McKibben, Barber and Gravitz preview a different economy, October 17th
Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature, will be one of the featured speakers at the annual E.F. Schumacher Society lecture series, Saturday, October 17, 2009. The event takes place from 10 AM - 5 PM, at the First Congregational Church, in Stockbridge, MA. Author Benjamin Barber and Green America (formerly Coop America) head Alisa Gravitz will also speak during the day's panels.
In addition to his importance as a voice for change, offered through his many books, McKibben has become a leading organizer for change as a founder of 350.org, the climate action network. Benjamin Barber may be best known for his widely read Jihad vs. McWorld. In 2007, he published Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Gravitz authored Coop America's guide to social investing. The three will no doubt offer a thorough-going critique of our current economy, along with ideas for the kind of economy we should have.
The E.F. Schumacher Society advances alternative, community-centered economic thinking, drawing on the ideas of E.F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful. In the face of today's all-too-evident failures in conventional economic thinking, their October 17th panel is likely to attract a lot of attendees, so early registration is advisable. Tickets are $25, or 25 BerkShares, the alternative local currency the Society helped start in the Bershires region of Massachusetts.
Bill McKibben and Frances Moore Lappe (Diet for a Small Planet; Grub; Democracy's Edge) will also be speaking on similar themes the next day, October 18th, as part of panels at the Massachusetts Relocalization Conference in Boston, 9 AM - 6:30 PM at the Reggie Lewis Center, 1350 Tremont Street, Roxbury. The conference, organized by the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, is intended to "to help build the local infrastructure and institutions needed to provide economic security in a changing world." The conference is also being sponsored by Lappe's Small Planet Institute.
Since at least the early 1970s – with the first Earth Day in 1970, the publication of the seminal work, The Limits to Growth in 1972, and the first oil crisis with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 – the question of the long-term sustainability of our economic order has been on the table, from the standpoint of energy, resources and the environment. The question of the long-term financial and social sustainability of our economy had been repeatedly raised long before that.
On top of the specter of the Great Depression, post-war financial crises again and again raised doubts about our economic system's financial sustainability. The devaluation of the dollar and the collapse of the Bretton Woods framework in the early 1970s, the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s, the Mexican peso crisis and bailout of the 1990s, the implosion of the dot.com speculative bubble in 2000, are just a few of the many examples of such recurring crises.
The current financial crisis is not the only post-war manifestation of the unstable nature of our economy, it is merely the most recent and most dangerous one. If we do not make fundamental changes in the direction of the economy, it will not be the last such crisis, perhaps not even the worst. (For a more detailed discussion of the current financial crisis, and resources to help understand its roots, go to our Financial Crisis page.)
At the close of this first decade of the new millennium, a convergence of crises – financial, climate, energy, and others – has raised the question of the sustainability of our economic order from nearly every standpoint. Millions of people are for the first time questioning the very nature of our economy.
Compared to the 1970s, the context for this question is a new one. Now we are looking at the world after 1989 and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet system. The limitations of a central command economy experimented with by the Soviets, albeit in a distorted and barbaric form, are painfully evident, even to previously uncritical members of the political left. On the other side, the current financial catastrophe has also made painfully evident the dangerous limitations of entrusting all to the “free market.”
Page last modified: 9/9/09