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It is all too clear that our economy is precarious, economically, socially and ecologically. Steady State Manchester promotes the Viable Economy¹, which means greater resilience, localisation, and balance as economic activity is treated not an end in itself, but rather as a means to deliver a sufficiently prosperous future without continual “growth”. The Viable Economy aims to bring the economic system under the control of society, building a culture that favours equality, solidarity and cooperation. Finally, a viable economy recognises the finite nature of ecological resources and embraces an ethic of stewardship by minimising imbalances to the planetary systems – including the climate, biodiversity, and nitrogen and phosphorous cycles – upon which human life depends.²

Any economy requires a sound financial system to facilitate its necessary transactions. Here we take a look at some current and recent financial innovations, asking whether they might help us move in the Viable direction.

Types of financial innovation

We will organise what follows in terms of the following categories, even though they do overlap somewhat.

Financial institutions that serve the interests of the community.

Community investment
Community-based currencies
Non-monetary community exchange schemes and credit.

We will not be discussing monetary reform, popular among some parts of the alternative economics and degrowth movements: we have critically discussed one set of proposals in this area previously.

Financial institutions: Community banking

A movement is now gathering pace to fill a gap in the UK’s banking system, that of mutual or co-operative, regionally-based banks, orientated to the local economy, and specialising in offering financial services to smaller enterprises, as well as local citizens. As Greenham and Prieg (2015) noted,

The UK lacks … a local stakeholder banking sector, particularly in certain key markets. We use the term ‘stakeholder banks’ to include any ownership or governance structure that has a broader remit than simply to maximise returns to shareholders.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cursed to live in interesting times

April 19, 2018

Cursed to live in interesting times

In this article I connect the fall in the growth rate, with its roots in the rising costs of energy extraction and generation, to declining resilience in the economic system. These are in turn related to a more conflict ridden geo-politics. There is an increased vulnerability to shocks which will be catastrophic unless and until there is a new conventional wisdom in society about what is wrong and what has to be done about it. Things would still be hard if we had a better understanding of what is wrong but society would be in a better position to do something about the predicaments that face us all. Unfortunately those with a vested interest in current arrangements are not likely to change their world view any time soon. With their control over an extraordinarily servile mass media there is a grave obstacle to society understanding its predicament and responding appropriately. The global system is entering an extremely dangerous phase for life on the planet.

Growth and stability go together – like balance and momentum on a bike

Let me start by using the metaphor of riding a bicycle. With forward momentum it is possible to balance on a bicycle – as soon as the bike and passenger stops it becomes almost impossible. There is an analogy here for the capitalist economy. If it is growing a capitalist economy will stay economically stable. If it is not growing then, after a time, it automatically becomes unstable. Account books can be balanced, bills paid and debts serviced when individuals, households, companies and government are in surplus because incomes are rising. However a surplus requires growth. In general terms in a contracting system the incomes are more likely to be inadequate to cover outgoings. Some of the costs cannot be paid when revenues do not cover those costs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Local and regional community resilience building is going global

April 2, 2018

Local and regional community resilience building is going global

In recent years the resilience imperative has made it onto the agenda of local and national governments, business leaders and international institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. In 2010, the UN Office for Disaster and Risk Reduction launched the five-year Making Cities Resilient campaign (UNISDR, 2015).

A 2012 report to the Secretary-General of the UN, prepared by the high-level panel on global sustainability and entitled Resilient People, Resilient Planet — A Future Worth Choosing, recommends three broad strategic actions: i) empowering people to make sustainable choices, ii) working towards a sustainable economy, and iii) strengthening institutional governance (UNGSP, 2012, p.79).

The 2013 World Bank report on Building Resilience recommends that the “international community should lead by example by further promoting approaches that progressively link climate and disaster resilience to broader development paths, and funding them appropriately” (World Bank, 2013: ix). In the UK there are now community resilience officers in local councils and the National Health Service.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Challenge — funded with $100 million — says it “is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century”. The initiative will support 100 cities financially to enable them to employ ‘chief resilience officers’ (CROs). The city of San Francisco hired Patrick Otellini as the world’s first CRO in early 2014 and by December 2014 another 64 cities had received funding to support this important whole-systems integration role in their city councils and town halls.

The Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) — the German government’s foresight unit — published a 400-page report in 2011, entitled World in Transition: A New Social Contract for Sustainability. It reviews historical examples of social change and suggests that individual actors and change agents are important drivers of cultural transformation, hence their role should be taken more seriously.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Transformative Thinking on Resilience in a Year of Crisis and Resistance

March 30, 2018

Transformative Thinking on Resilience in a Year of Crisis and Resistance

These are trying times for those who care about equity, sustainability and climate change—the issues that will shape our common future. In 2017, we saw the ascension of a US presidential administration that denies the reality of climate change, emboldens hate groups, and borrows from the future to bestow massive tax breaks on the wealthiest people and corporations.

Many of us watched in horror as police turned water cannons on peaceful protesters at Standing Rock, and as neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville. We mourned the rollback of Obama-era environmental protections, carried out by fox-guarding-the-henhouse cabinet appointees. And we lamented the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, against the backdrop of accelerating climate crisis. Indeed, from deadly wildfires to devastating hurricanes, 2017 was the most expensive year on record for weather disasters in the United States.

And yet, even in these times, there are extraordinary people working to create a fairer, greener world. Over the past year, the Island Press Urban Resilience Project, has collaborated with a diverse group of activists, academics and practitioners to sound the alarm about threats and—importantly—to lift up stories of sustainable, equitable solutions.

Those stories, originally published in a wide variety of news outlets, are collected in a new e-book Resilience Matters: Transformative Thinking in a Year of Crisis, freely available online. Here, you can read about community groups that are growing local economies while reducing carbon emissions and building climate resilience. That includes California’s Cooperation Richmond, which builds local wealth by incubating worker- and community-owned co-ops. It includes UPROSE, in Brooklyn, New York, which is reimagining its industrial waterfront as a hub for green industries that create good-paying jobs. And it includes PUSH Buffalo, in New York State, which organized residents to create a 25-square-block Green Development Zone, a model of energy-efficient, affordable housing. There’s more—from activists fighting against water shutoffs in Detroit, to the burgeoning local food movement in Milwaukee.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Living the Good Life: Core Values, System Design and Functional Resilience

February 28, 2018

Living the Good Life: Core Values, System Design and Functional Resilience

Credit: Good Life Permaculture

Hannah Moloney, co-founder and co-director of Good Life Permaculture, was in the pursuit of a duck on the run when I arrived at her property on a fine summer evening. The duck had wandered into the chicken enclosure, and Hannah’s intention was to manoeuvre the duck away from the chickens. I promptly joined in from the other end of the enclosure and managed to guide the duck into the safe hands of Hannah waiting at the other side. Minding ducks (and chickens), as I later learned in my discussion with Hannah and her life and business partner Anton Vikstrom, was not a distraction, but indeed part of their work profile for their social business, Good Life Permaculture, and accorded them much satisfaction. The salience of this comment was not lost given the nature of their integrated work space, which is made up of a thriving food garden bursting with life, green spaces, their highly functional home, and home-office, all with an uninterrupted view over much of Hobart (Figure 1), the capital city of Tasmania, Australia’s southern island state.

Credit: Author

*Figure 1. Premises of Good Life Permaculture*

What prompted Hannah and Anton to create (and sustain) this small piece of paradise in an urban block? Why Good Life Permaculture? What is a ‘good life’? And how does Good Life Permaculture interpret and respond to this ageless question, one that is as pertinent today as it was when put forth by Socrates in the Western tradition and Thiruvalluvar in the Eastern tradition?

Good Life Permaculture – Origins, Values & Objectives

Good Life Permaculture (henceforth referred to as ‘Good Life’) was born in early 2013 after about four years of conception and design by Hannah and Anton.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Volatility on Steroids

October 27, 2017

Volatility on Steroids

Salvador Dalí White calm 1936It’s been a while since we last heard from longtime friend of the Automatic Earth Dr. Nelson Lebo III, New Englander living in Wanganui, New Zealand. Nelson has written a fine collection of articles on this site through the years.

Of course I thought, when I first saw this piece in my mailbox, that he would have written about New Zealand’s new prime minister, Labour’s 37-year-young Jacinda Ardern, whose first action in her new job will be to prevent foreigners from buying existing homes in her country. It’ll be interesting to see how she intends to do so while remaining inside the Trans Pacific Partnership -TPP- agreement.

Radio New Zealand has a portrait in which she says ‘I Want The Government … To Bring Kindness Back’. And obviously my first thought was: wait till you meet Donald Trump. But it would be misleading to put the lack of kindness in politics on his shoulders. There’s too much blood on too many hands.

But Nelson didn’t address her this time. I hope he will soon. Instead, and I should have known, he writes about Koyaanisqatsi, life out of balance. When I wrote The Koyaanisqatsi Economya month ago, he said he had been thinking of the same theme.

Nelson named his article “Pura Vida trumps Koyaanisqatsi”, but I thought his emphasis on volatility is too important to not be the headline. Especially given that volatility in financial markets is at a -near- record low, while it appears blatantly obvious that this not reflect the ‘real world’ at all.

Nelson’s summary of the real world: “..hurricanes, mass shootings, hurricanes, opioid epidemics, hurricanes, people sleeping in cars, hurricanes, rising suicide rates, hurricanes, and children dying from cold damp homes..”

If that doesn’t spell volatility, what does? Forget about financial markets reflecting anything real anymore. Thanks to central banks, markets are fiddling while Rome burns.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Introduction to The Community Resilience Reader

October 12, 2017

Introduction to The Community Resilience Reader

We’re pleased to announce the publication of our latest book, The Community Resilience Reader: Essential Resources for an Era of Upheaval, edited by Daniel Lerch and published with Island Press. Here is the Introduction chapter, which explains why we’ve produced this important new collection of essays.

For over thirty years, the world community has tried to resolve the combined challenges of environmental degradation, fossil fuel dependence, economic inequality, and persistent social injustice—largely under the banner of internationally brokered “sustainable development.” Despite some partial successes, it is clear today that the pace of these global trends has not been slowed, let alone stopped or reversed. Their scale has grown and their impacts have become so widespread that they now threaten the stability—in some cases even the existence—of communities around the world. The global sustainability challenges of the past have become the local resilience crises of today.

Resilience is the ability of a system—like a family, or a country, or Earth’s biosphere—to cope with short-term disruptions and adapt to long-term changes without losing its essential character. We depend on the resilience of all the systems that support us for life and well-being; if these systems falter, we suffer. A crisis is an unstable state of affairs in which decisive change is both necessary and inevitable. Today we face four major crises—environmental, energy, economic, and equity—that threaten to overwhelm the resilience of the systems we care about, particularly at the local level.

The failure of international sustainability efforts to thwart these crises means resilience-building efforts at the community level—working on all issues and systems, not just climate change and infrastructure—are needed more than ever. But the charge to build community resilience raises important questions: Resilience of what, exactly? Resilient to what, exactly? Building resilience how, and benefiting whom?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You’re Likely A Lot Less Prepared For Crisis Than You Realize

September 23, 2017

rangizzz/Shutterstock

You’re Likely A Lot Less Prepared For Crisis Than You Realize

Lessons from the recent rash of natural disasters

It seems as if Mother Nature is waking up. Either she’s trying to send humans an important warning, or perhaps she’s just out to kill us all.

Massive storms across the globe, earthquakes, and collapsing ecosystems all combine to remind us that we are indeed intimately connected to our planet’s natural systems. And that our well-being rests on staying on Mother Nature’s good side.

Well, Mother Nature has seemed pretty pissed at us of late. Her recent punishments should be taken as a disciplinary wake-up call: It’s time.

It’s time to prepare, everyone. Way past time.

And it’s time to recognize that there are multiplying failure points across the many systems we depend on for our way of life — both natural and man-made. For example:

The wealth gap between the rich and the poor is now grossly obscene and yet still growing wider.
Our industrially-farmed soils are being depleted of their nutrients.
Species are going extinct every single day.
Global oil consumption ticks higher every year.
Stock price overvaluation is about the highest it’s ever been.
Bonds have never been more expensive (i.e. yields have never been lower) in all of recorded history.
Debt levels have never been higher (both globally and, in most cases, locally).
The planet’s population continues to explode (7.5 billion today, 10 billion by 2050) while key resources deplete at accelerating rates.

Only the foolish, or the seriously self-deluded, would think that these observations and trends will be consequence-free.

Which means we have to begin doing things very differently. We have to change who we are, the actions we take, the investments we prioritize, and even our most fundamental values and priorities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New (free) E-book Offers Sustainable, Equitable Solutions to Building Resilience

February 26, 2017

New (free) E-book Offers Sustainable, Equitable Solutions to Building Resilience

In an era rocked by environmental, economic, and political upheaval, our communities must be resilient to survive and thrive. But what does resilience mean, exactly? And how can we address the problems facing America today — poverty, job loss, crumbling infrastructure, pollution — while preparing for an uncertain tomorrow?

To help answer these questions, Island Press launched the Urban Resilience Project in 2013, with support from The Kresge Foundation and The JPB Foundation. The Project works with a diverse group of thinkers and activists to produce a wide-ranging series of articles on resilience. A compilation of this work is now available in the e-book Resilience Matters 2016: Sustainable, Equitable Solutions, available for free online.

The articles collected in the e-book address the economic, ecological and social dimensions of resilience. They report on a variety of threats, from the vulnerability of transit systems to the economic crises facing Rust Belt cities. Importantly, they showcase solutions that are sustainable and equitable. From public housing residents creating jobs in disaster recovery, to red-state cities that are (quietly) adapting to a changing climate, these stories illuminate the path forward in tumultuous times.

Organizations that contributed to the volume include the Public Health Institute, Emerald Cities Collaborative, Movement Strategy Center, Energy Innovation, West Harlem Environmental Action, NAACP, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, Natural Hazard Mitigation Association, Bronx River Alliance, California Environmental Justice Alliance and many others. The articles collected here were originally published in a diverse group of outlets—including The Guardian, Grist, The Nation, The Root and Governing.

The Urban Resilience Project continues to imagine and inspire the resilient cities of the future. If you’d like to write your own resilience story, or have a news tip to share, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can forge a greener, fairer future.

Climate, Energy, Economy: Pick Two

July 5, 2016

Climate, Energy, Economy: Pick Two

Dorothea Lange Miserable poverty. Elm Grove, Oklahoma County, OK 1936We used to have this saying that if someone asks you to do a job good, fast and cheap, you’d say: pick two. You can have it good and cheap, but then it won’t be fast, etc. As our New Zealand correspondent Dr. Nelson Lebo III explains below, when it comes to our societies we face a similar issue with our climate, energy and the economy.

Not the exact same, but similar, just a bit more complicated. You can’t have your climate nice and ‘moderate’, your energy cheap and clean, and your economy humming along just fine all at the same time. You need to make choices. That’s easy to understand.

Where it gets harder is here: if you pick energy and economy as your focus, the climate suffers (for climate you can equally read ‘the planet’, or ‘the ecosystem’). Focus on climate and energy, and the economy plunges. So far so ‘good’.

But when you emphasize climate and economy, you get stuck. There is no way the two can be ‘saved’ with our present use of fossil fuels, and our highly complex economic systems cannot run on renewables (for one thing, the EROEI is not nearly good enough).

It therefore looks like focusing on climate and economy is a dead end. It’s either/or. Something will have to give, and moreover, many things already have. Better be ahead of the game if you don’t want to be surprised by these things. Be resilient.

But this is Nelson’s piece, not mine. The core of his argument is worth remembering:

“Everything that is not resilient to high energy prices and extreme weather events will become economically unviable…

…and approach worthlessness. On the other hand,…

Investments of time, energy, and money in resilience will become more economically valuable…“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mid-Sized Meditations #11: Thoughts on Localism and Resilience

February 17, 2016

Mid-Sized Meditations #11: Thoughts on Localism and Resilience

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak to the “Resilience Group,” an informal gathering of environmentalists, activists, and interested others that meet regularly at the home of Wes Jackson, in Salina, KS. My short remarks–which were mostly inspired by the material in this post–gave rise to a robust and enlightening discussion, or so I thought. Here are a few take-aways, for whatever they’re worth.

1) The growth-centric paradigm which dominates so much economic activity around the world isn’t really the result of politically powerful actors; it’s the consequence of a worldview. Thus fulminating against the defenders of–in some ways undeniably beneficial, but also socially and culturally harmful, not to mention ecologically unsustainable–globalism, whether their motivations are libertarian like the Koch brothers (whose influence is omnipresent in Kansas) or statist like the Davos bunch(whose influence around here doesn’t really exist beyond the paranoid fears of a few black-helicopter-watching Tea Party types in our legislature), is to mistake symptoms for the disease. That’s not to say particular actions by particular actors shouldn’t be organized against; they should be. But we need to recognize that, as important as, say, an overturning of Citizens United might be to getting the message for local and economic democracy out there, simply accomplishing that, without a paradigm-changing language to explain why it’s important to do so, probably won’t change much.

2) The language that defenders of steady-state economies and local democracy need probably won’t be political in nature, and probably won’t emerge from the major cities or the state-based political entities of the world, despite those locations and polities being the site of so many productive nodes of intellectual input.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Systems Break: First They Slow Down

February 10, 2016

How Systems Break: First They Slow Down

Alternatively, we can cling to a state of denial, and the dominant system will be replaced by archetypal systems that are not necessarily positive.

Understanding our current socio-economy as a system of sub-systems enables us to project how and when unsustainable sub-systems will finally unravel.

The reality that cannot be spoken within the conventional media is that all the primary financial systems we believe are permanent and indestructible are actually on borrowed time.

One way to assess this decline of resilience is to look at how long it takes systems to recover when they are stressed, and to what degree they bounce back to previous levels.

A compelling article on this topic was recently published by The Atlantic: Nature’s Warning Signal: Complex systems like ecological food webs, the brain, and the climate all give off a characteristic signal when disaster is around the corner.

“The signal, a phenomenon called “critical slowing down,” is a lengthening of the time that a system takes to recover from small disturbances, such as a disease that reduces the minnow population, in the vicinity of a critical transition. It occurs because a system’s internal stabilizing forces—whatever they might be—become weaker near the point at which they suddenly propel the system toward a different state.”

Recent email exchanges with correspondent Bart D. (Australia) clued me into theDarwinian structure of this critical slowing down and loss of snapback (what we might characterize as a loss of resilience).

Beneath the surface dominance of one system are many other systems that are suppressed by the dominant system.

As the dominant system weakens / destabilizes / slows down, these largely invisible systems compete to occupy more of the ecosystem.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Jack Spirko: The Road To Resilience

February 1, 2016

Jack Spirko: The Road To Resilience

Requires a good map. Got one?

Continuing our focus on solutions, this week we’re joined on the podcast by Jack Spirko. His daily podcast focuses on practical, actionable steps each of us can take to “live a better life, if times get tough or even if they don’t” — a mission nicely aligned with the one we pursue here at Peak Prosperity.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Jack and Chris discuss the need for spreading awareness of the Three Es, the professional challenges in doing so, and how individuals can go about pursuing both security and prosperity in the face of the likely disruptive changes to come:

We’ve had these people predicting: This is the Big One! for 25 years. These people are hucksters who just want to make money. “End of America”, “The world is going to end!”, “In six months the dollar is going to collapse!” — people have been marketed these messages. Here’s my concern: it’s going to become Chicken Little. And when we really are at a point where you and I are going “Uh, guys…”, no one’s going to listen.

So as it relates to preparedness: being prepared for the grid to go down for a couple of months — great goal. Wonderful. But I look at preparedness this way: if you and I are in a car together and we’re going to drive from Miami, Florida to Portland, Maine, we’re going to go to Georgia before we go to Virginia unless we’re really dumb people without a map.

So when somebody asks me about preparedness, my first question is: Do you have 30 days worth of food stored up in your home? No? Then stop worrying about the grid going down. Do you have enough money to go 90 days without income and be okay?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resilience As The Key To Crisis-Proof Wealth

December 7, 2015

Resilience As The Key To Crisis-Proof Wealth

Some highlights from our recent media tour

Given Friday’s important swing low in the precious metals, we’re hard at work this weekend finishing up a lengthy analysis of the fundamentals ahead for gold & silver.

But in the interim, we want to make sure that our podcast listeners don’t go without their weekly fix.

So below are several recent interviews Chris and/or I have given as we’ve been getting the word out about our new book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting:

Greg Hunter: Everybody Knows This Economy Is Unsustainable

Jay Taylor: Prospering and Creating a World Worth Inheriting

James Howard Kunstler: KunstlerCast 272 — A Conversation with Chris Martenson and Adam Taggart

Download | Report Problem

Resilience and Collapse: Notes from Cyprus Part Two

October 5, 2015

Resilience and Collapse: Notes from Cyprus Part Two

In early 2014, I interviewed my cousin, Sofia Matsi, a newly minted permaculture designer and sustainability/resilience activist who lives on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Last year, Sofia related her experience of the all-but-complete collapse of the Cyprus economy in 2013 and her attempts, with others, to spark a movement for resilience and local self-reliance.

In this follow-up interview a year and a half later, Sofia describes how the explosion of interest and activity in permaculture, natural building, sustainability, resilience and relocalization in Cyprus is giving her renewed hope for the island’s future.

Cyprus is a tiny nation, but when its banking system collapsed from overexposure to Greek debt, it sent a chill through through the world economy: for the first time in living memory, a percentage of bank deposits were confiscated as part an agreement with EU leaders to bail out the country. This precedent threw into question not only the viability of the Euro currency and the European Union itself, but of the security of bank savings for ordinary people across the world.

Cyprus is comprised of an 80 percent Greek, 18 percent Turkish population; it has been de facto partitioned since the Turkish army invaded in 1974, taking over the northern 40 percent of the country. In 2004, Cyprus became part of the European Union.

Over the past 40 years, the intractability of “The Cyprus Problem” has puzzled and and confounded generations of peacemakers and diplomats, as recurring talks between representatives of the two sides collapsed, again and again.

Recent developments, though, have raised the hopes of many residents on the island; new negotiations between Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader, Mustafa Akinci, have been described by some observers as the most hopeful since the invasion.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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