHours in Oregon; Equal Dollars in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Madison Hours in Madison, Wisconsin, according to the E. F. Schumacher Society, which runs Berkshares.

These currencies all represent an effort to respond to the pressures of globalization, like the advent of massive chain stores competing with local merchants.
People in Great Barrington, Mass., can go to one of five participating local banks to trade 95 cents for one Berkshare, at a five percent discount to the dollar. They can then spend Berkshares at over 400 participating local stores as a direct replacement for dollars, thus saving 5 cents with every Berkshare they spend.
Even though store owners lose the 5 cents whenever they trade Berkshares back for dollars at a bank—which they have to do to buy something that can't be produced locally—they are still typically happy with the loyal, local customers they keep instead of losing them to chains like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Barnes & Noble.
“Local currencies are part of what educate people about the importance of their small, independent businesses,” Susan Witt, founder of Berkshares, told IPS. “It's bringing people off the internet back to Main Street, for the face-to-face exchanges. Once they're there, they like it.”
A local currency can help create a more sustainable economy in several ways, leaders in the local currency movement say.
First, since using a community currency forces people to buy locally, fewer goods have to be imported.
“By having economic transactions so focused locally, that's definitely, for one thing, reducing use of fossil fuel. If it's a local farmer's market ... food (is) produced 30 miles away instead of 3,000 miles away,” said Steve Burke, executive director of Ithaca Hours.
Trade theorists might object that it is less efficient, or less productive, for diverse goods to be produced in many communities than it is for each community to specialize in producing one product for export, even factoring in transportation costs.
A second way in which community currencies support environmental sustainability is that they can lead to reduced consumption, Ms. Witt argued. She believes people purchase more and more “stuff,” not because they need it, but to fill a void that community currency can satisfy.
“You know the full story about the goods you purchase. You know how they were produced. You know the carpenter who made the table. You know who her children are. You realize buying the table is supporting that family,” Ms. Witt said.
The products bought with local currency “link you to your neighborhood, your place, the people of your place. They're not just stuff ... they enrich your life the way that stuff would not. So you need less.”
A third way in which community currency can lead to sustainable economy is communities can print the currency they need to issue interest-free, or non-profit loans. Allowing credit to be issued interest-free eliminates the need to service growing debts. High-interest debt owed by individuals, businesses, and governments to private banks is one of the main factors pushing economies to constantly grow at an exponential rate. As these entities struggle to service the interest on their debts with a total money supply that was mostly created through issuance of credit, more and more new debt must be created in order for the system to be stable.
Thus, because high-interest debt pushes the economy to constantly grow, it also pushes industrialization into new markets, new products, and new technologies, which often lead to deforestation, air pollution, and the like.
By communities printing and issuing their own currency, in part through productive non-profit loans, the economy can function without the constant growth that is imperiling the environment.
There are at least two different models for how to organize and operate a local currency that local communities are using. One is used by Berkshares; the other was pioneered by the Ithaca Hour.
Founded in 1991, the Ithaca Hour is the oldest local currency to exist in the U.S. since local currencies disappeared in the 1900s. Numerous local currencies have since based their model on the Ithaca Hour.
Businesses become members in Ithaca Hours by purchasing a listing in the Ithaca Hours directory, and they receive two “hours” every year as part of their membership fee. Employees at these businesses then can accept hours instead of dollars for some of their wages. People can accept hours instead of dollars for services, like mowing a lawn, that they provide.
This, in addition to low-cost loans, is the primary way Ithaca Hours enter Ithaca's economy.
“There's a pretty fundamental difference between our model and the Berkshares model,” Mr. Burke said. “They sell them. With ours, you can't buy them; you can only earn them.”
They are called hours “to make a statement,” Mr. Burke said. The founders “wanted to emphasize the relationship between time and money.”
(This story is part of a series on sustainable development by IPS and the International Federation of Environmental Journalists for Communicators for Sustainable Development. See more at www.complusalliance.org.)

Civic Unreasonableness

2009-05-30T08:38:00.001-04:00

Dear Friends,

In its September/October 2008 article about James Gustave Speth, Orion Magazine (www.orionmagazine.org) comments, "If America can be said to have a distinguished elder statesman of environmental policy, Speth is it." His career includes leadership of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Yale School of Forestry.

It is this very life-long commitment to the environment that has turned Gus Speth into an eloquent spokesperson for a "new economy." In the essay below he argues for the urgent transformation of old and failing economic systems if we hope to achieve a sustainable and equitable future.

We are pleased to share the essay with you.

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
E. F. Schumacher Society

* * * * * * * * * *
PREAMBLE: NEW ECONOMY, SUSTAINING ECONOMY
by James Gustave Speth
May 28, 2009

The economic crisis has stimulated much soul searching and, more generally, searching for something better. Along with the environmental crisis, it has exposed the severe shortcomings of business as usual and the current order.

A great imperative Americans now face is to build a new economy – a sustaining economy. Sustaining people, communities and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for by-products of market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation.

We are told to seek a strong economy. We know now that we should seek first a strong society, a strong nature, and a strong democracy. Today's economy offers little help in these regards. We must move beyond it. We need to reinvent the economy, not merely restore it.

Political action must embrace a profound commitment to social justice and a powerful assault on economic privilege. It must embrace a sustained challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growthmania and a redefinition of what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals, and a commitment to deep change in both the functioning and the reach of the market.

Economic growth may be the world's secular religion, but for much of the of the world it is a god that is failing – underperforming for most of the world's people and, for those of us in affluent societies, creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, a sense of place and continuity, even mental health. It fuels a ruthless search for energy and other resources, and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs.

Before it is too late, America should begin to move to post-growth society where working life, the natural environment, our communities, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth; where the illusory promises of ever-more growth no longer provide an excuse for neglecting to deal generously with compelling social needs; and where a truly democratic politics is no longer hostage to the primacy of powerful corporate interests.

Needed Policy Initiatives

America's open-ended commitment to aggregate economic growth is consuming environmental and social capital, both now severely diminished. At the same time, it is abundantly clear that American society and many others do need growth along many dimensions that increase human welfare, now and in the future: growth in good jobs and in the incomes of the poor; growth in availability of health care and the efficiency of its delivery; growth in education and training; growth in security against the risks of illness, job displacement, old age and disability; growth in investment in public infrastructure for urban and inter-urban transport, water, waste management and environmental amenity; growth in the deployment of climate-friendly and other green technologies, as rapidly as possible; growth in the replacement of America's obsolete energy system; growth in the restoration of both ecosystems and local communities; growth in non-military government spending at the expense of military; and growth in international assistance for sustainable, people-centered development for the half of humanity that live in poverty, to mention some prominent needs. Even in a post-growth society many things need to grow.

We need targeted policies that directly address these objectives and America's compelling social needs – policies, for example, that strengthen families and communities and address the breakdown of social connectedness; that guarantee good, well-paying jobs (including green-collar ones); that provide for universal healthcare and alleviate the devastating effects of mental illness; that provide a good education for all; and that ensure care and companionship for the chronically ill and incapacitated.

Of particular importance are government policies that will temper growth while improving social and environmental well-being, such as: shorter workweeks and longer vacations; greater labor protections, job security and benefits; restrictions on advertising; a new design for the twenty-first-century corporation, one that embraces rechartering and stakeholder primacy rather than shareholder primacy; strong social and environmental provisions in trade agreements; rigorous environmental, health and consumer protection, including full incorporation of environmental and social costs in prices; greater economic and social equality, with genuinely progressive taxation of the rich and greater income support for the poor; heavy spending on public services; and initiatives to address population growth at home and abroad.

If the market is going to work for the betterment of society, environmental and social costs should be incorporated into prices. Honest prices will ensure that people take into account the environmental and social impacts of their purchases, whether they're environmentally conscious or just minding their pocketbooks. High prices are a problem not because they are high but because people don't have the money to pay them and alternatives (e.g., truly fuel-efficient vehicles) are not readily available. Honest prices would be higher prices for many things, but that does not mean Exxon should pocket the difference or that equity issues should remain unaddressed.

Responsibly high energy prices, driven for example by a declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions, will help protect the earth's climate, increase demand for efficient vehicles and public transportation, spur new renewable energy industries, decrease the supply vulnerabilities and international entanglements of imported oil, strengthen local communities and encourage localization rather than globalization. But honest energy prices must be accompanied by measures that make them affordable by those on whom they would otherwise impose a serious hardship.

Conventional wisdom on the clash of economy and environment is that we can have it both ways, thanks to new technology. We do indeed need a revolution in the technologies of energy, transportation, construction, agriculture and more. This ecological modernization can be driven by quantitative restrictions that ensure extractions from the environment do not exceed regenerative capacities and discharges to the environment do not exceed assimilative capacities. But the rate of technological change required to deal with environmental challenges in the face of rapid economic growth is extremely high and rarely achieved. If pollution from an industrial facility is cut in half but growth spawns another similar plant, there is no net gain. Housing, appliances and transportation can become more energy-efficient, but the improvements will be overwhelmed if there are more cars, larger houses and new appliances--and there are. There's a limit to how fast and far new technology can take us; technological change alone is not enough.

Economic Crisis and Beyond

Americans are struggling with the combined impacts of crumbling financial assets, tighter credit and layoffs. These problems are associated with a slowdown in GDP growth, but the failure of growth is not truly their cause, and they will not necessarily be cured by more growth. We have had jobless growth before. As is now appreciated, the current economic crisis is the result of government failing to intervene appropriately in the marketplace--in financial markets, in housing markets, in labor markets and elsewhere. We are today on the receiving end of misguided policies, including massive deregulation, that have led to deep structural maladies. Major corrections are needed.

The economic crisis should also teach us to live more simply and focus more locally. It is time to move beyond our consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles. There has been too little focus on consumption and the mounting environmental and social costs of American "affluenza," extravagance and wastefulness. Being less focused on getting and spending (initially, in part, because there will be less to spend) can help society rediscover that the truly important things in life are not at the mall nor, indeed, for sale anywhere.

Psychological studies show that materialism is toxic to happiness and that more income and more possessions do not lead to a lasting sense of well-being or satisfaction with life. What makes people happy are warm personal relationships and giving rather than getting, things that are possible at a human scale. The good news is that more and more people sense that there's a great misdirection of life's energy. In a survey 83 percent of Americans say society is not focused on the right priorities, 81 percent say America is too focused on shopping and spending, 88 percent say American society is too materialistic, 84 percent want to spend more time with family and friends. These numbers, even if half right, suggest there's a powerful base on which to build. More and more people are saying: Confront consumption. Practice sufficiency. Create social environments where overconsumption is viewed as silly, wasteful, ostentatious. Create commercial-free zones. Buy local. Eat slow food. Downshift. Public policy should support these directions, and it should devise new measures to track improvements in social welfare, a purpose for which GDP is a miserable failure.

Building a Unified Progressive Movement

What circumstances might make deep change plausible? A mounting sense of imminent crisis, occurring at a time of wise leadership, accompanied by the articulation of a new American narrative or story and the appearance across the landscape of new and appropriate models, all these would help. Most of all, we need a new politics and new social movement powerful enough to drive change.

We live and work in a system of political economy that cares profoundly about profits and growth. It cares about society and the natural world in which it operates mainly to the extent it is required to do so. It is up to us as citizens to inject values of fairness, solidarity and sustainability into this system, and government is the primary vehicle we have for accomplishing this. But mainly we fail because our politics are too enfeebled and government is more and more in the hands of powerful corporations and great wealth. Our best hope for real change is a fusion of those concerned about environment, social justice, and political democracy into one progressive force. We are all communities of shared fate. We will rise or fall together.
Environmentalists and social progressives must join to address the crisis of inequality unraveling our social fabric and undermining democracy. It is a crisis of soaring executive pay, huge incomes and increasingly concentrated wealth for a small minority while poverty approaches a thirty-year high, wages stagnate despite rising productivity, social mobility and opportunity decline, the number of people without health insurance soars, job insecurity increases, safety nets shrink and Americans have the longest working day of all the rich countries.

Progressives of all stripes must also join in seeking to reform politics and strengthen democracy. America's gaping social and economic inequality poses a grave threat to democracy. We have seen the emergence of a vicious circle: income disparities shift political access and influence to wealthy constituencies and large businesses, which further imperils the potential of the democratic process to act to correct the economic disparities. Corporations have been the principal economic actors for a long time; now they are the principal political actors as well. Neither environment nor society fares well under corporatocracy. We need to embrace public financing of elections, lobbying regulation, nonpartisan Congressional redistricting and other reforms as a core of our agenda.

For the most part, we have worked within our current system of political economy, but working within the system will in the end not succeed when what is needed is transformative change in the system itself. George Bernard Shaw famously said that all progress depends on not being reasonable. It's time for a large amount of civic unreasonableness.

* * * * * * * * * *
James Gustave Speth is author of "The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability" (Yale Press, 2009 paperback edition) available through your local independent bookseller.

WIR/Cooperative Credit and Exchange

2009-05-26T03:09:00.001-04:00

Erick B. Hansch was a colleague of Robert Swann and Ralph Borsodi at the International Independence Institute. One of the projects of the Institute was the launch of a currency called "The Constant" in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1972. Borsodi, an economist, was in his 90's at the time and decided to issue the currency as a one year experiment to prove it could be done, rather than just writing another book on the subject.

The Constants were issued by a bank in Exeter and were valued according to a weighted basket of commodities. The intent was to demonstrate how to issue a currency that would not deflate but which instead held "constant" buying potential.

The Institute was also the vehicle for launching the community land trust movement in this country. Erick Hansch was one of the authors with Bob Swann and Ted Webster of "The Community Land Trust: a Guide to a New System of Land Tenure in America" published in 1972, the complete text of which is available online:

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/clts/clt_book.html

In 1974 the Institute hosted E. F. Schumacher's historic trip to this country. Swann and Schumacher formed a close alliance as a result.

Erick Hansch, Ralph Borsodi, and Fritz Schumacher all died within a month of each other in 1977. Bob Swann continued working with the ideas of his friends and mentors and in 1980 founded the E. F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts which has been a leader in the study and application of local currencies and community land trusts. The Schumacher Society's current work with BerkShares local currency (http://www.berkshares.org) has grown from this long tradition of economic scholarship and innovative practice.

Erick Hansch had a gift for languages. In addition to English he spoke Chinese, German, and Spanish. In anticipation of the launch of the Constant, he traveled to Basel, Switzerland to study the WIR currency program (http://www.wir.ch) that has been in circulation in parallel to the Swiss Franc since the 1930s. His unfinished typed report is in the archives of the E. F. Schumacher Library. Thanks to the good work of volunteers, it has been entered into electronic format and is available in full at the Society's website:

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/local_currencies/wir.hansch.html

Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
E. F. Schumacher Society

BerkShares on NBC Nightly News

2009-04-28T05:10:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

BerkShares local currency was featured on NBC Nightly News on April 26th.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Best wishes,
E. F. Schumacher Society staff

Democratizing Finance

2009-04-14T09:39:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

The incomparable Hazel Henderson has been campaigning and strategizing for a green economy for the past forty years in her writings and talks, and at board and government tables. Her pioneering work has led to many of the programs we now take for granted in the socially and ecologically responsible investment field. She has worked with both citizen groups and heads of states around the world. She has created a language for evaluating the ethical basis of financial programs. Her name is a trademark.

As a new generation puts its imagination to the task of relocalizing economies community by community, it is important to remember the handful of shoulders on which this work stands. Hazel Henderson's shoulders are broad, her intellect fast paced, her contributions prolific.

Following is her recent "Democratizing Finance" detailing how "local leadership is rising, offering many creative alternatives for communities to nurture healthier homegrown economies . . ." It is distributed by InterPress Service and used with the kind permission of Ms. Henderson.

You will find more of her writings at www.ethicalmarkets.com and www.ethicalmarkets.tv Enjoy rediscovering Hazel Henderson, as we have!

Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, and Stefan Apse
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

******************************************************
Democratizing Finance
By Hazel Henderson
April 2009  

© InterPress Service  and Hazel Henderson,  www.hazelhenderson.com

The financial meltdown generated by Wall Street and the “too big to fail” culture of global money-center banks and financiers is generating local initiatives and demands to decentralize and democratize finance.  

Meanwhile, at the global level, the G-20 countries’ demands to democratize the voting structures of the IMF and the World Bank are essential to reflect the changing balance of economic power. The G-7 and G-8 group of countries are no longer relevant now that the G-20 group (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, and also the European Union) has taken center stage.

While national safety-nets are unraveling due to budget cuts, local leadership is rising, offering many creative alternatives for communities to nurture healthier homegrown economies:

• Local barter-clubs, like Freecycle.com, Craigslist and LETS, and scrip currencies are proliferating – as they always do when central bankers and the International Monetary Fund fail or apply the wrong remedies and make matters worse. Some of the most successful complementary currencies are Switzerland’s WIR and in the USA, BerkShares, with equivalent to $2 million issued in the first two years and accepted by banks and businesses in Massachusetts. Similar complementary currencies are matching needs and resources and clearing local markets in Britain, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and other countries.

• People-to-people lending and microfinance projects are booming in many countries. Women’s World Banking, Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, now emulated in many countries, FINCA and ACCION in Latin America, as well as the newer online versions, including Microplace, Kiva, as well as lenders Prosper.com in the USA and Zopa.com in Britain. Credit unions, operated in Europe and North America for a century, are becoming more proactive. They are filling new local needs, reaching out to poorer people and adding microfinance and lending to small businesses.

• Associations of small local banks and businesses are wielding more political clout, as are credit unions. In the USA, they are demanding equal treatment in the government’s TARP, TALF, and other bailout funds currently showered on the big banks whose reckless lending triggered the financial mess. Venture capital and venture philanthropy firms, including the Rudolf Steiner Foundation, Acumen and the foundations of Ebay founders Pierre Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll, are investing in social enterprises which meet social needs while making modest profits. Such social capital is now creating a new hybrid sector in many economies.

• The Business Alliance for Local Living Economics (BALLE) is such a network in North America, as well as the New Voice of Business, Green America, the Social Enterprise Alliance, the Fourth Sector Network and the Business-NGO Working Group. Entrex.net focuses on helping small businesses with their Private Company Index (PCI) which outperforms most stock indexes. Britain’s New Economics Foundation (NEF) has been generating both local initiatives, such as the Transition Towns movement, as well as its Green New Deal and alternative indicators to correct GDP, measuring wellbeing and ecological sustainability. NEF’s proposal to save Britain’s 11,500 postal offices by adding local banking functions is backed by trade unions, small businesses, public interest groups and pensioners.

• Time banking, a brainchild of Edgar Cahn in the USA (see www.ethicalmarkets.tv), is now helping local people connect and share services in Japan, Europe and other countries. Neighbors contact each other via a local “time banker” to provide meals and help for shut-ins, babysit each other’s children, watch over property, mow lawns and share appliances. Car-sharing has now spawned many new companies such as Zip Car in the USA and others in Canada and Europe where people can make ride arrangements rapidly on Blackberrys and laptops.

• China is host to many such local initiatives, linking small businesses on networks, including Baidu.com, Alibaba.com, as well as Qifang.com which provides affordable loans to China’s 25 million students. Circle Pleasure, a private company selling prepaid consumer cards, has formed a joint venture with Qifang for people-to-people banking, the first private company to receive a banking license from China’s Central Bank. In many countries in Africa, cell phone banking has taken off. Cell phones are the basis for the “phone ladies” in Indian and Bangladeshi villages, who rent out use of their cell phones to other villages. Rural farmers and fishers can consult prices being offered in nearby towns and markets on their cell phones to make sure they take their goods to the best places to sell them.

How far can people-to-people finance go in bypassing big, greedy banks and ethically challenged Wall Street financiers and their political allies? A long way, thanks to all the communications tools now widely available. Using these new information-sharing tools is helping people realize again what money is: just one form of information. Today it is possible to trade using pure information exchange. For example, in rural areas in Florida, radio stations have call-in programs where farmers can say “I have spare time on my tractor to exchange for fertilizer or pepper, melon, eggplant seeds.” The farmer gives her phone number and the trades are exchanged off-line. Similarly, the growth of farmers’ markets and contract-supported agriculture allows local consumers to buy fresh produce directly from nearby farms.

All these local solutions and people-to-people safety-nets raise the question “How did we allow big banks and centralized finance to grow so large that they become predators on the real living economies which produce the world’s real wealth”? Local people around the world are realizing that they can simply bypass big banks, stock exchanges and create all these services locally. The old, bloated financial sectors must downsize, cut their bonuses and take the losses from their reckless bets in their global casino. A truly efficient financial services sector should be less than 10% of a country’s GDP. Those in Britain and the USA grew to 25% of GDP, metastasizing with their “financial engineers” preying on the real economy. Now students are looking for jobs as real engineers, teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs.

In a very real sense, we humans don’t have a financial crisis but a crisis of perception. We are beginning to see our world differently than mainstream media portrays. We see our choices with new eyes. We know that money is not real wealth. We learn as we watch central bankers printing money on TV. Real wealth is generated by productive people using the Earth’s resources wisely. Money is a great invention. When it is managed properly, locally, nationally, globally or electronically, it is a useful medium of exchange. Hoarding money is no longer a reliable store of value. We are all rediscovering the many stores of value in our own communities. We find wealth beyond money. We can change our values for the new times we live in and restore the love economies to their central role in our lives.

******************************************************
Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006), is president of Ethical Markets Media, an independent social enterprise covering local economies, new currencies and the growing green sectors (www.ethicalmarkets.com). She co-created the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, updated regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com. She lives with her husband in St. Augustine, Florida.

Value Added Economy

2009-03-01T12:19:00.001-05:00

Dear Friends,

Users of BerkShares have circulated over two million of the local currency in the Berkshire economy since launch in September of 2006. The success of this initial stage of the program has enabled a strategic adjustment to the exchange rate between BerkShares and U.S. dollars. Now, 100 BerkShares can be purchased for 95 federal dollars (100B$ = $95).

This modification of the exchange rate will facilitate expanded use of BerkShares by the business community, providing more opportunities for citizens and businesses to recirculate the scrip before it is returned to a participating bank. The change is one of a series of planned enhancements, including extending the service area of the local currency to all of Berkshire County, BerkShares checking accounts, and BerkShares loans to businesses producing goods and services now imported into the region.

BerkShares has recently been featured in "Time," "Newsweek," and other national and international news media. Rodrique Ngowi's Associated Press story (see below) was reprinted in over 150 newspapers around the country and drew 56,000 hits to the BerkShares website in one day. The site averages 12,000 hits per day.

Increasingly, people are looking to BerkShares as a model citizen-initiated program for shaping a stable, localized, value-added economy as an alternative to a slumping national economy.

Berkshire merchants, restaurateurs, farmers, carpenters, auto mechanics, lawyers, service providers, and non-profit administrators are learning how best to use a local currency in their businesses. Berkshire bankers are streamlining their process to integrate BerkShares exchanges seamlessly with other banking functions. Berkshire residents are discovering new economic habits that expand their use of BerkShares and help them learn what their money is doing tonight. BerkShares staff and board are developing new ways to support BerkShares businesses. There is no blueprint for issuing such a robust local currency in the twenty-first century. Together our Berkshire community is writing the handbook.

All of this exploration and development is being conducted under intense media scrutiny, at a whirlwind pace, amid knocks on the door from other regions asking how it is done. The program carries sufficient depth in its conception, sufficient integrity in its application, sufficient vision for its future, to earn and meet such attention. We welcome the rapid unfolding and public visibility, simultaneously challenging and fitting. However to shape BerkShares into a local currency program that shines as a beacon of possibility for other communities, we are responsible for building organizational capacity equal to this opportunity. We estimate it will take an additional three years to complete the research and development phase of BerkShares and we must rely on grant support to fund these costs.

Donations to the E. F. Schumacher Society earmarked for BerkShares research and development can be made online at:

http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/donation_form.html

Thank you for your support,

Susan Witt, Executive Director
E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org
www.berkshares.org

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January 15, 2009

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iheOyI-EE_UMYu1FiKnpEbqzBcPAD95NOVE82

By RODRIQUE NGOWI
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. (AP)

Diana Felber brought her groceries to the checkout and counted out her cash — purple, blue and green bills that are good only at businesses in western Massachusetts.

Known as "BerkShares," the colorful currency is printed by a nonprofit group to encourage people to spend close to home in the state's Berkshire region.

Customers who use the money also get a built-in 10 percent discount, since they can get 100 BerkShares for just $90 at local banks.

"I like all the ideas about local," said Felber, a 64-year-old artist shopping at the Berkshire Co-op Market. "I also like that it's a discount. Who wouldn't like that?"
The BerkShares program is one of the most successful of its kind in the country, and it is attracting attention as other communities look for ways to insulate their economies from the deepening financial crisis.
Susan Witt, co-founder of the nonprofit Berkshire Inc., said her group receives about three calls a day from other people interested in creating local currencies.

So far, more than $2 million in BerkShares have circulated through 350 businesses since the bills were first printed two years ago. BerkShares look similar to real money for good reason: They are printed on specialty paper from Crane & Co., a local company that has been the sole provider of paper for U.S. currency since 1879.

The bills come in denominations of 5, 10, 20 and 50 and feature portraits of well-known local figures: a Mohican Indian, the original inhabitants of the area; civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois, who was born in Great Barrington; community leader Robyn Van En, who died in 1997; Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick; and painter Norman Rockwell, who lived in Stockbridge.

National retail chains in southern Berkshire County have not signed up to accept the currency, and BerkShares cannot be traded online with out-of-state merchants, Witt said.

"I'd much rather take BerkShares than you giving me your credit card," said Steffen Root, co-owner of Berkshire Bike & Board, citing card processing fees. "I think that we can keep our money local, it's a good thing — especially with our economy where it's going."

Interest in local currencies often spikes during a recession as communities scramble to promote their businesses and curb unemployment, said Lewis D. Solomon, professor at the George Washington University Law School and author of "Rethinking our Centralized Monetary System: The Case for a System of Local Currencies."

The U.S. Constitution prohibits states from coining their own currency, but it is silent on local paper money. The courts have allowed private groups to print complementary currency, provided it does not compete with federal money and does not circulate beyond a limited area.

For accounting purposes, the Internal Revenue Service requires that income received in BerkShares and other local currencies be declared in U.S. dollars.

The Massachusetts program is one of several local currency systems, including those in New York, California, Kansas, Michigan, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One of the oldest is Ithaca Hours, which went into circulation in 1991 in Ithaca, N.Y.

"If you have local networks, you can trade within them," said Paul Glover, founder of the Ithaca program. Whether they are business, religious, neighborhood or professional groups, "there is a capability within those to trade without strict dependence on dollars."

Starting a local currency isn't cheap.

In the Berkshires, Witt's group spent $250,000 in grant money to pay for research and development and to create the alternative financial system. The group has made its research available for free online, hoping to help reduce costs for other communities seeking to set up a similar program, she said.

The bills are traded an average of four times before finding their way back to the banks, Witt said.

Not everyone is a fan of the local currency. Machal Snyder, a bookkeeper for several businesses, said she stopped going to the bank to get BerkShares. "I just started using my debit card for everything," she said. "I hate to admit it, but I think that I have become a bit more about convenience."

Those concerns may be resolved by an expansion program that includes branching into debit cards and offering loans to business startups, Witt said.

Shanace Sullivan said BerkShares help her support relatives tied to the local economy.

"A lot of my friends and family are people who work in the local trade, so it's important for me that business stays in the area. And any business that I have, I can try to keep it here," she said.

On the Net: BerkShares: http://www.berkshares.org
Ithaca Hours: http://www.ithacahours.org/

Economic Life/Grace of Innovating

2009-01-28T19:20:00.002-05:00

“Economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands by grace of import-replacement.”
--from "Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life" by Jane Jacobs

In October the E. F. Schumacher Society bought a house for staff and interns. It was not a simple transaction, rather a complex and marvelous adventure weaving our work lives together with the story of a small manufacturing company: the innovation of its founding, the history of its employees, its significance in the regional community, the role of a regional equity fund in financing its growth, and the power of the vision of the fund's founder. It was (though we did not know it at first) a story about ingredients for building strong regional economies and the grace of that process.

We are pleased to share the story in the narrative below.

Photos are at:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/PAS/photos.html

Best wishes,
Susan Witt
E. F. Schumacher Society

Economic Life/Grace of Innovating

For the past four years the Schumacher Society has rented a small house for staff and interns that we call Guilder House, located a short walk through the orchard from the Schumacher Library and office building. Because housing prices have been so high in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, it has been essential to provide free and/or affordable housing in order to enable young staff and interns to work with us. With its four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, Guilder House has served that purpose.

In June the owner of the house offered to sell it to us, donating one third of its current appraised value as a gift to the Society. The offer was irresistible; nevertheless, repair work was necessary to responsibly care for the building. How would we get it all done?

A week after signing the contract to purchase Guilder House, we had a call from Dan Levinson, the founder and managing partner of Main Street Resources (www.mainstreetresources.com), a private equity firm in Westport, Connecticut, that provides investment capital and resources to companies with great potential and great people. Main Street had recently invested in Protective Armored Systems (www.pasarmored.com), a small manufacturing firm in the Berkshires making bullet-proof glass for multiple applications. Dan told us that one of the autoclaves used to heat and pressurize the glass had exploded. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but a building was rendered useless, and production would be shut down for over a month. Like other good corporate citizens before it, PAS wanted to keep its workers employed during the rebuilding. The company was reaching out to community groups for appropriate volunteer projects. This was a welcome opportunity for us.

For four weeks we watched as a crew of up to twelve per day worked to transform Guilder House--clearing brush and trees to open the site to more light, sealing cement walls against moisture, staining the exterior to protect the wood, replacing a rotting deck, removing moldy carpeting and sanding the newly exposed floors, insulating walls for heat efficiency, tiling, painting, cleaning. What was merely housing is now a warm, secure, lovely home, thanks to the team from Protective Armored Systems (PAS).

Schumacher staff provided coffee, homemade muffins, home-cooked hot lunches served family style on a row of picnic tables, a refrigerator full of soft drinks, a priority list of projects, and plenty of ahs and heart-felt thanks. The PAS crew provided multiple skills, hard work, good will, and stories about what it takes to run a small manufacturing firm. Main Street Resources provided the inspiration, connection, and funding for building materials. Over lunches and coffee breaks we learned a great deal about the history of industrial development in the region.

The Berkshire region was once home to a diversity of local manufacturing firms. Water from the Housatonic River powered wool, paper, and log mills. We grew much of the food we ate and processed much of the wood used in building our homes. Wood stoves provided a significant quantity of heat from October through April. There was a spirit of self-sufficiency coupled with a rich cultural tradition.

However like many developed regions, the Berkshires have since “outsourced” that manufacturing. Remnants of the infrastructure remain, such as abandoned factories clustered along the river, but we are losing the memory of manufacturing skills and its ethos. The Berkshire economy is changing to a service economy.

PAS is unique in the region, manufacturing its signature product for export and providing jobs for technically skilled employees. What are the characteristics that grew this firm, and how can we encourage additional manufacturing appropriate in scale and nature to the region?

PAS is a small company with only forty employees. Its founder, Phil Martino, has deep roots in the Berkshire community. He basically built the business from scratch, inventing the manufacturing process for the bullet-proof glass, designing the equipment, and gaining the confidence of customers. He worked alongside his employees, training them in cutting the glass to specification, grinding the edges smooth, keeping the work space meticulously clean, and packing in such a way that no damage occurred during shipping.

When asked about the philosophy of work behind his success, Phil Martino modestly claims that it is nothing special--essentially that of the Shakers, who believe that God is met in your work, so you perform each task with the love and care appropriate for that meeting. Further, you treat co-workers as you would be treated by them. That simple but profound work ethic permeates the business.

Several of the PAS workers came from the closing paper mills (some of them third generation in the mills) or were laid off when General Electric closed its nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts, operations. Ranging in age from nineteen to sixty, they have worked as carpenters, as linemen trimming trees, as equipment installers, as stock clerks, as theater-set builders. Most were raised in the Berkshires. Two are recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. One is African-American with a young family. Another is Phil's grandson, learning the business by working alongside the others. The younger ones might have had some training in the trades in public high school. They wish they had had more.

The employees all have friends who are looking for jobs, and they are grateful for the manufacturing job at PAS. It provides a relatively good salary, enough to provide security for a family. They are proud of their role in the business and report that PAS is different from other worksites. Because of the relatively small scale of the firm, they know all the stages of making the glass, not just their one task. That gives them greater ownership and pride in the finished product. They have read letters from American soldiers in Iraq thanking PAS for the bullet-proof glass in their vehicles that protects lives under fire. They have seen the copy of the U. S. Constitution kept safely behind their glass and know that it is a document of enormous significance to the history of this country.

These men trained by Phil work alongside him in the production line, fish with him, see and respect the discipline it took to build the company, and so they do not hesitate to labor hard for him. If GE or the paper mills had been shut down by equipment failure, their employees would be on the dole, not working on a community project supported by PAS.

I asked Phil Martino what he sees as the limitations to creating more manufacturing firms of the scale and quality of PAS.

* Distribution of tax incentives
Regional economic development programs provide tax incentives to lure big corporations to the region but fail to offer similar incentives for smaller home-grown businesses.

* Infrastructure
Building and site selection, while a concern, is not an insurmountable problem. Remnants of a once thriving industrial base along the rivers mean that suitable buildings remain vacant and affordable. It is important, however, to cultivate a citizenry that welcomes appropriately scaled manufacturing in their neighborhoods.

* Transportation
A lack of sufficient freight-train service to the region puts reliance on trucking, thus narrowing choices of locations to easy access from the few highways.

* Skilled workers
There is a base of good workers in the region, but they are not trained, so businesses must take the time for and bear the cost of training on the job. Though more technical education in the public schools would be helpful, better yet would be funds for apprenticeships so that job-skill development can be specific to the manufacturing process.

* Financing
Phil named lack of financing for small and medium sized businesses like his as the biggest hindrance to business start-ups and expansion. Large enterprises have national sources of funding, but not so the regional firms on the scale of PAS. Phil is quick to credit Main Street Resources with providing an answer to the problem of financing.

Dan Levinson earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and holds a joint degree (with honors) in applied mathematics and economics from Brown University. But his real skill lies in recognizing the talent of individuals and encouraging those talents. His equity fund, Main Street Resources, is shaped in a particular way to best apply his skills and inclinations. Investing primarily in businesses within a hundred mile drive from his home in Westport, Connecticut, he knows the companies and their management teams personally. He is available on short notice for consulting and trouble-shooting. He is well-informed about his portfolio businesses, without micro-managing them.

Phil Martino personally funded the startup of PAS, putting his home and family at risk. When PAS was ready to grow in an organic way, it needed a financial partner. Main Street understood the scale of the business, made the personal contact, and provided the right amount of financing while still keeping the successful management team in place--a team that knows the product as well as the ins and outs of the manufacturing process, the suppliers, the markets, and the local community.

Main Street's engaged, personal, proven approach to financing has turned clients into new investors. Under Main Street's leadership a group of former owners of small businesses has coalesced into an informal mentoring team to help a new set of entrepreneurs, ensuring the success Main Street’s partner enterprises.

It was Main Street that provided the capital to open a new facility at PAS to house a new autoclave. When the explosion occurred, the leased building next door was already under renovation and the autoclave was on order. Main Street's investment meant that production would resume in one month, not one year. What would the employees do during that time? For PAS, with its deep local roots and in partnership with an equity fund with strong social values and a commitment to the region, the answer was simple: seek a community service opportunity, supporting the workers and the community group at the same time.

By good grace, that group was the E. F. Schumacher Society.

For four weeks staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society and the Protective Armored Systems team ate lunch together on picnic tables stretched out across the lawn of Guilder House. Our co-worker, Kristen, spent the morning cooking, using fresh produce from local farms and my kitchen garden. The red, white, and yellow checkered table cloths and napkins were washed fresh each day. We all experienced a note of subdued festivity.

I spent two hours every day interviewing each member of the team, learning what brought them to their work and asking what they thought was needed to create more manufacturing jobs in the region. Their stories lingered with me over the weekends, when they were not with us, and I began to realize that our stories, told over many lunches, lingered with them.

One Monday morning I went over to Guilder House and found the crew already hard at work. Oronde, meaning the Appointed, whom everyone called "O," was scraping old paint from the side of the house in preparation for a fresh coat. "O," says I, after a pause while watching him work, "You are all pouring so much love into this house." "Susan," says O, "that's because you are all pouring so much love into us."

Grace.

President's Energy Speech

2008-12-11T20:09:00.003-05:00

Joseph A. Stanislaw has spent his career concerned about the future of energy production and consumption. The J.A. Stanislaw Group specializes in strategic thinking and investment in energy and technology, advising industry and governments as they set energy policy.

Deeply influenced by the writings of E. F. Schumacher, Mr. Stanislaw has authored several papers on alternative energy technologies and their promise.

He writes of his latest innovative essay: "With the historic election of Barack Obama to President, our nation enjoys new opportunities to confront monumental challenges--especially the convergence of energy, climate change, and security. This is the speech I would like to see President Obama deliver when he takes office in January 2009."

We have excerpted sections of it below. The full essay is at www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/stanislaw_08.html

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society

* * * * * * * * * *
TOGETHER WE WILL EMPOWER AMERICA IN THE 21st CENTURY

My fellow Americans, this is my first address to you as your President. It is also one of the most important speeches I will ever make.

Our nation confronts many challenges. . . . one challenge transcends them all.

It is--at once--our most critical economic, national security, foreign policy, and environmental challenge. It lies at the heart of how we educate our children and operate our government. It is the key to unlocking millions of jobs, and to preserving and developing our local communities. And it is our way out of this economic crisis, the most severe crisis our nation has faced since the Great Depression.

This issue is energy--how we produce it and how we consume it.

The threats we face today that are linked to energy have multiplied. Not only are our economic security and well-being at risk, but so too is our fundamental security. Our reliance on foreign oil threatens our independence. Our exposure to climate change poses an unacceptable risk to our communities, our environment, and our culture.

It is this convergence of economics, climate change, and security that
makes energy the most important issue of our time.

In leading our country into a new energy era, I have on my side one all- powerful weapon--a weapon none of my predecessors ever fully enlisted in their efforts: you, the American people. Each and every American, beginning today, has the power to drive our country to greater energy independence. Each and every American can contribute in a meaningful way to creating the green economy of the 21st century and to combat climate change.

I will be accountable to you. And I expect you to be accountable to me and to each other. This is what democracy means.

We will appeal to American common sense by expediting the era of cutting-edge clean vehicles, energy efficient homes, and smart appliances--all of which will save you money and improve your lives.

We will build on the American ethic of fairness by allowing competing technologies to prove themselves on their true merits -- making our markets reflect and capture the true cost of energy . . .

We will inspire and support America's spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship by investing in research and providing powerful incentives to bring new technologies into the marketplace.

We will lead the way by making energy a force for international unity, not division, and by seriously addressing climate change.

And we will honor America's forward-looking spirit by investing in education, from cradle to grave, so that we change how Americans of all ages view our energy challenges and the related environmental issues.

Nor will we suddenly turn our backs on oil and gas. No matter how fast the progress on alternatives, the world will be primarily reliant on fossil fuels for at least two generations--the bridge to tomorrow's new energy future depends on this. . . . There is no quick fix. But a rising tide of alternative sources of energy--combined with new demand patterns and new demand efficiencies--will mitigate the eventual, gradual drop-off in hydrocarbon production that should begin in the next quarter-century. This will create a bridge to the new, cleaner energy era ahead and will create a wave of new jobs--a new industrial revolution.

Allow me to outline five areas of action, including specific targets, on
which my administration will begin working immediately.

The first, and most vital goal, is education. There is only so much that presidential leadership alone can accomplish. For this great American project to succeed, we must make knowledge of energy part of our national DNA. This can only be done through education.

So tomorrow, I will convene a blue-ribbon commission of high school and college educators, business and labor leaders, economists, and technology experts to look at every aspect of our education, training, and public awareness systems. . . .Their first goal will be to identify the skills our schools must teach so that we develop a world-class workforce that can usher in a new era of energy and environmental progress – these include basic skills needed from electricians, to welders, to plumbers, to more advanced engineering skills.

But education requires not only learning in the classroom, but learning in the real world. So today I am announcing the massive expansion of AmeriCorps. Every graduating high school senior will be encouraged to undertake one year of national service. The top priority will go to projects that will rebuild our communities so that they become energy efficient and environmentally aware.

Our second goal is one that also enlists every single American--energy efficiency.

The greatest proven reserves of fossil fuels that we have are not in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf of Mexico--they are in your cars' gas tanks, in your homes' oil heaters, in the electricity plant down the road. A barrel of oil saved is a barrel found. Everything we do today, we could be doing more efficiently as soon as tomorrow--consuming less energy by using technologies that are already available to us.

By the end of my first term in office, our goal is to put in place energy efficiency programs and initiatives to promote alternative transportation technologies that will eliminate the need for oil imports by 2025.

Our progress towards energy efficiency, however, will only be possible if we continue to develop smart technologies and alternative forms of energy. For this to happen, we need markets that are honest and fair--markets that reflect the true price of energy. This will be my administration's third goal.

Simply put, when you buy a gallon of gas today, or fill your boiler, the price of these fossil fuels does not reflect their true costs to our society. Over the course of my first term, therefore, I will confer with the energy industry about adopting a carbon tax or a carbon trading system that creates a cost for carbon to make the economics of our energy systems reflect the honest cost of fossil fuels. The revenues we raise from such a tax or trading system would be invested in helping to finance the upfront costs of energy efficiency technologies for Americans, as well as in the research we need to develop clean and alternative technologies.

This is my fourth goal: to make America the world leader in every promising clean and alternative energy technology. There is no silver bullet to achieve our energy targets--we need every bullet.

As importantly, my government will renew our country's aging infrastructure, laying the foundations for the green economy of the 21st century. A smart energy grid will be one of our signature projects. Specifically, within two months from today, we will begin work on demonstration projects for a smart grid system in two to three locations in America, so we can prove the worth of these technologies. We will then reward states that allow for the rapid implementation of smart grids and we will develop programs to speed the construction of such grids across the country.

If we are willing to spend $1 trillion to bail out banks, surely we can invest an equal amount to build the basis of our future prosperity. In doing so, government will lead by example. We will use America's might in the market to set the highest standards for energy technology. Those companies that lead the way will be rewarded in the marketplace through the government's purchasing power.

Your government will construct buildings that meet green LEED standards. Your government will retrofit its buildings to the highest "green" standards. Your government will purchase automobiles and electronics that rate in the top 10 percent of energy efficiency. By doing so, we will create economies of scale for these technologies that will bring down prices for all Americans. And your government will hire employees who have received certification in energy efficiency.

I expect that city and state governments, many of which have been visionaries in this field, will follow the federal government's lead. In fact, we will help them do so by offering federal guarantees for municipal bonds raised for this purpose. We also will require any entity drawing on federal funds to meet federal energy standards.

In everything we do, in fact, we will be guided by a profound commitment to our local communities--it is the prism through which we will develop all of our energy policies.

. . . in cooperation with today's top technology companies, we will launch a major web portal to allow local communities nationwide and worldwide to share their best ideas and practices for transforming themselves into green economic leaders.

Government also will use the current crisis in our economy to transform local communities. As we rebuild our financial system, we will ensure that it functions to promote housing and urban transport improvements that are responsive to our energy goals. This includes, among other measures, providing mortgages with lower rates for more energy efficient homes.

And when the smoke clears--and the smoke will literally clear--we will have created millions of new jobs--jobs that pay well and stay put for all those students educated by the "green economy" schools we will have created. Jobs that revitalize local communities. Jobs that make America a global industrial leader once again. Jobs that cannot and will not be exported.

But if there is one thing we have learned during the economic and foreign policy crises of the past decade, it is that we cannot go it alone. America is not an island.

On the energy issues that matter most, we need to reach out and develop deep cooperation with our allies and trading partners. This is my fifth goal.

Our ultimate destination is energy independence. But, the path to that ultimate destination is mutual interdependence. We will achieve this by creating transparency in energy markets, by investing jointly with our allies in new and renewable technologies, by leading negotiations for a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol, and by creating a G20 for energy security.

To oversee all aspects of this greatest challenge of our generation, I am creating today a National Energy Council, which will be located in the White House.

Their core mission will be to create the vision, the direction, and the conditions to drive us to this new energy future.

We should not expect short-term miracles from this plan. Over the next four years, we must do the hard work of defining and putting in place a 50-year vision for the wholesale transformation of our society to one that has a sensible long-term energy policy – and is also clean and green. If we do this, our energy costs and our foreign dependency will drop dramatically each and every decade. This is the promise I make to you and your children and your grandchildren.

* * * * * * * * * *
Used with permission of Joseph A Stanislaw and
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (www.deloitte.com).

Scale Limitations/Shaping a Future Economy

2008-11-30T14:29:00.002-05:00

John Fullerton described the current financial collapse in his May 2008 essay "The Relevance of E. F. Schumacher in the 21st Century." It now seems prophetic.

In the same article he warned us not to look to the tweaking of current economic systems to solve our problems, but rather to reach to the teachings of our common wisdom traditions to find new ways of assessing the truth of our situation and to collectively build new economic systems that are just, ecologically responsible, and permanent. In fact he names this rebuilding as the central task of concerned citizens in the first decades of this century.

We have posted his full article at the E. F. Schumacher Society's website (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/fullerton_08.html) and excerpted sections below for your reading.

Best wishes,
Staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

********************************
Excerpts from:
"The Relevance of E. F. Schumacher in the 21st Century"
By John Fullerton
May, 2008

Our global economic system is broken not because of the credit crisis; it is broken because it is predicated on perpetual, resource driven growth with no recognition of scale limitations.

What we are not hearing, at least in the mainstream media, is a critical reframing of the questions that address root causes. . . . . We are not hearing a debate about the sustainability of a perpetually growing global economic system nested within our finite biosphere. We are not hearing a debate about the wisdom of allowing financial power (and systemic risk) to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few financial institutions of increasing complexity and scale. We are not publicly questioning the wisdom of the system we have allowed to evolve in response to capital's quest for ever increasing financial returns. Nor are we debating where to look for creative responses.

However, nothing could be more important at this critical time. What we must grasp is that the financial crisis we are reacting to is but a cyclical side show to the bigger issues we face regarding the sustainability of our economic system. We should see the present financial crisis as a wake up call to this far greater challenge. We should search with an open mind for the wisdom we need to transition our economic system onto a sustainable path, grounded in ecological reality, with a respect for human justice and a deep appreciation for all life.

What is needed is nothing less than a new economic myth, which incorporates the central issue of scale in order to supplant and transcend the "invisible hand" of the free market. We need a "post-modern (post-materialist) economic theory".

At the beginning of the 20th century, scale did not matter. At start of the 21st century, scale redefines our economic challenge.

In my personal quest for this new economic myth, I was stopped dead in my tracks after discovering E.F. Schumacher several years ago. Most who know of Schumacher know him from his seminal work, Small is Beautiful - Economics as if People Mattered (1973). The fortunate ones have also read his final published work, A Guide for the Perplexed, a title that grabbed me and did not disappoint. Most disciples of Schumacher probably encountered his clear thinking during the 70s. Many went on to become leaders in the environmental movement. I was in junior high school when Small is Beautiful was published, and then was busy building a career in global finance during the 80s and 90s on the belief that finance rather than politics would dominate international relations during my lifetime. I got that right, but not in the way I expected. Seeing global finance, what I do, as a root cause in fueling our unsustainable economic system, has shaken many of my prior beliefs on economics.

. . . it is now time that we transcend to an economics built upon wisdom. Schumacher's instruction is clear and compelling. "From an economic view point, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study the economics of permanence." This intention takes us in a profoundly different direction than conventional, Cartesian thinking. "Permanence" suggests valuing durability over efficiency, stability over speed. These are different values from those typically celebrated in the marketplace.

We need to think about what adjustments are necessary to "insure" the permanence of our collective home, which must include a stable civil society. Such thinking must address the very nature of our economic system. Without a sustainable and just economic system, there is no permanence. We need to inject these ideas into the public debate by reframing the cyclical economic concerns that preoccupy the mainstream media. We see little true recognition of this profound challenge among our business, financial and governmental leadership, which remains absorbed with short-term tactical issues.

Following Schumacher's lead, we should look to the great wisdom traditions for direction in this truth. Where better to look than to the ideas and teachings from all cultures that have stood the test of time, rather than restrict ourselves to contemporary economic theories that we know are limited and incomplete.

Schumacher is relevant to our critical 21st century challenges precisely for this reason. His philosophy, his concern about the limits of materialistic scientism, his distinctions between divergent and convergent problems, and his ideas of decentralism, appropriate technology, and human scale to name but a few, are all rooted in the great spiritual and philosophical teachings. Not surprisingly, his ideas, in addition to being humane and just, are aligned with nature and nature's sustainable way, the only truly sustainable system we know. They are, I believe, rooted in truth as best as Schumacher could discern it, and therefore they represent wisdom, the wisdom of permanence.

If you examine Schumacher's personal library, which is carefully stewarded at the
E. F. Schumacher Society in the Berkshires, you will find that most of the texts are not about economics. Instead, they include the great philosophical and spiritual texts from all traditions. Schumacher's gift and genius was to derive economic principles and ideas from these teachings, to have the courage to speak the truth, despite knowing it often flew in the face of conventional economic thinking, and to make the truth accessible with his clear and witty prose. What emerges is certainly not the final word on the economics of permanence. Some of his thinking is outdated, or simply missed the mark. But as a foundation to build upon, it is invaluable. The reason his ideas about economics ring true is because they are built upon these wisdom traditions. The contradictions of modern economics are gone.

Our challenge now is to refine and update this thinking and to chart a practical path of convergence between the reality that exists in our economic system today and the principles we strive to uphold and upon which our long run prosperity undoubtedly depends. . . . The opening decades of 21st century may be our best chance to launch the critical transformation of our economic system to an economics of permanence. We need to get it right, as only our collective consciousness will allow.

Transitioning to a sustainable and just economic system is the ultimate challenge of the 21st century. History no doubt will judge our generation by how well we acknowledge, embrace and take up this challenge.

******************************
John Fullerton is a former Managing Director of JPMorgan where he worked for 18 years in New York, London, and Tokyo, and subsequently was CEO of an energy focused hedge fund. He is now seeking to launch an investment fund focused on investing in high impact sustainability initiatives, and is working on The Purpose of Capital, a book about the role of investment capital in sustainable economics. He is a friend and supporter of the E. F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. John can be reached at john@level3cap.com.

Co-producers of Our Own Economies

2008-09-06T11:56:00.002-04:00

If our common interest is to build more independent regions and their unique regional cultures, then part of that effort will be to build more independent regional economies --ones in which the goods consumed locally are produced locally.

In her Cities and the Wealth of Nations, the late Jane Jacobs brilliantly argues that the best strategy for economic development is to generate import-replacement industries. She would have us examine what is now imported into a region and develop the conditions to instead produce those products from local resources with local labor. Unlike the branch of a multi-national corporation that might open and then suddenly close, driven by moody fluctuations in the global economy, a locally owned and managed business is more likely to establish a complex of economic and social interactions that build strong entwining regional roots, keeping the business in place and accountable to people, land, and community.

What then is the responsibility of concerned citizens to help build sustainable regional economies?

An independent regional economy calls for new regional economic institutions for land, labor, and capital to embody the scale, our endeavors. These new institutions cannot be government-driven, and rightly so. They will be shaped by free associations of consumers and producers, working cooperatively, sharing the risk in creating an economy that reflects shared culture and shared values. Small in scale, transparent in structure, designed to profit the community rather than profit from the community, they can address our common concern for safe and fair working conditions; for production practices that keep our air and soil and waters clean, renewing our natural resources rather than depleting them; for innovation in the making and distribution of the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and energy rather than luxury items; and for more equitable distribution of wealth.

Building of new economic institutions is hard work. Most of us rest complacently in our role as passive consumers, not co-producers and co-shapers of our own economies. But it is work that can be done, and fine beginnings are being made in the development of local currencies, community supported farms, regionally based equity and loan funds, worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, and business alliances for local living economies.

These initiatives are motivated by the affection that the citizens of a region have for their neighbors and neighborhoods; for the fields, forests, mountains, and rivers of their landscapes; for the local history and culture that binds these all together; and for their common future.

We encourage you to join regional economic projects in your own communities or create them anew. Inventory the
multitude of human, natural, and financial resources available for local production. Support existing businesses. Share information. Apply the genius of local knowledge to shape new enterprises. Celebrate successes.

On Saturday, September 20th BerkShares local currency will celebrate the two millionth BerkShare exchanged at one of our five participating banks with the Second Annual BerkShares Bash. Featuring some of the Berkshire businesses that define the program and our local economy, the event is scheduled for 1-5 PM on the front lawn of the John Dewey Academy at the historic Searles Castle, Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Admission is 5 BerkShares. Kids 12 and under are free. Delight in local musicians, yummy food, fine crafts, Roger the Jester, face-painting, stilt walking, neighbors and friends. Bring the family, a picnic basket, a blanket for sitting, extra BerkShares for treats, and the expectation of a great time.

Susan Witt for the
E. F. Schumacher Society

BerkShares Inspired Currency

2008-08-20T10:41:00.005-04:00

Another town in England, Lewes, has issued a local currency that takes inspiration from BerkShares right here in western Massachusetts.

Check out the story Small UK Town Creates Own Currency to Beat the Credit Crunch

In addition to the inspiration taken from BerkShares, the Lewes Pound is modeled on the Totnes Pound.

Nourishing Traditions

2008-07-29T12:18:00.003-04:00

This video of Sally Fallon Morell comes from the Weston A. Price Foundation Annual Conference.

Sally Fallon Morell will speak at the 28th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures on October 25th with Anna Lappé and Dan Barber

Visit www.smallisbeautiful.org for more information and to register for the event.

Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen

2008-07-16T10:59:00.009-04:00

E. F. Schumacher Lecturer, Anna Lappé's new book is one part investigative journalism and one part celebration of delicious meals.

Check out a review of Grub by Sustainable Table

Anna Lappé will be joined by Dan Barber and Sally Fallon Morell at the 28th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures on October 25, 2008

E. F. Schumacher Lecturer Dan Barber

2008-07-14T14:22:00.006-04:00

This New York Times op-ed piece by Blue Hill Restaurant co-owner/chef Dan Barber brings rising food prices into a positive light. Small-scale local farmers are starting to feel a competitive advantage over oil intensive industrial agriculture.

Check out his article Change We Can Stomach

Dan Barber will speak at the 28th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures on October 25, 2008, along with Sally Fallon and Anna Lappé.

The event is sponsored by Gardener's Supply Company

Local Currency Mini-Conference

2008-07-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

As BerkShares Board of Directors considers the future evolution of the program, the American Institute for Economic Research, a Great Barrington economic research organization founded in 1933, has called a mini-conference entitled "Prospects for the Acceptance of Competitive Local Currencies: The Future of BerkShares." Several eminent monetary scholars will join BerkShares board and staff on Friday July 18th from 3 to 5 pm on the AIER campus to imagine growth to a more independent currency.

BerkShares will be discussed in the context of the history of independent currencies. Speakers will then address how BerkShares could move from federal dollar backing to an index of locally produced commodities such as maple syrup, wool, wood products, local beer, field greens, and local cheese. The conference will also consider the responsibilities of a local reserve board for BerkShares, including regulatory authority, oversight capacity, and other policy-making tools. This discussion will suggest a framework for how and on what basis to issue additional currency. Finally, panelists will suggest strategies for making loans denominated in BerkShares.

Seating is limited to 75 people for this event. Please RSVP with AIER.

Save the Date

2008-06-27T10:17:00.009-04:00

The 28th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures will be help on October 25, 2008 at the 1st Congregational Church in Stockbridge, MA.

This year's speakers:

Sally Fallon is founding president of The Weston A. Price Foundation, a non-profit nutrition education foundation with over 400 local chapters worldwide helping consumers find local grass-based animal products. Fallon speaks to the importance of returning to organic farming, pasture-fed livestock and whole traditional foods, properly prepared, if Americans are to regain their health and vitality, as well as the benefits of an economy based on small scale organic production and food processing that returns added value to the independent farmer, rather than to large-scale food processing conglomerates.

Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author respected for her work on sustainability, food politics, globalization, and social change. Named one of TIME’s “Eco-Who’s Who,” Anna has been featured in The New York Times, Gourmet, O-The Oprah Magazine, Domino, Food & Wine, Body+Soul, Natural Health, Utne, and Vibe. Since 2002, Anna has been collaborating with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, through their Cambridge based Small Planet Institute, an international network for research and popular education.

Dan Barber began farming and cooking for family and friends at Blue Hill Farm. It was there that he was first introduced to and gained respect for locally grown and seasonal produce. Since May 2000, Dan has seen Blue Hill Restaurant grow from a noted neighborhood restaurant to receiving a 3-star New York Times review. In 2004 both Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture opened their doors. As the restaurant’s chef/co-owner and a member of the Center’s board of directors, Dan focuses on the issues of pleasure, taste and regional bounty and how these imperatives are threatened.

Reliving the Seminar

2008-06-06T15:34:00.003-04:00

From the first read through of participants for the 2008 Building Sustainable Local Economies Seminar it was obvious that we had collected a special group. Susan said that never before had she experienced having such a talented and involved group collected for a Schumacher Society seminar. Attendees included community organizers, educators, farmers, social investors, and more. We could easily tell that we would be surrounded by wealth of knowledge, but we could not have foreseen how the connections between participants would heighten the entire experience.

On the evaluation forms filled out by seminar participants after the event—which I have shared with you below—almost every person mentioned the connection among group members as integral to his or her overall experience. From sharing our community's stories on Wednesday night to the final action plans on Sunday morning, jokes, suggestions, and encouragement abounded.

We captured some of the workshop presentations and discussion in audio format, which are now posted online.

Enjoy.

Chris Lindstrom
http://www.archive.org/details/lindstrom_money

Alex Thorp and Elizabeth Keen
http://www.archive.org/details/keen_thorp_ILF

Charles Turner
http://www.archive.org/details/turner_seminar

Eric Harris-Braun
http://www.archive.org/details/harris-braun_wealth

Susan Witt
http://www.archive.org/details/witt_clt

Joseph Stanislaw
http://www.archive.org/details/Stanislaw_energy

Energy: Global is Local

2008-05-08T16:33:00.002-04:00

International Energy Expert and E. F. Schumacher Society Board member Joseph Stanislaw will be presenting a talk, Energy: Global is Local at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, MA on Thursday, May 22nd at 7:30 pm.

Joseph Stanislaw is the lead organizer and chairman of the Athens Summit 2008, a meeting of 61 countries to foster closer, deeper, and more effective cooperation on attaining energy security and combating climate change. His work as the founder of the advisory firm JAStanislaw group and as an independent advisor to Deloitte has involved him with the stark realities of energy security throughout the world. "We are now," Stanislaw says, "collectively acknowledging the qualitative limitations of hydrocarbons and the challenges these pose --especially in light of mounting global energy demand." The threat in terms of climate change and international social unrest requires that actions be taken that both deal with carbon emissions and provide continued access to energy.

2008-04-23T13:34:00.003-04:00

In his closing remarks at the 2007 Building Sustainable Local Economies Seminar, Chuck Turner spoke of the economic models presented, and being implemented throughout the world, as the beginning of a change in our mode of thinking. They embed a more appropriate way of relating to each other and to the natural world. As the old paradigm of materialism that is causing social, ecological, and economic injustices crumbles, it is essential to consciously participate in the shaping of a new paradigm. Communities that are evolving place-based institutions for land, labor, and capital will be the support for this new system.

Turner closed by saying that the beginning lies with the seminar participants. Each has the power to start a local project that will be a root for developing an entirely new consciousness. All we must do is start.

Chuck Turner will again be a member of the core faculty for the Building Sustainable Local Economies, May 21st to May 25th, joining Eric Harris-Braun, Elizabeth Keen, Chris Lindstrom, Joseph Stanislaw, Alex Thorp, and Susan Witt.

Turner's 2007 E. F. Schumacher Lecture "What about Us––The Earth's People?" has just been published. You can find the complete text or order it in pamphlet form at www.smallisbeautiful.org.

Renewing America's Food Traditions

2008-04-10T15:12:00.002-04:00

The E. F. Schumacher Society and the Orion Society are co-sponsoring a talk by Professor and MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" recipient Gary Paul Nabhan. He is the co-founder of Native Seeds/Search and a leading voice for conserving and renovating native plant agricultures. His books include Renewing America's Foor Traditions and Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods.

The event is free and will be Friday, April 18th at 7pm at the Berkshire South Auditorium, 15 Crissey Road, Great Barrington, MA

Schumacher Events

2008-04-03T13:36:00.002-04:00

Simon Trace. Monday, April 7th 7:00 pm at the Kellogg Music Center on the Simon's Rock campus in Great Barrington, MA. Simon Trace is Chief Executive Officer of Practical Action, an United Kingdom organization that develops intermediate technology for the developing world. Practical Action, formerly the Intermediate Technology Development Group was founded in 1966 by E. F. Schumacher to bring real and sustainable improvements to people's lives. Tickets are 3 BerkShares, available at the door. This event is co-sponsored by the E. F. Schumacher Society, Simon's Rock College course on Globalization and Community Ecology, and the Center for Ecological Technology.

Susan Witt. Friday, April 11th 7:30 pm at The First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, MA. Susan Witt, Executive Director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, will give a talk entitled Conscious Economics: The Intimacy and Complexity of Local Production and Exchange for Think OutWord Think OutWord is a peer-led training in social entrepreneurship for young adults loosely situated in the northeastern United States. It is grounded in, though not limited to, an understanding of the threefold nature of the human being and of society, primarily as it was articulated by the early 20th century philosopher, Rudolf Steiner.

Michael Gordon. Monday, April 14th 9:00 am at the Latham Community Baptist Church in Latham, NY. Michael Gordon, outreach coordinator for the E. F. Schumacher Society, will present an overview of the E. F. Schumacher Society and Schumacher's philosophy of Small Is Beautiful for the Interfaith Alliance of New York State.

Gary Nabhan. Friday, April 18th 7 pm at the Berkshire South Regional Community Center in Great Barrington, MA. A talk entitled Renewing America's Food Traditions: Endangered Diversity in Our Hands and Mouths. Author Gary Paul Nabhan, a professor and the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," has been the primary shaper of the local and indigenous foods movement in the U.S. He's an expert in local foods and indigenous foods and an advocate for their preservation. His books include Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; Arab/American: Landscape, Culture, and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts; and, coming in May, Renewing America's Food Traditions. This event is co-sponsored by the E. F. Schumacher Society and the Orion Society.

Cathrine Sneed. Tuesday April 29th 7:00 pm, location to be announced. Cathrine Sneed is the founder of the Garden Project in San Francisco, CA will be speaking about her experience of innovatively empowering both former offenders and at-risk youth through training and education while transforming the urban environment.

Joseph Stanislaw. Thursday, May 22nd 7:30 pm at The First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, MA. Joseph Stanislaw is founder of the international advisory firm JA Stanislaw Group, LLC, specializing in strategic thinking, sustainability, and environmentally sound investment in energy and technology. He will lead the audience through an examination of a new locally-scaled energy economy.

Schumacher Lecture

2008-03-28T14:24:00.002-04:00

We have just added a lecture by Fritz Schumacher to our collection on archive.org. This talk given to the Lindisfarne Association is a compelling example of his small is beautiful philosophy.

Cathrine Sneed

2008-03-27T10:28:00.006-04:00

A video segment of Cathrine Sneed's October 1995 E. F. Schumacher Lecture is now up on our YouTube Channel.

This lecture delivers a message that is moving, hopeful, and extremely important. Cathrine Sneed's work with the Garden Project in San Francisco shows that bringing people out of the jails and off the streets into the garden can be transformative in both the human and natural realms. Sneed's personal story is equally compelling—overcoming illness, poverty, a skeptical bureaucracy, and resistance of co-workers to create a gardening program within the San Francisco jail system which linked prisoners to the restaurants and people outside prison walls.

New Publication

2008-03-26T12:01:00.009-04:00

Image courtesy of Sara Sheehy Photography

We recently published the lecture pamphlet for Majora Carter's 2007 talk entitled "Sustainable South Bronx: A Model for Environmental Justice." As with all of our published lectures the full text is available for free download at www.smallisbeautiful.org

Please Enjoy

Simon Trace of Practical Action

2008-03-20T13:54:00.002-04:00

On April 7th the Chief Executive Officer of the British Organization, Practical Action will join the E. F. Schumacher Society at the Kellogg Music Center on the Simon's Rock Campus at 7:30 pm for a talk about appropriate technology for the developing world.

Find out more about the event:

www.smallisbeautiful.org

Find out more about Practical Action:

www.practicalaction.org

Practical Action was formerly the Intermediate Technology Development Group founded by E. F. Schumacher to bring real and sustainable improvements to people's lives.

Why Schumacher?

2008-03-14T15:43:00.004-04:00

Now it is even easier to find out about the man who envisioned a new economics.

We have added the full text of E. F. Schumacher's biography, "Schumacher: His Life and Thought" written by his eldest daughter, Barbara Wood.

A portion of the Schumacher Archives is also available. This includes articles written by Schumacher himself, including copies of Small Is Beautiful in many languages, documentary film productions about him, his lecture and background notes, and awards, medals, and photographs. The collection is still in the process of being computer-indexed, scanned, and made available to scholars on-line.

unMoney Convergence

2008-03-12T14:14:00.002-04:00

On April 14th a group of social-entrepreneurs, academics, economists, bankers, philanthropists, business men and woman, system changers, lenders, borrowers and barter-ers will gather in Seattle for the 2008 unMoney Convergence to engage in an evolutionary conversation on money.

http://unmoney.wik.is/

Topics covered will include micro-credit, slow money, local currencies, complementary currencies, time dollars, retail trade exchanges, LETS, state of the art transaction software and hardware technologies, money and spirituality, ecological accounting, social venture and entrepreneurship, monetary theory, value network mapping, equity sharing, energy backed currency, organizational structures, gift economies, and barter.

A great accompaniment to the lecture pamphlets

2008-03-11T15:44:00.001-04:00

We have recently placed the audio files for a selection of the E. F. Schumacher Lectures online. Go to the Internet Archives to hear the words of inspiration as they were spoken.

After finding a lecture that piques your curiosity, go to the Schumacher Society website to see if there is a beautifully edited version of the talk to study and share with your friends.

Enjoy,
Michael Gordon

YouTube Stars

2008-03-07T11:11:00.014-05:00

Southern Berkshire businesses, their owners, managers, and employes are YouTube Stars!

Watch them at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Efssociety

Or from the TV link on the BerkShares homepage.

http://www.berkshares.org

The BerkShares Team

Slow Money

2008-03-07T11:06:00.007-05:00

"Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow."
--Jane Jacobs from "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

One of the features of BerkShares, the local currency circulating in the Southern Berkshire region of Massachusetts, is that it fosters this wealth of sidewalk contacts.

Use of BerkShares, a paper currency, requires face to face economic exchange. The citizen/buyer must meet the merchant/owner and enter into conversation about the item purchased. In the course of these multiple transactions an understanding begins to grow of the nature of the business, how it fits in the streetscape of the town, the working conditions of its employees, availability of locally made goods, the impact of new regulations, the necessity to respond to the changing tastes of consumers, the hurdles to prosperity, the many roles the merchant plays in the community as volunteer ambulance squad member, school board official, community theater player.

When purchasing directly from a producer with BerkShares the information shared may be even more deeply sourced in the local landscape. You may learn how to detect the first signs of a blighted maple tree plaguing the maple syrup industry, or learn how heavy spring rains kept bees from pollinating the apples blossoms, resulting in fewer apples to market.

BerkShares are a "slow money" to borrow a term coined by E. F. Schumacher Society friend, Woody Tasch. It takes more time to process a transaction, time for graciousness, time for building connection with community of place.

"Inconvenient," some will say. Yes, when compared to the hastiness and anonymity of an internet purchase. But rich with information needed for conducting public life. A democracy only thrives when its citizens are informed and engaged by public issues.

Slow money is not sleepy money but awake to the flow of economic life pulsing through a region, shaping its future, providing warning signs and creating options for public policy and private initiative. Perhaps the greatest task of concerned citizens in the twenty-first century is to reclaim responsibility for the consequences of our economic transactions--personally, institutionally, and in public spending. Slow money is the start of this process.

The function of money is to serve as an abstraction for real economic exchange. This is both its flaw and its almost mystical power.

If we did not have the tool of money, we would be we left with direct barter, limited to what we could trade at a particular place and time--carrots for cord wood. Without the carrots I could not acquire the cordwood. Money stands for a value created at a different time, stored, and used to exchange for goods needed in the present time. Money allows values to be collected together and applied to an entirely new type of venture in the future. This accumulation allows the entrepreneur to organize human initiative and raw materials and create some before-unrealized product for healing the sick, producing energy, transporting goods. Quite wonderful.

However this tendency in money to abstract actual exchange can rapidly escalate unchecked, so that ultimately money begets money through sheer movement of capital. The living consequences of the working of capital--the conditions of laborers, the processes used in manufacturing, the effect on eco-systems to obtain raw materials, the fossil fuels used in transportation of goods to consumers, the pockets of accumulation--all tend to be obscured.
Our private discussion and public debate accordingly narrows to cost of goods and return on investment--shaping personal habits of consumption and public policy that drive a global economic system unimpeded by environmental, social, or cultural concerns.

Slow money again makes us conscious of the impact of our economic transactions--not just as purchasers, but as tax-payers, investors, and philanthropists.

In December, BerkShares, Inc. took out a full page ad in a local paper listing the seventy-one non-profit organizations that would accept year-end donations in BerkShares. These ranged from the volunteer fire department, to arts groups, to social service agencies, to the plethora of environmental organizations in the Berkshires. By accepting BerkShares, these groups were committing to re-circulate the BerkShares back in the community by purchasing needed goods and services locally.

A woman in the area, known for her generous support of many different initiatives, called to ask exactly how would someone make a donation in BerkShares. We explained that you would walk or drive to the project's office, call staff together, look them directly in the eyes, tell them what important work they were doing for the community, explain that you wished to thank them for this good work, and hand them an envelope with a big stack of BerkShares. To calculate the tax value of your gift, you would use the BerkShares exchange rate with federal dollars--10 BerkShares equals $9.

Such direct acknowledgement of good work exponentially increases the value of the gift by inspiring staff. Slower, yes. It would take more time to deliver the BerkShares in person than to simply write a check. Inconvenient, yes. In the short run that is, or so it seems.

I recall the wonderful scene in "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in which the prince encounters a salesman extolling the benefits of a pill to quench thirst. The salesman explains that by not having to collect water for drinking, people will have more time to do other things. The prince responds by saying that if he had more time there is nothing he would rather do then locate a well from which to draw water to quench his thirst.

As residents of the Southern Berkshires shift to trade in slow money, they are at the same time re-imagining their local economy. It is fair to say that everyone in the Southern Berkshires knows what BerkShares are—that they are in fact a currency that can be spent only in the region. And it is fair to say that at least fifty percent of the people in the Southern Berkshires have already engaged in long conversations about BerkShares in coffee shops and other "sidewalk contacts." BerkShares have ignited a community discussion about local businesses and their problems, about local trade and the reasons for it, about the economic role of non-profits, about local currencies in general and their importance, about the role of local banks, about establishing import-replacement business, about economic sovereignty, about changing deeply engrained financial habits, and about a sustainable
future.

These small/slow exchanges are balancing the abstract tendency of money by reconnecting financial transactions with the people, culture, and landscape of a particular place, while at the same time building the community wealth which is the foundation for a newly imagined economic system.

Detailed information about the BerkShares program is at:
www.berkshares.org

Best wishes,

Susan Witt

Kilowatt Hour Notes and Other Mediums of Exchange

2008-02-21T16:30:00.000-05:00

In April of 1981 the E. F. Schumacher Society convened a conference called "Community Survival in the Age of Inflation." Schumacher President, Robert Swann addressed the conference on the theme "The Place of a Local Currency in a World Economy: Towards an Economy of Permanence." In his talk he laid out the steps for implementing a local currency denominated in kilowatt-hours of electricity produced regionally using small-scale technologies and renewable resources.

In June of 2004, E. F. Schumacher staff member, Chris Lindstrom led the convening of a new conference: "Local Currencies in the 21st Century." It proved a historic gathering. Representatives from 17 countries shared experiences and built relationships that have led to new productive collaborations.

Much has happened in the development of new community-based systems of exchange. Advances in technology have suggested possibilities for the design of currency systems that Bob Swann could not have anticipated. And Bob would have been proud that in his own region of the Berkshires, over 1.5 million BerkShares have been issued from eleven participating banks since launch of the program in September of 2006.

A coalition of groups is convening a conference April 14th-16th in Seattle, Washington to explore monetary systems, how these systems impact both the individual and communities, and how this impact might be transformed through personal and community action. See their wiki page for conference details and registration information.

Keynote speakers include:

Hazel Henderson, producer of the TV series "Ethical Markets," author of "Creating Alternative Futures" and other books, and E. F. Schumacher Society Advisory Board member; and Nipun Mehta, an inspirational speaker and founder of CharityFocus, a fully volunteer-run organization that has delivered millions of dollars of web-related services to the nonprofit world for free.

Everyone who attends is welcome to present (the format will be 80% open space technology). Topics will include micro-credit, slow money, local currencies, complementary currencies, time dollars, retail trade exchanges, LETS, state of the art transaction software and hardware technologies, money and spirituality, ecological accounting, social venture and entrepreneurship, monetary theory, value network mapping, equity sharing, energy backed currency, organizational structures, gift economies, and barter.

The E. F. Schumacher Society is pleased to be a co-sponsor of the event in partnership with PlaNetwork, RSF Social Finance, Current Innovations and Tools for Change.

Following are excerpts from Bob Swann's original 1981 talk.

Chris Lindstrom, Michael Gordon, Sarah Hearn, Susan Witt,
Amalia Feld, Beeta Jahedi, and Chad Nicholson
Staff and Interns of E. F. Schumacher Society
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.smallisbeautiful.org

* * * * * * * * *

from "The Place of a Local Currency in a World Economy" by Robert Swann, 1981

1. I want to focus on the institution of money and the opportunity that now presents itself to develop a better system than our present system. We need a monetary system which will by its nature promote and enhance the small scale institutions, small businesses, cooperatives, small communities, and local towns, while at the same time being sensitive to the unique ecologies of regions. Obviously, the system we have now, and which is failing, does not do so.

2. From a legal viewpoint, money is nothing more (or less) than a claim. But from a technological viewpoint, money is a tool. Like any other tool it can be shaped to perform in different ways. Just as both a scythe and a combine are tools for cutting wheat, so money may be designed to perform in different ways with different objectives. In the same way that we are presently designing and creating more appropriate hardware for small scale needs, so we must create an appropriate tool for exchange.

I do not mean to suggest that creating a better money or exchange mechanism will solve all the problems that confront our society. Not by a long shot. However, just as E. F. Schumacher pointed out, if we create inappropriately scaled tools we end up with many social problems (unemployment, dissatisfaction with work, alienation, etc.) so also the tool which we presently use for exchange, is inappropriately designed for the various functions for which it is intended and as a result has led to serious economic and social problems.

Economists are presently arguing about the possible "solutions" to these problems but since economists, like most modern technologists are looking for "macro" solutions, they have virtually overlooked the possibility of micro solutions. . . . . It is, therefore, I think up to those of us who are the advocates of appropriate technology and small scale to become the inventors, creators, and producers of an appropriate technology for money and banking. We cannot expect the answer to come from outside of our own ranks. Moreover, it is vital to us, because all of the other appropriate technologies with which we are involved depend eventually upon a proper and decent exchange system.

A new money system should have all of the attributes that we value (cooperation, self-reliance, community, etc.). Such would be the direction of the work on which we must concentrate in order to develop an "economy of permanence" in Schumacher's words.

3. If we are to begin to design a local money system that would work for development of a local economy, what are the elements or characteristics for such a system?

It would have to be simple to understand, but consistent with our experience of the present money system. That is: it would have to consist of both cash (or paper currency) as well as a checking system--or some other form of bookkeeping which utilizes the computer to simplify accounting. Unlike our present money system, it would have to be redeemable (i.e. exchangeable) in some real value--not necessarily gold or silver, but real needs of everyday use such as energy. Without redemption system it will be difficult to convince people of its value--after all isn't that exactly why the dollar so devalued--because it is not redeemable for real value from the primary issuer, the Federal Reserve.

Most importantly, we would need to establish a measurement of value which would be as universal as possible and not subject to swings in value up or down as our present money system is. In other words, it would have to remain as constant in value as possible in order to establish a sense of permanency and security as well as make it more practical for exchange to take place.

Such a method of measurement would be the most revolutionary element in the design and would be the key factor in making it possible for a universal system of money and banking--without the need of central banks or central governments becoming involved in money issue. Once this standard of value had been arrived at, it could be monitored by the state or federal government just as the Bureau of Standards maintains and monitors other standards of measurement such as weights and units of space. But it would not require state intervention into the economic sphere, as is now the case.

And finally, it would have to be organized at the local level and controlled by the community as a whole (i.e. each community would elect members of the board of the issuing bank which would preferable be a non-profit institution). Under such a structure as I am suggesting, banking would become more truly a profession, and bankers would be paid for their services, but the community would decide how and where its currency would be invested.

Let me reiterate briefly these specifications: a local currency (appropriate scaled currency) should: be consistent with customary practices (cash, checking, and accounting systems); be redeemable in some form of real need of every day value; and although based on local production, be a universal measure of value.

4. To restate the major point of this talk: the most pressing need I can imagine for a local and regional self-reliant economy is the invention and establishment of an appropriate exchange system such as I have described. Yet such a system, because it is based on a universal measure of value like a kilowatt-hour of energy, could, at the same time, become the key to eventually establishing a worldwide system. For it is obvious that while on the one hand we are at an historical point where local and democratic participation in the economy is essential to our economic survival and to our humanity, it is also clear that we live in a world which is rapidly moving towards a one world economy.

This new, appropriately scaled monetary system would consist of thousands of small, primarily self-reliant regions exchanging or trading directly with each other using a common unit of exchange. Thus the foundation for a cooperative world economy would emerge.

I would therefore call for a task force of volunteers to come forth from this conference determined to study and then implement the first stages of such an appropriate money and banking system.

Bringing Morals Back to the Table

2008-02-06T10:16:00.000-05:00

Many of us are eating locally and organically produced food. From a modern economic perspective, where price is often the paramount consideration, these choices seem illogical.

What accounts for this shift, and does it have the possibility of expanding to all of our economic decisions?

At the end of his 1966 essay "Buddhist Economics," economist E.F. Schumacher asks, "whether modernization as currently practiced, without regard to religious and spiritual values is actually producing agreeable results?"

Economics, practiced as a science, an objective discipline, seeks to reduce relationships to only those that maximize utility. The worker's creativity and spirituality are discouraged, and consumers are asked to put aside their moral considerations in economic decisions.

Buddhist economics is the description of another path in economic reasoning, one that involves people "imbued with a fully developed sense of the sacredness of all existence." Schumacher looked to all faiths to inform his thought about creating a more sustainable economy. He recognized the human as an individual but also as a creative element within a larger system.

The Buddhist economist asserts that a person's work should have a threefold result: develop and use his faculties; join with others in a common task; and create the goods necessary for comfortable existence. Work becomes an act of bringing needed goods into the world with respect for the environment that led to their creation.

For the Buddhist economist this is the process of finding the middle way, with both material comfort and spiritual reverence.

Altering the economic perspective requires replacing an outward reflection of materialism with an inward reflection of morality. In other words, breaking away from a system that asks us to separate ourselves into "the economical man," who cares only about compensation and price, and "the moral man" of compassion and good will. Working in the tradition of the ideas taught by Schumacher, the E.F. Schumacher Society in Great Barrington, Mass., has launched a local currency, BerkShares, for the southern Berkshire region as a means of reconnecting these two sides and implementing our values in economic decisions. We use the local currency because it represents a support of the local economy that includes our friends and family. BerkShares defines the physical boundaries of our purchases so that we may see their full impact.

As we learn to reinitiate our morality into economic decisions with the help of tools like BerkShares, we will realize the role that locally scaled production can play. Our morals will demand that our purchases be accompanied by a more complete picture of the processes that led to their creation. Therefore, a movement toward relocalizing production must accompany the incorporation of morality into economics.

The American economic system assumes a consumer chooses goods with the lowest price. The decision that many of us are now making to forgo price in favor of local food is based on our values. We believe that food should not travel over vast distances and that a farmer has a right to a living wage. When our purchasing decisions take these value judgments into consideration, we are willing to pay more for local and organic products. This is the beginning of a new economy that embraces the moral and sacred values in all our purchasing decisions.

No endeavor that involves the interaction of conscious beings with an inherent ethical sensibility can be treated as an absolute science. Working conditions, environmental health and community support can be included in our economic decisions. The E.F. Schumacher Society and many other organizations are working to build the models that can bring together our economic system and our morals. These models will provide the meaningful work and the awareness of production necessary for a more complete and fair economic system.

Sincerely,

Michael Gordon

This article first appeared in the January 19, 2008 edition of Albany, New York's "Times Union" newspaper

50 Million Farmers

2007-05-12T13:12:00.000-04:00

50 Million Farmers

As the world passes peak oil production we will again be "subject to the net-energy principle: it takes energy to get energy from the environment, and costs have to be subtracted from gross yields." Richard Heinberg, in his 2006 E. F. Schumacher Society lecture, says "we've been living on virtually free energy for the past two hundred years." He invites us to "imagine pushing our car twenty or thirty miles," the distance that car could travel on one gallon of gasoline. "That," he says, "[is] the energy equivalent of roughly six to eight weeks of hard human labor." What the abundant energy of fossil fuels has facilitated is the mechanization of every imaginable process, including farming.

With peak oil--according to some analysts--in sight, the industrial agricultural model is looking increasingly unsustainable. As Heinberg states, ours is a "food system profoundly vulnerable at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. Both are inevitable."

"Is it possible," he asks, "that a solution lies…in deliberately de-industrializing production but doing so intelligently, using information we have gained from the science of ecology as well as from traditional and indigenous farming methods?" He believes that it is possible, and in fact, imperative that we apply such an approach.

With the Special Period in Cuba as reference, Heinberg estimates that to maintain national food production up to fifty million farmers will need to join the three to four million current farmers. However a return to the land would require more than just willing farmers. Heinberg believes that these farmers must be aided by affordable access to land, university training in small-scale ecological farming methods, direct financial aid through start up phase, and long-term low-cost loans.

"It is not a simple or easy strategy, and it will require a coordinated and sustained national effort. But in addition to averting famine this strategy may also permit us to solve a host of other seemingly unrelated social and environmental problems." Heinberg tells us that "if we do this well, it could mean the revitalization not only of democracy but of the family and of authentic, place-based culture."

In his lecture Richard Heinberg has vividly outlined the reasons for returning to an agricultural system designed specifically to supply food to its own region. As an expert on the future of oil and natural gas he is well positioned to tell us that we must begin making changes. The production of food is of central concern not only because it is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, but also because continued production is vital to our survival.

Heinberg would have us "accept the current challenge--the next great energy transition--as an opportunity to re-imagine human culture from the ground up, using our intelligence and our passion for the welfare of coming generations and for the integrity of nature's web as our primary guides."

Heinberg's 2006 lecture "Fifty Million Farmers" edited by Hildegarde Hannum, is available in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society. Cost is five dollars each. Pay with BerkShares, cash, check, or credit card.

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