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Comment by Jordan Bober on May 10, 2012 at 6:22pm

‎"I was there when the currency that would forever change the way Vancouverites think about money was born."

Wouldn't you like to be able to say that one day, a few years hence? Now you have your chance!

We are super excited about May 16th at the HiVE! Not only do we get to tell you all about our plans to revolutionize local economics in Vancouver with the SeedStock community currency project, but we have some amazing local artists lined up to inspire and entertain you as well, including:
• Singer/songwriter Buckman Coe (http://www.buckmancoe.com/)
• Singer/songwriter Corrina Keeling (http://www.myspace.com/corrinakeeling)
• Actor/musician Zamir Dhanji (http://www.akasha.ca/)
• Local slam poetry champion Johnny MacRae (http://johnnymacrae.com/)
• Artist/poet/filmmaker Hazel Bell-Koski (www.hazelbellkoski.com)

Just a taste of what an enormous wealth our local artists represent for our community!

Have you reserved your ticket yet? If not – hurry, because seating is limited! www.seedbomb.eventbrite.ca It will be the best money you’ve ever changed.

Comment by Jordan Bober on February 26, 2012 at 10:50am

Open Money and LETSystem founder Michael Linton will be giving a talk at Eternal Abundance on Commercial Drive on March 5th at 8:30pm! This is a great opportunity to learn more about what money has to do with economic relocalisation - how it is the greatest obstacle, but redesigned can become one of its most powerful tools. More details at http://www.villagevancouver.ca/events/new-ways-of-exchange-an-eveni...

Comment by Philip Be'er on December 12, 2011 at 10:48am

Hi Jordan and Celia,

It feels wonderful to have the opportunity to participate in this important dialogue.

When we're discussing the impacts of Climate Change and projects like the ones cited by Celia, we have an opportunity to pose the alternative that will create ongoing, high quality employment for millions of people while massively reducing energy consumption. As I've written at Can Urban Agriculture be used as a primary strategy for combating c..., by putting our support behind the expansion of urban farming, everyday people like ourselves can participate in combating Climate Change and there is more than enough room in urban agriculture to absorb millions of empowered and stimulated workers. I was in Southlands yesterday and saw the unused boulevards that can easily be converted into microfarms using techniques like SPIN Farming and the City has hundreds of acres of land like these that could be used in this way. I would love to get your support to bring organisations like the David Suzuki Foundation onboard so that we shift our strategy from asking for change or from demanding change (strategies that have failed to convince powerful transnational corporations who control our society to shift their priorities in any way) and instead we get on with Being the Change by planting our future harvests.

Philip Be'er

Home Harvest Farms

Urban Farming Solutions

Comment by Jordan Bober on December 12, 2011 at 10:07am

Celia Brauer has once again found her way into the press in defence of good ecological economic sense, this time with a letter to the Vancouver Sun in response to a column by Harvey Enchin that really illustrates what kind of mainstream and destructive economic thinking we are up against. Here is what Celia wrote:

Harvey Enchin's commentary on the perils of sacrificing megaproject jobs is once again full of the mythology which got us seven billion humans on this planet into the deep trouble we are in at the moment.

"A job is the best cure for poverty." What fool would dispute that? But the thousands of jobs that would be created by the Site C Dam, the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Keystone XL pipelines, the Jumbo Resort or the Prosperity Mine that are (thankfully) being opposed by "aboriginal groups and self-appointed environmental guardians" are all in the resource extraction sector.

Every one of these megaprojects is rooted in a misguided ideology that promises endless growth - except that the sources for raw materials and sinks for inevitable waste cannot possibly be infinite on a planet that is itself not growing. The business plans for these megaprojects rest on the assumption that the long-term impact of the continued destruction of our natural world, which has already been massively compromised, is a fair price to pay for progress and the only thing we need to talk about is human jobs right now.

What about the future of the children whose parents will get these jobs? What will their lives be like on a planet significantly altered by runaway climate change, pollution and ecosystem and biodiversity loss? Will they not curse us for not finding some alternative sources of "job creation"?

Thank goodness people have finally risen up to fight these destructive megaprojects. The discussion of alternate ways to meet our real needs and the creation of employment as a healthy byproduct of doing so can then proceed - as it already has to a modest extent - without the background noise of wholesale destruction continuing.

No jobs on a dead planet. It's time for more columnists to wake up and realize that considering the health of the Earth, our home, is essential. Endless "fire-sale" style activities that destroy our living resources and create too many waste products for the sake of jobs and growth is economic folly.

Celia Brauer Vancouver

Comment by Jordan Bober on November 24, 2011 at 9:36am

Thanks everyone for a great Eco/New Economics discussion circle yesterday evening! For those who couldn't make it, here is a very brief summary of our discussion:

We started by reviewing some basic microeconomics that form the theoretical basis for the worship of the "efficiency" of the market, then took a look at various types of market failure which ultimately boil down to negative externalities and the underproduction of public goods. We also discussed how externalities 
are in fact so pervasive and have such a cumulative effect on the evolution of whole industrial sectors and economies that they can actually dwarf the effects of the explicit, monetised market itself in terms of deciding what is produced, how it is produced, how it is allocated, etc.

Then we started discussing ideas for how we can start to make more people aware of the pervasiveness of externalities, including beginning to engage politicians and other decisionmakers. We thought that especially now that we have a very green-minded municipal government with a fresh mandate, and several of our group's members are more or less acquainted with some of the councillors, it may be worth developing specific ecological economic policy proposals that we can put forward for coucil's consideration.

For example, Michael Barkusky has an idea that because our city charter permits the city to collect fees to recover costs, we may consider imposing fees on some of the "bads" that are produced in the city as a way of not only reducing the production of those "bads", but to create new revenue streams that take pressure off of property taxes. As just one example, take the thousands upon thousands of disposable paper cups that are served up in cafés and fast food joints every day in this city. Currently the city is bearing the costs of cleaning up discarded paper cups, collecting the trash, trucking it to landfills, etc. Those are direct costs, but more can be added. For example, as the landfills fill up, the city will need to go to greater expense to dispose of this trash. And what about the harder-to-quantify costs to the environment? The city should be justified in imposing some kind of "paper cup fee", or charging a much higher business license fee to businesses that use a lot of disposable cups. 
This is but one example.

We plan to hold our next discussion circle in January, and hopefully you can join us then!
Cheers,Jordan

Comment by Jordan Bober on October 31, 2011 at 8:03pm

Chris Martenson, author of the Crash Course, gave a great talk via teleconference hosted by Transition US on Oct. 25th, in which he discusses with great clarity what is happening now in terms of the global economy and energy situation, and talks about what he has been doing to build resilience into his life (which included quitting his high-paying executive job, selling his waterfront suburban home and moving to a farm in order to devote himself to making the transition, and helping others to do so as well. This 75-minute talk is well worth a listen and can be accessed at http://transitionus.org/sites/default/files/tus-chris-martenson-102...

Comment by Jordan Bober on October 27, 2011 at 12:05am

Thanks to everyone who attended our discussion circle on October 25th! Eleven of us met to learn more about Open Money and how a community currency is different from conventional money, and we were fortunate to be joined by Michael Linton, the philisophical father of Open Money and the inventor of the LETS and Community Way models of community currency.

 

Stay tuned soon for the announcement of November's discussion circle! And a reminder to all that if there is a particular issue or idea related to Ecological or New Economics that you would like to discuss or present, please make your suggestion here so that you can be scheduled to lead a discussion or presentation of that topic.

Comment by Jordan Bober on July 5, 2011 at 1:14pm

Hi All,

 

Please stay tuned for an announcement of our next meeting, probably next week! Among other things, we will be talking about the nature of money and the role it plays in our current growth paradigm - and how it can be changed at a grassroots level.

Comment by Kathryn Cholette on February 14, 2011 at 3:04pm

Michael Barkusky's response to Kathryn Cholette

I am OK with a broader name, and a somewhat broader scope.

I should say though, that my understanding of the term “ecological economics” is already broad, perhaps broader than it might have appeared to you, and I don’t think I am alone.   A past President of the Canadian Society for Ecological Economics, for example, is not a trained economist, and would never claim to be. Other predecessors have formal backgrounds in fields other than economics, and, I suspect, are entirely self-taught in the technical aspects of economics.   Many participants in CANSEE conferences have perspectives that would be more recognizable as those of conservation biologists, ecologists, sociologists or political scientists.

Herman Daly, although himself a conventionally-trained economist, was always very explicit that he did not see ecological economics as a “branch of economics” but rather as a new paradigm for approaching economic issues.

The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) considers ecological economics to be a “trans-discipline”, and is quite explicit about that. The editor of the journal “Ecological Economics” which is sponsored by ISEE, although commercially published by Elsevier, Cutler Cleveland, is someone who is considered, in the separate silos of academia, to be a geographer rather than an economist.

In an applied context, few self-styled “ecological economists” see themselves as moderate reformists merely tinkering with the “system we have”.   In fact, one of the semantic distinctions between self-styled “environmental economists” and “ecological economists” is over precisely this – the degree to which the existing system is viewed as defective.  The environmental economists are much more satisfied with the system, seeing it as fundamentally sound and just in need of a few improvements to address a few important un-priced externalities. The ecological economists are much more radical about the pervasiveness of externalities.  A central question for ecological economists is whether there can be a greater than optimum macroeconomic scale to the human economy?   This question is an anathema to conventional macroeconomists.  

I do recognize that it is possible to go one more step in questioning the nature of human “wants” and “needs”.   Some ecological economists (e.g. Manfred Max-Neef) have taken a surprisingly radical view of this question.

But if you feel better with “Ecological Economics / New Economics” that is fine with me.   I think of the “New Economics Foundation” and the Schumacher school of thinking is very compatible with what I might call the Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen / Kenneth Boulding / Herman Daly school of thinking, that has been very influential for me.   Interestingly all of these thinkers, including Schumacher, were in fact trained in conventional economics, but all of them were thinkers who transcended the boundaries of conventional (largely neo-classical) economics.

Personally, I do not favour throwing out all (or even most) of the ideas of conventional economics as so much rubbish.   I think there are some ideas that are valid and really worth being well understood, not only by social activists trying to change the world, but by citizens at large.  Even some of the ideas that I readily agree are “flat-out wrong” (and maybe even dangerous) deserve careful scrutiny and a proper critique, and should (in my opinion of course) be rejected for good solid logical or empirical reasons, not because they are simply offensive in appearance at a first superficial examination.

Having said all that, none of us have unlimited time for intellectual pursuits, and the need for social and (ecological-economic) change is undoubtedly urgent.  So I recognize that people will inevitably pursue those things about which they are most curious and those things they expect to be most helpful to th

Comment by Kathryn Cholette on February 13, 2011 at 10:07am

The Ecological Economists wrestle with the existing economic system and work to change it.  Those working on New Economics focus directly on finding ways to meet people's needs and  protect nature  And then they seek ways to create economic institutions that support these goals - ways that often fall under the sphere of "Local Economics".   Of course there are numerous areas of overlap between these approaches.  It will be exciting to explore macro-economics from these perspectives and to understand the institutional changes needed to support the micro economic relocalization of the economy.