Last month the (En)Rich List was unveiled here at PGI. Coming out on top was E F Schumacher, one of the most influential men of the 2oth century. But who was Ernest Fritz Schumacher, and what makes him so important?

Fritz Schumacher was born in Germany 1911, in time to spend his childhood in the humiliated and economically constrained years after the First World War. He saw how his country’s circumstances were pushing politics in an extreme direction, and he moved to Britain to study at Oxford. When the Second World War began he was rounded up with many other Germans, and incarcerated in a makeshift prison camp. He had many friends, some of them quite influential, and they worked to secure his release. He saw out the remainder of the war working as a farm labourer, but throughout the whole period he was working on his economic ideas. His writing was getting noticed. On one occasion he took a day off from the farm to go to London to discuss one of his papers with John Maynard Keynes, the foremost economist of the age.

After the war Schumacher returned to Germany to work on the reconstruction, but was drawn back to England and eventually to a job as chief economist at the National Coal Board. This was a huge and very important nationalised industry, and he was to work here for the next two decades, working on energy policy, trade, employment, and much more besides.

It’s a little ironic that one of the most influential thinkers in sustainability worked in coal for most of his career, but this was before climate change was well understood. Schumacher became concerned about sustainability because he realised that coal and oil were non-renewable resources. The economy depended on them, but could not run forever on these energy sources. “Mankind has existed for many thousands of years and has always lived off income” he told a conference in Germany in 1954. “Only in the last hundred years has man forcibly broken into nature’s larder and is now emptying it out at a breathtaking speed which increases year to year.”

He began to develop an alternative economic theory, one that put people first and respected the environment. In 1955, seventeen years before the Club of Rome, Schumacher was recognizing the limits to growth:

“A civilization built on renewable resources… is superior to one built on non-renewable resources, such as oil, coal, metal, etc. This is because the former can last, while the latter cannot last. The former co-operates with nature, while the latter robs nature. The former bears the sign of life, while the latter bears the sign of death. It is already certain beyond the possibility of doubt that the ’0il-coal-metal-economies’ cannot be anything else but a short abnormality in the history of mankind – because they are based on non-renewable resources and because, being purely materialistic, they recognise no limits.”

Being a practical man as well as a theorist, Schumacher began working on some real-world responses. He championed organic agriculture and agro-forestry. He founded a charity to investigate intermediate technology – the term he coined for simple and empowering technologies that improved people’s lives, but that were still cheap and accessible. That charity is still at work, now called Practical Action. The philosophy of intermediate technology was also picked up worldwide – the Centre for Appropriate Technology , still active in the arid zone of Australia, is just one example of this kind of thinking.

It wasn’t until his sixties that Schumacher got around to writing the book that made him famous. He called it The Homecomers. The publisher agreed on all but the title, and discarded it in favour of Small is Beautiful, with the subtitle A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. It was published in 1973 and it became a global bestseller, connecting with a whole generation of students, with those pioneering voluntary simplicity, and the first shoots of the environmental movement.

Schumacher died just four years later, but the message was out and his influence is everywhere. The renewable energy revolution is underway, a little late perhaps, but just as Schumacher called for. He laid the foundations for the New Economics movement, and like Schumacher’s own catchphrase, the New Economics Foundation still have ‘Economics as if people and the planet mattered’ as their motto. The UK government has a localism agenda inspired by Schumacher’s ideas. Occupy protestors hold up ‘Small is Beautiful’ placards. The Schumacher Society are behind the wave of alternative currency experiments around the world. The Transition Towns movement has Schumacher’s fingerprints all over it. Appropriate technology is still a powerful idea in development. Organic farming, permaculture, New Urbanism, the Green Party, and countless other groups, organisations and movements owe a debt to Schumacher somewhere down the line. And that includes the postgrowth movement too.

It’s that legacy, the ideas that he inspired, that makes E F Schumacher so important. Many economists or thinkers put a name to something or explain something better. Others inspire an idealism that ends in oppression or chaos. Few economists have made such a positive, transformative, life-affirming contribution, and for that, E F Schumacher comes top of the (En)Rich List .

Jeremy blogs over at Make Wealth History.

Related posts:

1. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
2. Looking To The Future
3. Toward a Post Growth Society

When 26 year old Canadian Lee Brain began his testimony at the public hearings of the son of the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel in Prince Rupert on February 18, 2012, he claimed to be ‘no one in particular’.

What did this young man say about the proposal to run a pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia that resulted in a standing ovation and a crowd brought to tears after delivering his speech?

The transcript from the hearings has been reproduced below – however it is well worth watching the 20 minute clip of one man’s eyewitness testimony of the oil industry and his call to transition away from the fossil fuel industry:

The following is the testimony of Lee Brian at the Enbridge Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel hearings in Prince Rupert on February 18, 2012.

“Who am I? My name is Lee Brain, and, I am no one in particular.

I want to say that I’m not here today as a representative of any political party, business organization or special interest group. I have no agenda today but to simply offer my personal experience about how this project will impact me, and my community.

I am here today as sovereign, natural being of the planet who has been born into a certain time, and into an already established system of institutions.

As an independent observer of our collective reality, in coordination with 7 billion others, I am here regulated by my own internal self-governance process.

At the ripe age of just 26, I am old enough to have been humbled by the lessons of life, yet, not old enough to fully appreciate the whole journey it has to offer.

In Prince Rupert, I work as an After School Activities Coordinator, working with children in elementary schools. I also run a computer skills education company as a sole proprietor.

But I am truly here today representing a new generation of leaders that is emerging at this time, and speaking on behalf of a younger generation than myself that is still coming into awareness.

My story doesn’t begin very conventionally. Born in oil town Canada – Fort McMurray, Alberta – I am associated with one of the biggest oil men I know – my father. Having worked all over the world, he is primarily a start-up engineer and EPCM contractor that over sees some of the largest projects this world has to offer. He has worked in over 35 countries, speaks 7 languages fluently and is one of the most brilliant men I have ever personally encountered – and not just because he is my father.

Although ideologically, we do not see eye to eye all the time, we are connected by a deeper bond – an energy that is love that only a father and son can know. And this is not a fact I can easily share with my peer group, in fact, many of them are just learning about this in this very moment. In my generation, there is a growing frustration and anger towards men and women who operate at that level and caliber of things. And granted, I feel these same frustrations as well.

So I consider myself living somewhat of a hybrid life. On one hand, I am deeply passionate about a resilient, sustainable and flourishing planet – on the other hand, well, there’s my father – and I am forced into having to balance some of the most ideological paradoxes that we are faced with at this time. And I’m sure that the Enbridge representatives here today also have a sons or daughters who are just like me.

At 9 months of age, I fell down the stairs backwards and cracked my skull open. Parts of my brain went onto the floor, and at the time there was an outbreak of airborne meningitis, which I caught as well – needless to say, I should have had permanent brain damage and should not be here speaking to you today.

So I consider myself very fortunate to be here.

Shortly after that incident, we moved back to Prince Rupert where 3 generations of my family have resided. Growing up here my whole life, I am deeply attached to this region. I have watched as my family and friends have made their living off many of the many natural resources this area has to offer. At a young age, I was able to learn about many First Nation cultures, and how their stewardship of the land has kept this area in balance for thousands of years.

My oral evidence today comes in the form of a story, an experience I had 3 years ago which directly reflects the impacts this project will have on me, and my community.

The story begins after a lifetime of debating with my father – he thought it was high time for me to finally experience first-hand the magnitude and power of the oil industry.

So in the summer of 2009, I had the opportunity to spend one full month on one of the world’s largest oil refineries, producing 800,000 barrels of oil per day. At the time, it was under an expansion project to produce up to an astonishing 1.2 million barrels per day – and for confidentiality reasons, the company and details of the project will remain unnamed.

The catch was that this refinery was in a very rural area in a northern province of India – right on the coast of the Arabian Sea, and bordering Pakistan.

So here I am, 23 years old traveling to India, and needless to say, tensions were high upon arrival. Coming through the airport, between the H1N1 virus outbreak and the one year anniversary of the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks of 2008, the military presence was simply overwhelming.

I landed in Mumbai, or Bombay to the locals, and spent a day traveling to the northern province of Gujarat, Ghandi’s home province. Situated outside the small village of Jamnagar, I stayed in a secured complex surrounded by high walls, meant for expatriates – in literally the middle of nowhere. The land in the region was primarily used for agricultural production, but due to the strategic location on the Arabian Sea, naturally there was large military and industrial presence in the area as well.

Each day I would wake up at 6am, and travel roughly an hour to the refinery. Guarded with AK47s, I remember the first day of my arrival I had the whole place in a stir, wondering why I was there. And to tell you the truth, I was thinking the exact same thing. It’s not easy being in a foreign country, being the only young Caucasian male in sight, amongst 50,000 workers constantly staring at me. But my fears quickly subsided as I spent more time there each day, and learned about the gracious, kind and humbled culture of the East – regardless of the portrayals the media would have you believe.

I spent each day with 2-3 different managers from each department, and was able to learn a large portion of each faculty of discipline during my time there. I was very fortunate to have received such an in-depth, bird’s eye view of the entire project – and not even the most qualified engineering intern would have had this opportunity. The experience itself changed who I am fundamentally, forever.

I learned about the entire EPCM – that is – the production process from engineering, procurement, construction, and management – I spent many hours and days with managers from piping, documentation control, distributed control systems – civil, biological, chemical and environmental engineering – instrumentation, quality control, marine operations, water management – electrical and on-site power production – from construction management, procurement and materials, product creation and commercial supply, safety & security, and loading & unloading via rail, truck, VLCC & ULCC.

I am not exactly sure if the average person could fully appreciate the sheer magnitude of the operation, and the intricate interrelationship dynamics between workers, departments, managers and corporate headquarters. It is nothing Discovery Channel would ever be able to portray.

The experience made me question many of the fundamental assumptions I had been making regarding the industry itself. I was realizing just how tricky of a situation we are in globally. My naïveness of the reality and immensity of this substance was not fully actualized until I had this experience. I can say right now, that I fully respect the power of oil.

One such day on the refinery stood out in particular. It was a hot, sunny and humid day, after monsoon rainfall my entire time there – I think it was most likely the Prince Rupert weather following me overseas – and on that day a hand full of managers thought it would be fun to take me out to the Jetty, where they loaded and unloaded the super tankers. Situated a lengthy route away from the refinery itself, we drove down to towards the coastline.

On our way there, we drove past many different villages. Each one looking extremely impoverished. I learned later that this was not always the case. There was a time in this region where fishing, farming and the local economy truly flourished. But once the refinery project was approved, among other projects in the region, they built a pipeline directly through 9 different villages. Over a period of time, there was pipeline breakage which contaminated an underground aquifer, and spoiled the wells and water supply of the majority of the surrounding villages. As industry expanded, and land bought and sold, men were forced into cheap labour at the refineries, after lifetimes of sustainable farming and fishing – now dependent on one or two companies for employment. Women, children and elders went starving after losing access to fresh water, with no accountability for cleanup – just left to fend for themselves. I ask, what would be the case here in our region? Do you see any potential similarities?

Converging onto a thin strip of man-made road spanning about 2 miles in length, we arrived at the Jetty, greeted by military personnel. After a lengthy process of clearing me for entry, we walked onto couple massive docking stations. To my right, men were conducting repairs on a rather standard sized vessel, no larger than the ones you would see here in our Harbour. In the distance, an ULCC fresh from the Middle East was rolling in from the horizon. The size of the vessel stopped me in my tracks. After 10 minutes, the ship stopped and made a slow bank horizontally out at sea.

I asked one of the managers, Jitesh was his name, why the ship stopped so far out. He told me that because of the size of the ship, they had a floating unloading station, and through another piping system they unload & load way out there, and that connects to the main routing station at the Jetty, to be piped a few miles back to the refinery.

I asked him why, and he said “even though we have docking stations here, it is for the smaller vessels that are used for domestic purposes. But these larger vessels that come from the Middle East can run aground easily.”

This, in open seas, I thought.

So we all stood there, suspended in what felt like an eternal moment – the heat waves rising above the calmed Arabian Sea, and the ship danced in the horizon as I stood dumbfounded by its sheer mass. One man comments: “I always forget just how large those vessels are.”

A few moments pass as we all stood, just watching.

Out of the silence, Jitesh says to me “Do you see what we are doing here Mr. Lee?”

I asked “What’s that Jitesh?”

He replied, with an unexpected, sobering tone: “We are destroying future generations for now, and forever.”

And in this kind of slow motion life moment, I felt this kind of tingling feeling on the top of my head– and with sweat dripping down from the inside of my hard hat onto my face, the sun beaming into my eyes – I squint over at 6 men slowing nodding their heads in silent agreement.

It was such a profound statement, and in that moment, there was silence.

On the way back, I had a lengthy discussion with Jitesh about the ‘whys’ of it all – about life, the human condition, and the challenges we face in the 21st Century. Although I will not cover that conversation due to procedural constraints, I will say that I learned some extremely valuable lessons that day.

I learned that it is not because every man and woman who participate in industry are all evil, bad people – being in India, on this refinery, there was this certain kind of ‘rush’ I felt. I felt a kind of new power within myself – being in a productive, hard working, problem solving environment – Where there is grit, and dirt, and sweat, and mud and building and pumping and drilling and hammering and huge turbines at massive pressures doing crazy stuff. There is this feeling you get when you’re working with other professionals in a high stake environment – and on some very obscure and messed up level, I can understand how those who work in industry can get excited about growth and yet subsequently, can turn their eyes off towards any adverse impacts they are creating as a result.

Like I said, on a very obscure and messed up level.

And I just have to be fully honest and mention this, the feeling is addictive – you can literally feel it in your veins. And this coming from just one month of experience, with a totally different ideological perspective.

The major thing I witnessed in my time on the refinery that I feel constitutes as evidence was my observations of the relationship dynamics between corporate headquarters and the managers on the refinery. What I witnessed time and time again, was the technical experts knowing the damage, risk and adverse effects of the project, versus what corporate would portray to the general public after reading their materials. There was a clear and present dual world operating simultaneously – completely undeniable if you are on site. So what I saw, first hand, was this dynamic between ‘what is really happening’ and what the corporate headquarters will have people believe is happening. And as we have seen in our planet, this situation is not an isolated event.

Based on my experience, what I learned was that the global system of infinite growth attracts men and woman of a certain… level of understanding, a certain type of person who will be attracted to the ideals of the current economic measurement that coordinates the global psychology of things, and a type of person who externalizes themselves and detaches from connection, and so whole heartedly believes in their reality, their perception of things, that they project their fears out onto everyone else – and their ego becomes the driver, blindly leading them down a path of self-destruction. And they are people of high intellectual prowess, but unfortunately have yet to develop the deep wisdom that we all possess within us as human beings. And we call these people CEO, and Prime Minister.

The Enbridge Northern Gateway Project is simply just one of thousands of projects across the globe that are bi-products of a severely flawed global system. Even if this pipeline does not go through, there will be another proposal of the same magnitude appear somewhere else – and this will go on and on, until we either address the fundamental root of the issue – or face the slow decline of our civilization.

We are psychologically stuck – we are good at what we know, but are too scared to try anything else. If we could directly transfer the mobilization power of oil into a new energy economy, into a new economic measurement, into a new level of coordination and cooperation – where the true cost of development is clearly laid out – we may have a chance.

Because you simply cannot infinitely grow, within a finite system of resources – period.

So I do not sit here today, in anger, or in blame, or in judgment. And on behalf of my generation, I forgive these men and women for their lack of awareness, heart and understanding. They too were born into an established system, conditioned into a certain way of thinking, and as far as they know, they did and are doing their best. But now, it is time to let go of the 20th Century, and enter into a new global direction towards a path of healing and new design.

In closing

It’s time now for a full scale, mass mobilized transition process off the fossil fuel economy. We need to use all of our resources we have left wisely to create a whole new system of operation that is global in scale. This process needs to have the mobilization power comparable to the proportions of the Manhattan project, and then some. It’s time for us to journey into a new dream, a new way, with new design and new fundamental principles. It’s time for us to end a millennia of pain, suffering, shame and unconsciousness. It’s time to create resilient, sustainable and flourishing communities, that have the adaptive capacity to respond to any challenges they may face in their external environment – and be able to effectively respond specifically to the coming age of peak oil, climate change and rampant global economic instability.

It’s time for us to dismantle the institutions that are beginning to imprison us. It’s time for us to un-learn, to remove the power structures, and to decentralize the grid so that individual communities can produce their own food, energy and own internal means of production for hundreds to thousands of years to come.

And ultimately, it’s time for us to become the true masters we are meant to become – true, planetary mastery – in balance with the emotional, cultural, spiritual and psychological well- being of every inhabitant. It’s time for us to embrace the new consciousness that is emerging at this time, where by busting open the hearts and minds of our people, we will propel ourselves forward into a new golden age of humanity that is imminently upon us.

We are those people.

So, if on one hand, you had an unpredictable path, that leads into a new dream, a new way of life for all of mankind.

and on the other hand, you had a predictable path that leads to the slow, inevitable decline of a civilization.

Which path would you choose? Thank you.”

Related posts:

1. 12 Steps To Treat Our Growth Addiction

This is part of an ongoing series in which we will feature ways Post Growth is in action already.  The intention of this series is to inspire ideas about how to engage intentionally in our communities.  Please visit our Post Growth in Action web page for more. 

Seattle Tilth has been educating gardeners, empowering eaters, and advocating for farmers in western Washington State, USA since 1978. It remains one of the most recognized and effective local and sustainable food culture organizations in the region.  A couple years ago, Tilth adopted and renovated an existing local program which is now called Seattle Youth Garden Works (SYGW).  Last fall, I had the privilege of volunteering with this program one afternoon a week and was greatly impressed by the experience.

SYGW serves homeless and at-risk youth ages 16 to 21, teaching teamwork, self-respect, and education- and employment-specific life skills through urban farming and farmers’ market work.  Youth crew members are referred by schools or case workers, interviewed, and hired on a seasonal basis.  They are asked agree to the terms of a contract developed collaboratively by SYGW staff and youth crew.  The youth choose whether they wish to sign on and are paid an hourly wage for their participation.

The ‘mentor’ role, which is SYGW’s term for my volunteer position, is not a one-on-one relationship as in a big brother / big sister kind of program.  Rather, mentors are present at the student work sessions to model good work ethic, respectful communication, balanced (not perfect) processing and expression of emotion, and healthy boundaries.  The thorough volunteer mentor recruitment process included a ‘group interview’ discussion of our experiences, perceptions, and misgivings about interacting with people in vulnerable circumstances such as homelessness, addiction, mental illness, and history of abuse.  Prior gardening and youth work experience were desirable but what mattered most to the SYGW staff was one’s willingness to learn and listen.  Once chosen for participation, the volunteers attended a 3-hour training on homelessness–causes, street culture, and intervention.  (This event was offered by another social service organization and attended by new volunteers of several different programs.)

In addition to garden maintenance, harvesting, and preparing the produce for market, afternoon work sessions often included presentations by guest speakers on topics including resume writing, starting a small business, how to prepare and apply for college, personal finances, and healthy cooking.  Both the program and the crew members underwent round-table feedback at the end of each week.  The youth demonstrated remarkable self-awareness, forthrightness, and dedication both to the integrity of the program and to the well-being of the other members of the crew.  Veteran crew members (some were on their 3rd session, having started spring of 2011) were both hospitable and authoritative in introducing new mentors to the workings of the farm.  When I visited the SYGW Saturday morning farmers’ market near the end of my volunteer session, I was delighted by the evident pride that the youth took in the fruits of their labor, their composure interacting with the public, and in the welcome they showed to me.  As I was purchasing my vegetables, one of the youth graciously served me coffee (brewed fresh by the cup!) and declined to include it in my total, grinning shyly and saying, “We’re family!”

The most powerful moment for me of this 2-month experience was the afternoon that both youth and leaders were invited to draw a ‘life map’ and tell their stories in a framework of highs, lows, major identity factors, significant experiences, and hopes and fears for the future.  Each of these young lives was marked by crisis and hardship that I find hard to imagine.  Some had suffered in part due to their own choices, recognized this, and were determined to make a better go of it this time.  All had been dealt a hand at some point in their life for which no one with a decent helping of empathy could blame them had they given up the game.  Few were angry (though they had every right to be); many were sad but still able to celebrate memories; all had dreams.  They listened to and encouraged one another, as they did for us.  In cultures where appearances (be it a tough exterior, a tidy unreproachable track record, or moral superiority based in socioeconomic difference) are held at a premium, encounters like this are a rare and beautiful thing.  Seattle Youth Garden Works does not merely keep kids out of trouble and prepare them for jobs.  It is an education in humanity and community at its finest.

Related posts:

1. Local Spotlight – March 2012
2. Local Spotlight – January, 2012
3. What We’re Reading (and Watching!) – April 2012

I spent the day last Monday at the United Nations by invitation of the Bhutanese government (along with about 600 other guests). The event was called “High Level Meeting on Well-being and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm.” I thought, “It must not be very high-level if I am invited.” Nonetheless, there I was among 600 activists, economists, NGO workers, bankers, et al from around the world, listening to speeches by prime ministers and Nobel laureates. Except for the monks, I was the only man not wearing a necktie. But that wasn’t what disturbed me about the meeting.

Let me give you a bit of background. In 1972, the King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, remarked that, instead of gross national product (GNP), the nation should strive for “gross national happiness” (GNH). I believe he meant merely to point out that GNP (or GDP, as is more commonly used today) is a poor indicator of a nation’s well-being. The concept of gross national happiness had traction, though, and it wasn’t long before psychologists and economists were trying to come up with metrics to put a number on the concept. Adding impetus to this effort was a growing awareness among social critics that GDP is a very poor indicator of a people’s well-being. In the United States, real per-capita GDP has risen three-fold since the 1950s, but people are not three times happier by any measure. If anything, they are less happy.

Goods and Growth

That GDP and happiness are poorly correlated actually presents a deep challenge to economic dogma. Economics associates GDP closely with “utility” – that is, with “goodness.” After all, you won’t buy something with your hard-earned cash if it doesn’t benefit you, right? If, for example, you decided to sacrifice some of your leisure time in order to buy a new car, that must mean the car will make you happier than that extra hour of leisure every day. In a free market, two parties won’t make an exchange if it is not to their mutual benefit. Therefore, say the economists, the more exchanges being made, the more total benefit is being had. That is why, in economics, it is those things that are exchanged for money – and only those things – that are called “goods.”

The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times. The main message seemed to be, “Of course we will continue to have economic growth and sustainable development, but alongside it we should adopt policies that foster the well-being that GDP doesn’t measure.”

The Federal Palace Restaurant in Hong Kong offers this advice on happiness.

Economic growth is sacrosanct for a reason: without it, our money system disintegrates. Because money is created as interest-bearing debt, without growth, debt tends to rise faster than the ability to service it. For a time, borrowers can be lent even more money with which to service their debts while they wait for the return of growth; but if growth doesn’t return, they will go bankrupt. As this process proceeds, debt-to-income ratios rise, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, and a Marxian crisis of capital looms: a vicious circle of falling wages or employment, shrinking demand, falling profits, more layoffs, and so on. In times of high growth, a portion of that growth can go to enrich the owners of capital, and everyone else can get richer, too. But when growth slows, there isn’t enough wealth left for “everyone else” after the interest has been paid.

So it is in Europe today: “Austerity” means that more and more of a nation’s income will go toward debt service, and more and more of its assets will be transferred to its creditors. And if growth doesn’t resume, this process will never end until the entire population are paupers. Around the world, whether for nations or for individuals, financial policymakers adhere to the same plan: Grow your way out of debt. The only alternative is some sort of redistribution of wealth – through debt forgiveness, for example, through inflation, or through Gesellian negative-interest economics. There is no alternative that preserves the wealth of those who have wealth.

Thus it was that, at the conference and in the World Happiness Report that accompanied it, while there were a few nods to the ecological limits of growth, there was no mention of addressing Third World debt, consumer debt, or the financial system that depends on it. This was the coal pile in the ballroom – obvious but unmentionable, for acknowledging it would mean, inescapably, a radical transformation of our entire society. The circles represented at this “high level” conference have not reached the point yet of countenancing anything as radical as ending the debt system. But they will soon. As ecosystems and cultures unravel, the party isn’t as much fun anymore even for those at the top.

Debt and the Erosion of Well-Being

Without addressing debt, I’m afraid the world won’t make much progress in happiness. You see, it is not only that GDP and GNH are not equivalent; further growth in GDP cannot even happen without eroding the basis of human well-being on Earth. What exactly happens when GDP grows? GDP is defined as the sum total of goods and services exchanged for money. So, if neighbors look after each other’s children, no service is rendered; it only becomes a service when they pay for day care instead. If a culture practices subsistence farming on communal land, no goods are being produced. The food only becomes a good when they sell it to each other; so, too, the land when they divide it into private property and rent it out. Any potential to monetize what was once free is a business opportunity, a lending opportunity. Without such opportunities, banks cannot lend new money into existence. Without new money, the old debts quickly become unpayable. And because the new money comes along with even more debt, the system always needs to grow; the realm of goods and services needs always to expand.

So here is a dilemma: The way the realm of goods and services expands is by transforming nature and social relationships – the very things that the World Happiness Report cites as essential to happiness – into products and services. In order to keep the financial system functioning, we are destroying the basis of human well-being.

Here are some of the many examples of how economic growth policies directly destroy the essentials of happiness. Economic growth turns social reciprocity and gift relationships (two components of GNH) into paid services. It converts pristine ecosystems into sources of timber or minerals. It converts silence into noise, starry skies into urban lights, kitchen gardens into supermarket purchases, mom’s cooking into fast food takeout. It replaces the village storyteller with the TV cartoon, mothering with day care, outdoor play with video games. A society that still has these former things intact, and meets its needs without much money, is called, by economists, an “undeveloped market.” The process of liquidating social and natural capital is called “development.” Clearly, our conception of sustainable development is begging for scrutiny.

It is not enough to call for education, national pride, or religious teachings to stem the tide of globalization when the money system drives that tide. When rural youth leave the farm for the slums of Cairo or Bangkok, the glamorized images of Western consumption that draw them usually have an ally in economic conditions. Possibly, it is that local produce cannot compete with imports thanks to free trade policies and perverse subsidies for mechanized agriculture and transport. And what is behind the free trade policies, the subsidies? We would like to blame greed, but, at the bottom, I find something more banal – the pressure to pay the bondholders, or to get an extra half-percent return on investment, or to reduce a fiscal deficit. Debt pressure is endemic to the system, and it pushes the commoditization and marketization of everything and everyone. Ecological protection, cultural diversity, local agriculture, and fair trade are all under assault when nations are forced to liquidate natural resources, to convert agriculture to commodity production, to open markets and eliminate protections on labor in order to keep servicing their debts to the international banking system. The effects of debt pressure reach into personal life in wealthy countries, too. We would like to enjoy more leisure (listed in the report as important for happiness), but how can we when we have student loans to pay, credit cards, mortgage debt?

At the conference, Swami Atmapriyananda recited an old teaching story about a fisherman lounging at the wharf. A businessman comes up and asks why he isn’t out there fishing. “I already caught enough today to feed my family.”

“But if you fish more, you could sell the fish and make money.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“With the money, you could buy more boats and hire other people to man them.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Well, then you could make even more money and retire.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Then you could spend your days lounging on the wharf and only fishing as much as you pleased.”

“But that’s what I’m doing right now.”

During the Q&A at the end of the conference I offered a variation to this story. The businessman tells the fisherman he could make more money. “Why would I want to do that?” Because if you don’t, you won’t be able to make your debt payments and I will seize your boat!

In summary, debt drives growth, and growth drives debt. This system erodes many of the things that are essential to human happiness – such as community, leisure, and nature – but as long as there is room for new growth, the system can keep going. Today, though, we are running out of nature to convert into goods – the planet just cannot sustain much more exploitation. We are also running out of social relationships that aren’t yet monetized. This crisis of growth has been delayed for many decades through colonialism and technology, extending the domain of money, but it is upon us now. The result is rising indebtedness and growing misery, as each extension of growth comes at higher and higher cost.

Human Nature and the Easterlin Paradox

A key paradox in the field of happiness research illuminates this situation. Known as the Easterlin Paradox, it observes that, while national happiness doesn’t rise with national income, nonetheless, within a nation, those with higher incomes are generally happier than their compatriots; moreover, wealthier nations generally rank higher in measures of happiness than poorer nations. With a few notable exceptions (Costa Rica, Thailand), the happiest countries on Earth are the Western industrialized democracies.

How to explain this paradox? One might critique the findings of the report on methodological and conceptual grounds. For example, could “happiness” signify different things in different cultures? Perhaps it has taken on associations of Western-style “success.” Or, perhaps, it only measures how people compare themselves to a socially constructed standard. The accepted explanation for the paradox is that people are, by nature, competitive and are, therefore, unhappy when they see people around them who are wealthier than they are. If that is the explanation, one can only shrug one’s shoulders. Absent totalitarian communism, people will always vary in their abilities and fortune. At best, it suggests the prescriptions of mainstream political liberalism – more equitable distribution and welfare state services to ameliorate the effects of disparities. The economists present were comfortable with this level of change which, admittedly, in the current political environment, is already beyond the pale. I would be happy if the liberals got their way, but they will not. We cannot afford it – if “afford” means, as it does today, to keep the wealth of the creditor class intact. Along with everybody else, the liberals are working against debt pressure, which conspires to erode the social safety net and intensify wealth concentration still further. There is no escaping the need for systemic monetary reform.

The dynamics of growth and debt reveal another, more disturbing explanation for the Easterlin Paradox. The reason that lower-income nations are unhappier is simply that the basis of happiness there has been strip-mined, converted to money, and exported to creditor nations. And, of course, within these creditor nations it is the same – only a very few people enjoy the benefits. Most people there are debtors, as well, and suffer from the same depletion of the natural and social capital.

Where does happiness fit in life?

When the elements of well-being have been stripped from a culture, when its communities, its traditions and stories, its relationship to the land, its cultural identity, its natural resources are all gone, then its people have only money left to sustain themselves. Basic human needs do not change; but when an economy is monetized, the many ways its people meet these needs collapse into one way – money. Once that has happened, of course, it is true that happiness will depend on money. So, the explanation for the Easterlin Paradox is not that we compare ourselves to our fellows and are envious of their success; it is that the success of one comes at the expense of another. One man’s wealth is another man’s debt.

From this perspective, it is clear why economic growth doesn’t increase happiness. If monetary transactions merely replace things that have been lost, they won’t increase “utility” or well-being at all. For example, if I take your land and sell it back to you, if I destroy your culture and sell you entertainment, if I destroy systems of reciprocal labor and force people to buy and sell labor, if I pollute or privatize the water so that you have to pay for potable water, if I destroy your indigenous systems of healing and learning so that you must pay for medicine and education, if I impose debt on a population so that people must pay to even exist, then no one is actually better off. Instead, we have a situation where a shrinking minority can obtain at least the measurable factors of happiness, while the majority can’t even obtain those. And this state of affairs is irremediable, as long as we are stuck in a scarcity-inducing, debt-based money system.

Measuring Happiness

It is not surprising that the economists and dignitaries couldn’t acknowledge how fundamental this crisis actually is. They are, after all, deeply invested in the present system. But even the most conservative among us sense, I think, that superficial efforts to promote happiness are doomed, that some inexorable force is working against them. Though they might respond to this helplessness with pretense or cynicism, there is hope, too. Some of the speakers were from outside government and academia, and when they enunciated principles wholly at odds with mainstream economic philosophy, the audience came alive – professors, World Bank employees, NGO workers, and grass roots activists alike. If nothing else, the conference was significant for bringing such voices into a high-level conversation on economics.

There was, at the conference, an undercurrent of radicalism that would have supported a deeper critique. It surfaced a few times: Costa Rican president Laura Chinchilla mentioned the need to reconceive what development is; Dr. Vandana Shiva spoke of the horrendous effects of economic development on Indian agriculture and questioned whether happiness can really be measured; Dasho Karma Ura spoke of the “joy of slowness,” the value of silence in nature, and other things fundamentally inimical to development as we know it. “In the GNH paradigm,” said Dasho Karma Tshiteem, “time is life, not money.”

One after another, the Western professors at the podium proclaimed, “Happiness is something we can measure,” and each attendee received a 100+ page World Happiness Report ranking the happiness level of each country according to a variety of measurements. While I had questions about the methodology and unexamined assumptions behind the data, my main question was, “Why is it so important to measure happiness?”

For one thing, if happiness can be measured, and if we understand the purpose of government to be maximizing the happiness of its people, then we can continue to apply the same mindsets and methods of the technocrat to governance, merely replacing GDP with a quantified measure of GNH. This would fulfill Jeremy Bentham’s 200-year-old ambition to make a science of governance. For a long time, we have sought through economics, political “science,” and the “social sciences” generally to engineer a more perfect society. If only we could be more rational, more scientific! Running society becomes something like a math problem.

Members of the intellectual establishment will not give up this ambition easily, for their careers are dedicated to it, valorized by it. If social engineering has largely failed, perhaps that is because we aren’t doing it well enough. We need better data! If GDP is flawed, let’s replace it with a new measure. That the whole ambition to quantify everything and to base decisions on the maximizing of a number is insane does not occur to them, for it lies at the foundation of a a 400-year-old intellectual tradition going back at least to Galileo. In science, only the measurable is real.

Even more alien to the technocrat would be the notion that the progressive quantification of the world is hostile to human happiness. Today we see the encroachment of the realm of money, of the commodity, of property, into the domains of the commons and the gift. We might add to Dasho Karma Tshiteem’s observation and say that only when we measure time can the equation “time is money” take hold. Perhaps it is the immeasurable that is key to happiness. Proposals for GNH metrics seek to measure the number of one’s social relationships; but can it measure their quality? We might measure leisure time, but can we distinguish hours spent in mindless dissipation from those spent in intimate connection? The danger, in making choices by the numbers, is that we develop those things that can be measured and neglect those that cannot. That is why, on a personal level, it is foolish to make choices based on money. On a collective level, too, that is why we have so many huge but ugly buildings, copious but unnourishing calories, pervasive but impersonal entertainment. And it is why those outside the measurement systems – such as the indigenous and other species – have been sacrificed on the altar of growth.

Happiness isn

To be fair, the desire to measure happiness is well-motivated. While I didn’t hear it explicitly stated, a natural next step after establishing a GNH measure would be to monetize it, in the sense of internalizing costs that are presently externalized onto our well-being. For example, if we decide that healthy ecosystems are important to happiness, we could tax their depletion. Some of the economists present at the meeting advocate just this. Robert Costanza, for instance, is a leading figure in ecological economics who advocates the valuation of “ecosystem services.” Once so valued, we can easily manage their use through green taxes and similar measures. I sympathize with this idea of finding ways to make products and processes that involve the despoliation of the planet prohibitively expensive. We must also keep in mind, however, that the immeasurable might be even more precious. Without this awareness, we risk committing monstrous acts. What if, for instance, we assign a value to a certain rare species of turtle, and find that the revenue generated by paving over its last habitat and building strip malls exceeds that value?

I am not sure whether, ultimately, the designs of the economists can be consistent with the spiritual teachings that certain of the monks brought to the conference. It seemed that the economists were salivating to get their hands on a new arena of utility-maximization. Even if their motivation is to apply the tools of their trade for the good, those tools are based on a worldview that has unhappiness built into it. It might, in this case, be as Audre Lord said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Human Nature and Selfishness

Primary among the axioms of economics is the assumption of selfishness – that human beings seek to maximize their rational self-interest, at least in most situations. After all, if you have a choice between paying more and paying less, you pay less. Everyone tries to get the best deal. Yet some of the spiritual leaders at the meeting enunciated a very different conception of human nature. They spoke of the interconnected nature of being and, drawing applause from the audience, of the importance of altruism and loving-kindness as a basis for happiness.

The World Happiness Report, however, was more equivocal. True, it devoted a brief section to the correlation between altruism and happiness, citing studies that show that people who volunteer tend to be happier than those who do not; but it also argued that people’s own happiness diminishes when the people around them increase their income. Consider the following passage in the report:

But the more general finding is that comparator’s income reduced happiness and this has been strikingly confirmed in many laboratory experiments. One neuroscience experiment involved the task of guessing the number of dots on a screen. Good guesses were rewarded by a monetary payment. Each subject was paired with another subject, and after each of the 300 trials the subject was told the accuracy of his own guesses and the associated income he would receive, as well as the same information for his “pair.” At the same time fMRI scans measured the blood oxygenation in the subject’s relevant reward center (the ventral striatum). Blood oxygenations responded strongly to both the subject’s own income (positively) and to the pair’s income (negatively). The negative effect of the pair’s income was at least two thirds as large as the positive effect of the subject’s own income.

What are we to make of this? One might conclude that, just as economists tell us, human beings are indeed motivated by self-interest, and that this self-interest generally corresponds to money. Moreover, happiness measures also correlate fairly strongly with income. But, we might also ask, in what situation is it normal to envy the success of another person or to gloat over their failure? It is normal in a competitive situation, and our money system immerses us in perpetual competition. Because money is created through lending at interest, there is always more debt than there is money. We are always in competition for never-enough of it. The more monetized a society in which we live, the more this condition colors our perceptions, so that, quite naturally, we accept it as human nature.

Perhaps selfishness is not human nature; perhaps it is an artifact of our system. Someone recently told me a story about an anthropologist who put a basketful of sweet fruit near a tree and told some children that whoever got there first would win the fruits. The children all joined hands and ran there together. When the anthropologist asked them why, they responded, “How can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?” Perhaps this, and not the above social psychology experiment, exemplifies human nature. Or, perhaps, human nature is not an immutable absolute, but arises through the the interplay of biology and culture.

In a gift-based culture, it is obvious that each person’s well-being depends on the well-being of others. In a usury-based culture, it is not so obvious. Your misfortune is my good fortune, because that’s one less competitor for never-enough money. When one is in debt, it is hard to experience the “joy of slowness” that Dasho Karma Ura spoke of. For many people I know, debt is a powerful source of stress. Marriages fall apart because of it, health breaks down. Recently, an elderly man in Greece even killed himself to escape his debts. There is academic research demonstrating a correlation between debt and psychological distress.1

Barriers to Interbeing

Why wasn’t debt and the money system mentioned in the conference? It is all well and good to voice lofty intentions to uphold the things that the debt system is destroying, but if that system isn’t addressed as well, those intentions will never be kept. I am not surprised that it wasn’t mentioned, because the money system lies at the heart of today’s world order. To advocate creating money in a different way than through interest-bearing debt is heresy. Economists, in particular, are wedded to this system, so I was not surprised that they didn’t highlight its incompatibility with so many of their criteria for happiness. The best they could do was to say, “High income does make people happy, but other things do, too. Therefore, we must pay attention to these other things even as we strive for continued economic growth.”

One might easily say that the economists have hijacked the Gross National Happiness movement, neutering its implicit radical critique of economic growth. They seem to have turned it away from the deeper questions, not only regarding the money system, but also the worldview upon which it rests – the reductionistic philosophy of measurement, number, and control, and the vision of a world of separate, competing selves. Yet even they resonate with teachings that run counter to that worldview. Perhaps they are doing the best they can, within the limits of their operating paradigms, to bring about a more beautiful world.

Unfortunately, these operating paradigms doom such efforts to failure. It is not just the money system that is at stake here. Underlying our debt-based system is a certain view of human nature, human identity, and our relationship to nature that is, like the money system, in crisis. A system that engenders competition makes sense in a world of discrete, separate selves, striving first and foremost to survive and reproduce in a world of Other. But that sense-of-self is becoming obsolete; many of the religious speakers talked of the interconnected nature of being, of interbeingness, of the larger We. Even the economists acknowledged the importance of connections and community for happiness. But when we have a money system that fosters endemic disconnection, any efforts to promote happiness will be fighting an uphill battle. We saw what happened when the sincere intentions of Rio ran up against financial reality, and its hopefully promises came to nought. Let’s not repeat that mistake. It is time to confront the fact that our spiritual values, which are evolving toward oneness or interconnection, are at odds with our institutions, which embody separation. Our economic institutions are chief among them, and cannot be excluded from the happiness conversation.

Reposted from Shareable, 15 April 2012

1. See for example S. Brown et al. / Journal of Economic Psychology 26 (2005) 642–663. The researchers disaggregated debt from income and assets. Savings have a positive correlation with reported life satisfaction, but not as strong as the negative correlation between debt and life satisfaction.

Photo credits Used under Creative Commons license:

1. Guy Kawasaki/Erno Hannink. 
2. Paul Downey. 
3. Jarno. 

Related posts:

1. Bernanke on Happiness
2. Challenging the Happiness Argument
3. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

This is part of an ongoing series highlighting what our members are currently reading in the Post Growth and sustainability realms.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

When exploring alternatives to the status quo, I think many of us are guilty of looking for ‘new’ ideas, overlooking the diverse wisdoms that have sustained people and the earth thus far.  In this beautifully written book, David Abram effectively draws on multiple ways of knowing, including: phenomenology; indigenous knowledges; the ‘more-than-human’ world of the land, air, animals; our sensory experiences; and more.  He urges readers to acknowledge that any focus on the purely human world without recognizing its constitutive relationships with everything else is foolish and indeed, (mis)leading us down a disastrous path.  Instead, his explorations go to enough depth to open our minds to the potentials of more interconnected conceptualizations of ourselves with/in the world. – Janet

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Novelist and essayist Barbara Kingsolver and her family try their hands at a year of local and partly self-sufficient eating on a small once-and-future farmland acreage in southern Appalachia.  The story starts in March with the start of the growing season (resourcefulness required to fill a plate from one’s temperate-zone county is immense at this time of year, even in a community that is quite neighborly and agrarian relative to most of the U.S.) and concludes with a reflection on the mystery of life and the privilege of participating in the process of being sustained (though sometimes also thwarted) by the abundance and complexity of nature.  In between: rooster antics, homemade cheese, and ingenious coping mechanisms of humans faced with an oversupply of zucchini.  One chapter for each month.  Engaging and informative, the book reads like a well-produced documentary, seamlessly interspersing anecdotes, social analysis, personal reflection, political and nutritional information, and–recipes!

The writing itself is a family affair, with husband Steven Hopp contributing sidebars highlighting food policy and agriculture industry issues in more detail, and teenage daughter Camille covering nutritional and culinary aspects of the experiment.  10-year-old daughter Lily is responsible for the poultry and insightful, humorous 1-liners that color many of the stories.  Kingsolver’s comprehensive and articulate survey of the state of food culture in the United States is balanced by descriptions of the trials and triumphs of novice farmers, all delivered with her classic no-nonsense irreverence that make one feel that one is listening over the kitchen table or the back fence of a neighbor who is becoming a good friend. – Ingrid

Mindwalk (film) by Bernt Amadeus Capra

In February, I wrote here on What We’re Reading about the book The Web of Life.  For those who are keener on films and/or want a simpler introduction to systems thinking, check out the film Mindwalk.  Filmed in 1990, it was way ahead of its time, describing ecological literacy as part of a complex systems perspective of the world.

The film features three main characters: a physicist, a poet, and a politician.  They bump into each other while exploring the iconic island of Mont Saint Michel in northern France.  Each of them is there for a different reason, but they have one thing in common: they are all on a personal quest for a better understanding of the world and themselves.  And that’s exactly what they gain from the conversation that emerges between them.

Rich in deep, holistic thinking, the film offers the viewer a systems perspective of the problems that the modern world faces and, thus, a systems perspective for seeking and finding sustainable solutions.  No solutions are offered; just a refreshing perspective that acknowledges and explores the complexity and fluidity of human systems.  I appreciated it even more knowing that it was filmed in 1990.   – Jen

Related posts:

1. What We’re Reading (and Watching!) – November 2011
2. What We’re Reading (and Watching!) – December, 2011
3. What We’re Reading – February, 2012

On September 15, 2011, at over 60 locations worldwide, people handed out their own money to complete strangers, two coins or notes at a time, asking recipients to pass half on to someone else. Here are our reflections on the event, including why and how it happened.

Life Beyond Economic Growth

Most of the world’s transactions do not involve finance. From parenting, caregiving, growing and sharing food, volunteering, and borrowing library items to doing household chores and exchanging ideas on the Internet, aspects of the informal economy are familiar to us all.

A brief historical look also reminds us that our current monetary systems aren’t all we’ve ever known. In fact, even now, there are numerous alternatives currently in play. For instance, thousands of people around the world are engaged in bartering and gift economies which have persisted since ‘pre-money’ times. Others are developing and using alternative currencies, such as Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) and TimeDollars or Time Banking. There are also groups working on ‘open-source’ currencies, and families who are choosing to spend less money, buy less stuff, and live more simply.

Often drawing on these alternatives, an increasing number of organized initiatives are deliberately fostering sustainable economic and political systems. Think here of Transition Towns, the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, the Post Carbon Institute, Via Campesina, the New Economics Foundation, Community Economies, and Occupy movements.

Life-supporting economic principles are already evident in many worker-run cooperatives and businesses, sliding scale payment options, participatory budgeting approaches, social justice movements, Fair Trade efforts, Community Land Trusts, credit unions, barter clubs, family and clan-based production methods, collective housing arrangements, job-sharing arrangements, and other forms of the solidarity economy. Meanwhile, ecological economics provide a helpful alternative framework for thinking about bigger picture economic and environmental questions. Clearly, there is good cause to feel hopeful about the plausibility of providing for ourselves and communities without growth-based money systems at the center of activity.

In this light, the proposition that we can thrive without a growth model economy becomes increasingly believable. Indeed, it can be understood as more likely to serve us than the alternative: the endless pursuit of growth on a finite planet.

Given the relentlessness of growth messages from our media, governments, and each other, how might we collectively recognize the greater prosperity that can accompany shifts away from economic growth? How can we understand the relationships among existing sharing practices, new systems developments, and potentials for post-growth futures? How can conversations – about the meanings we give to money, the ways we use it, and alternatives to our reliance upon it – be nurtured in public spaces?

Free Money Day

Inspired by these questions and being big believers in the value of exploring the lighter side of grave challenges, we at the Post Growth Institute decided to conduct a social experiment: Free Money Day. Encouraging creative approaches, we challenged the peoples of the world to take to the streets to give away their own money. Signed-up participants committed to give two small coins or banknotes to strangers, asking these strangers to pass one of them on to someone else – as a symbolic gesture, not a donation.

Quirky? Yes. Likely to elicit questions and dialogue? We hoped so. The idea was for this simple exercise to act as an interruption to our trained response to the prospect of ‘free money’. Curiosity was embraced as a conversation starter.

We created a website and invited participants to share what they did through photos, footage, or reflections they wanted to pass along to the wider world. The site included a world map, so people could find their closest event and observe the experiment’s reach.

We scheduled activities to happen on September 15, 2011, purposefully coinciding with the anniversary of the 2008 bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers. One of the world’s largest investment banks at that time, Lehman Brothers’ collapse triggered a series of events which contributed to global financial mayhem, the repercussions of which are still being felt.

Why Focus on Money?

As a medium for exchange, money helps keep many economies running. A certain level of income is vital for people within such systems to be able to meet their basic needs. However, research consistently suggests that, beyond a certain point, having more money does not increase an individual’s well-being. This obsession with making more money as individuals is mirrored by our societal addiction to unending economic growth.

The pursuit of these fixations is seriously impacting people’s employment situations, livelihoods, ability to access food, and even the stability of the climate. The money systems in which we are currently enmeshed are fundamentally unstable – they create bubbles, and a destructive boom-bust cycle, which result in loss of jobs, homes, health, and even lives.

The U.S. government’s repeated debt ceiling hikes may temporarily delay further economic upheaval, but an overarching problem remains: We cannot grow on like this! The world’s formal financial systems, which are based on exponential growth, are fundamentally incompatible with a world that has limits to the availability of certain resources.

The Gift of Giving

As it turns out, there are plenty of people eager to liberate themselves from the entrenched relationships we so often have with money and, therein, growth. At the first global Free Money Day, there were 64 events registered in 44 cities, across 19 countries. The equivalent of approximately $3,000 (US) was given away to complete strangers. In addition, to their great surprise, some participants were handed money by strangers!

Participants took seriously the invitation to get creative: One person drew pictures, attached them to coins (with instructions), and left them in public places; one participant engaged ‘virtually’ as a way of overcoming material barriers to her participation in public; another participated via post. Several handed out money on the streets to passersby (on trains, in town squares, and even at the top of a snow-covered mountain).

Based on participant feedback, the predominant responses from the public were a mixture of confusion and amazement. Once people realized there was no catch, they were happy to chat in greater depth. One woman reportedly broke down in tears. She had just lost her job to corporate downsizing and said that whilst a dollar obviously wasn’t going to change her situation, she was comforted to know people genuinely cared. Another person, deeply moved by the gift, said it was the first time they had ever been given something without any expectations in return.

A common response was: “Give it to someone who actually needs it.” However, the apprehensiveness of these passersby to accept the money often dissipated once they knew they could also give some of it away. And they did: In Sydney, where it took four hours to give away $1,000 outside the town hall, journalists came up to cover the story. When asked how they learned about the event, they said that their interest had been prompted when someone randomly gave them a dollar a few streets away!

Perhaps the greatest insights came from the people who were on the streets that day. Here is what some of them (givers and receivers) had to say:

“Those are the moments in life that I’m PASSIONATE about. Moments that challenge common conceptions, touch people in a different way that might actually make a shift in paradigm, generate debate and bring back LOVE to our lives.” – Axel

“ inspired me to become more pro-active about the things I value and believe could improve the standard of living of others.” – Nudzejma

“I think about all the time. I have a family, I want to look after them the best I can. So, obviously amassing as much as I can gives them the lifestyle that I want to give them. This concept of … having someone give it back to you throws everything on its head, gives me a chance to reflect … It never is enough. You just tend to spend as much as you make.” – Ted

“I’m a homeless man and I often get confronted by beggars coming up to me in the street, cutting me off, confrontational, and asking for spare change. Now, the awareness of this today is so cool because if everyone went around giving, no one would be asking … and the world would be such a better place.” – Joe

Free Money Day, 2012

Fueled by the energy and passion of last year’s participants, Free Money Day 2012 will again take place on September 15 all around the world. This year we’re partnering with debt relief groups to include ‘forgiving’ informal debts amongst friends and formal debts between countries and companies. If you would like more information or are interested in participating, please visit the Free Money Day website or join the conversation through Twitter with the hashtag #freemoneyday, and Facebook.

Then again, no need to wait until September to try it out – sharing money is always common cents!

This piece was previously published at www.shareable.net

Related posts:

1. Sharing is Caring
2. Four Degrees of Sharing
3. Freedom from money

We are very excited to share news of our latest project: The (En)Rich List.  This is our way of celebrating a wealth of inspirational individuals whose contributions – when taken collectively - enrich paths to sustainable futures.  It is a parody of the Forbes Rich List, which was launched earlier this month.  You can find our media release here, and more detail about the List here.

People who made the Post Growth Institute’s Top 100 include prominent Indian activist Dr Vandana Shiva and ‘collaborative consumption’ champion Rachel Botsman. Lesser known individuals to make the List include ‘sharing law’ pioneer, Janelle Orsi, and ‘The Moneyless Man’, Mark Boyle.  And because we had such a difficult time keeping to just 100 such inspirational figures, we added another 99 who comprise our ‘Honourable Mentions’ list.

Part of what made the development of this list so difficult is the collective nature of most of the work it highlights.  Naming individuals to represent these efforts was a difficult, and in some ways conflicting, task.  A lot of the people in the list are ‘representative’ of social movements, such as Wangari Maathai (The Greenbelt Movement), Brian Czech (CASSE), and Rob Hopkins (The Transition Network).  Some have worked tirelessly in more amorphous ways, such as Mahatma Gandhi whose lifelong commitment to social justice has been foundational to the work of so many others.  Our experience has been that just about every member in this list would put their associated social movements and commitments ahead of their own interests.

So even though our overall interest is in the collective tapestry that comprises those who appear on this list and others, we believe the (En)Rich List offers one way for the general public to be introduced to a few new individuals and, therein, movements, philosophies, and practices.  And for those of you who are already familiar with the names and initiatives that appear on this list, we hope their diverse stories serve as further inspiration for you, just as they continue to inspire us.

Please take some time to ‘get to know’ the people it features, and their wonderful work.  By reading their biographies, visiting their websites, and engaging with them and each other (through social media or otherwise), you may find new avenues to work together, bring ideas into action, and further ’enrich’ your own work.

This is – we hope – an ongoing and collective project.

Related posts:

1. The (En)Rich List
2. Post Growth Reading List
3. Safe Operating Limits for Spaceship Earth

RFK image by Words from Pictures - click to see high resolution version.

We often think of the concept of ‘post growth’ and the questioning of GDP as a measure of success as something that recently emerged with the Global Financial Crisis.

Yet post growth thinking has a long intellectual history, dating back to well before the 20th century – in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill wrote ‘Of the Stationary State’; Thomas Malthus was writing on the relationship between exponential population growth and food supply in the 17th and 18th century; and post growth thinking was even around as far back as Aristotle’s time:

…a community which was guided by Aristotelian norms would not only have to view acquisitiveness as a vice but would have to set strict limits to growth…

One of the more recent challengers to the GDP (growth) consensus was Robert F Kennedy.

On 18 March 1968, RFK directly challenged growth and the use of GDP as a barometer of success for nations in his University of Kansas speech:

“Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.  Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

On 18 March 2012, we remember RFK’s words – share them with your friends. Start conversations about what we want our society and communities to be like, and what we can do to change our focus to put the wellbeing of people and planet first.

RFK’s speech was forty-four years ago today. We can’t afford to let another forty-four years go by before we face this issue, and act.

Watch:

The Economics of Happiness

Read:

What’s the Economy For, Anyway? - John de Graaf and David K. Batker

Growth Fetish – Clive Hamilton

Related posts:

1. Post Growth News Roundup – August
2. Imagining A Post Growth Future
3. Toward a Post Growth Society

This is part of an ongoing series in which we will feature ways Post Growth is in action already.  The intention of this series is to inspire ideas about how to engage intentionally in our communities.  Please visit our Post Growth in Action web page for more. 

I recently joined the co-operative group, Food for Alice. For $30 Australian each week and a small membership fee, I can get a large box of delicious fruit and vegetables sourced as locally, and as in-season, as possible. There’s also the opportunity for group members to swap, share or sell produce from their backyard – for example, sometimes people additionally sell a carton of organic, free range eggs for just a few dollars.

Food for Alice is run using a social contract model. In exchange for  great food, members also volunteer for a few hours every few months, collecting the fruit and vegetables from local markets and school gardens, and then sorting them on behalf of the group. The group also has a Facebook page where people post gardening tips, and ‘for sale’ notices for items like local bushfood and medicial plants, and livestock manure.

People join for different reasons. Some want organic food, whilst others want to support local, independent businesses and community groups. I’m mostly involved for the food miles it reduces – Food for Alice fruit and vegetables only need to be transported a short distance from farm or garden to kitchen. And given that I live in the middle of the desert about 1,000km away from Australia’s major food producing areas, food miles can quickly add up.

Lots of towns and cities have similiar groups – check it out where you live today!

If you know a local post growth initiative in your area that you would like to cast the spotlight on, please contact us.

Related posts:

1. Local Spotlight – April 2012
2. Local Spotlight – January, 2012
3. What We’re Reading – February, 2012