Finding Hope
It was hazy here on the East coast of the U.S. Smoke from the massive wildfires burning in the West, three thousand miles away. Elsewhere, unprecedented floods in Europe and other parts of the world. Homes turned into cinders or washed away, loved ones lost. Scientists have finally tied these events to our greenhouse gas emissions.
In its latest report the IPCC[1] urges nations to take coordinated action to reduce greenhouse gases before we reach a nasty tipping point. Our leaders nod but don’t do enough to avert that outcome.
I have young people in my life that I care about. I worry about the world they and their children’s kids will inherit from us. The worry threatens to slide into despair if I don’t keep in mind that there are ways to make their future less grim.
We have to get off the path we are on. Our current scheme for living is unsustainable and headed for climate change disaster. There are two powerful forces that keep us glued to that path. But we created them, so we can also undo their hold on us.
The proximate force
The modern world is trapped in an economy that is fueled by consumption. To stay healthy, it requires us to buy ever increasing amounts of goods and services. Slow it down, as our current pandemic has done, and businesses go bankrupt, millions lose their jobs. In the US the government had to pump in trillions of dollars to keep the economy barely afloat, and it is poised to do it again. But the consumption it is designed to revive is driving us to that nasty tipping point.
What we need is a vision of an alternative economy that won’t crash if we buy less stuff. One that provides us with meaningful jobs, gives us opportunities to grow mentally and spiritually. And that does not create more inequality. And that is less unstable.
Sounds like a pipedream, but it’s not.
The economist Tim Jackson has a vision of an economy that would do all this. He calls it “Prosperity without Growth,” also the title of both the 2009 and 2017 editions of his book. (The subtitles are different.)
Jackson’s ideas on the subject are the most well thought through of any that I’ve come across. I’m not an economist, but eminent ones have applauded his ideas.
His scheme would change the measure of an economy’s success from increases in goods and services consumed (GDP)[2], to measures of increases in wellbeing. The former may be necessary in underdeveloped countries, but only as much as it takes to ensure an adequate level of food, housing, and healthcare for its citizens. He provides evidence that beyond that level, further increases in GDP and material possessions do not lead to a greater sense of wellbeing.
Jackson’s “wellbeing economy” includes moving towards a greener way of living, and a proper valuing of the services of teachers, health care providers, and others who help improve the quality of our lives. With great attention to detail he answers all the questions you might want to ask about his scheme, such as where the jobs come from without GDP growth, how to reduce income inequality, and how to dismantle the “culture of consumerism.”
But the leaders of the major polluting economies – Britain, China, Germany, France, India, Japan, and the U.S. – seem to be unaware of his way out of their jobs-versus-climate change trap. Perhaps because it requires big government investments in such things as green energy and the service sector, typically investments that are long-term with below market rates of return.
And perhaps because a move to Jackson’s well-being economy would be a radical shift from our current scheme for living. Such a move would be resisted by all who derive their power from the status quo. How to overcome that resistance? A powerful mechanism already exists, but it needs some redirection.
When I discovered that Gene Sharp was practically a neighbor – he lived across the Charles river from me – I went to see him.[3] This was before I was aware of Jackson or his thinking. Even back then I was frustrated by the lack of action on the climate change front by our policy makers. The scientists’ warnings hadn’t done it, what else could be done to get them off their butts?
All Gene said in his quiet voice was: “If you want people to change, you have to give them options.”
The answer felt right, but I walked away from our meeting more discouraged than ever. Because I couldn’t see any options to our way of life that wouldn’t cause our economy to collapse. Until I came across Jackson’s book, Prosperity without Growth. I was excited. Here was the option!
But what is still missing is a connection between Jackson’s option and the growing power of the climate change protest movement, led by young people. It gives rise to events such as the recent outpouring of people in Glasgow, young and old, after the COP26 meeting[4] announced its targets for reducing emissions. Their shouts and posters echoed what Jackson says: Nowhere near enough to avert a coming climate change catastrophe.
I saw the photos and videos. A surging tide of protest passion. But no mention of the way out of the trap that keeps policy makers glued to our current scheme for living. No posters that said: “Wellbeing Economy Now!” or “Prosperity Yes, Growth No!”
But there will be more protests. What’s needed is some redirection. Greta Thunberg led the outcry in Glasgow. She dares to speak truth to power. But though she gets applause and Nobel prize nominations, her words don’t help those who run things to get unglued from their current course. What might help is some empathy for the trap they are in and suggestions for getting out of it.
And, an understanding that radical changes such as a move to Jackson’s scheme for living may need to start at a local level, with communities or towns best equipped to experiment with it. Success at that level would pave the way for the adoption of something like it at a larger scale. But that move needs to begin now.
In the meantime, we can all spread the word about the option. Out of several dozen of my friends and acquaintances only one had heard of Jackson. These are people who care about the environment and are relatively well informed about it.
Jackson’s website has a wealth of material about his option. It includes his many papers and articles, TED and other talks, and videos of discussions about his ideas.[5]
In “Post Growth,” his latest book, Jackson talks about the impact of what Greta Thunberg says: “Her words [spawn] artistic and musical interpretations that reach beyond audiences scientists ever could.” The same could be said about some of his words.[6]
The deeper force
We must move in the direction of Jackson’s “prosperity without growth” before we cross a climate tipping point. That greener, less consumption-driven economy would use fewer natural resources, and in that sense be more eco-friendly than our current way of life. But we don’t need to wait for that move to happen before we begin to shift our stance toward the Earth. We can do that in a different bur ultimately complementary way.
How we relate to the natural world is determined by our worldview: our ideas and beliefs about it and about our place in it. The shift needed is from one that equates our success as a species with our ability to dominate and exploit nature, to one that sees that our survival depends on being able to cooperate with and be guided by it.
Our modern way of life is built on the spoils of our war against the natural world. On strip mining, on deforestation, on depleting its aquifers, on polluting its air and waters and soil, on driving a massive number of its species into extinction.
We, as Homo Sap., have been here for close to 200,000 years. For 97.5 percent of that time we lived in relative harmony with the natural world. Then, about 5,000 years ago some of us went on the warpath against our neighbors and against nature. Along with that war we also began to create stories that justified it. We in the modern world are the products of two hundred generations of that brainwashing.[7] But that inherited narrative leads to a climate change disaster. We have to wash that story out of our heads and find the seeds of a fresh vision in the wisdom of our deep past, a wisdom about how to work with the Earth kept alive in the indigenous world.
The good news is that the 5,000 years of programming is erasable. Because we are all born with a measure of creativity.
Creativity, ultimately, is the ability to transcend our conditioning, to break free of it and see the world through new eyes. It is hard wired into our genes because it is needed to adapt to changing circumstances. We have successfully lived through ice ages, we have found ways to make a good enough living in rain forests, deserts, and the Arctic.
We’ve come to the end of a five-thousand-year old experiment in living that looks like a dead-end. It has brought us some magical things: space travel, the internet, modern medicines, ragas, Bach and Beethoven. But none of those things are of much use to a species that is no longer around or back to living in caves.
It is still not too late to avoid a truly devastating climate change future. If we move toward a more sustainable way of life. If we wind down our war against the natural world. Big tasks, but we have some time in which to do them, perhaps two or three generations worth. And we have our creativity.
How do we get rid of the programming that invites eco-disaster? One way is to change the stories that underpin that narrative. We can start with the part of it that justifies our war against the natural world: hey, that’s how things are in it, a struggle for survival that pits every species against all others. We’re just doing what comes naturally.
Those who live close to that world would say: not so. Indigenous people, but also increasingly our scientists. The stories they tell suggest our biosphere flourishes on cooperation.
Currently the best-known story may be that of the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her meticulous work demonstrates how the trees in a forest use underground networks to exchange nutrients, water, and information about the presence of pests and diseases. Older trees nurture young ones. They cooperate across species and make forests a collaborative venture. [8]
Simard’s work also validates indigenous forestry practices, based on similar ideas about the trees in it. But such validation may not be possible for some indigenous insights into the cooperative nature of the world. Here is an example.
Alice and the bees
Rolling Thunder was a Cherokee medicine man. He is the subject of a book named after him and written by Doug Boyd, a member of the Research Department of the Menninger Foundation.
R.T., as he let himself be called, still performed healing rituals for individuals but much of his time was taken up by work on issues related to Indian rights. He lived in a house at the edge of a small town in Nevada.
Boyd was part of a group of non-Indians that R.T. allowed to witness some of his work. When they needed to be around they usually camped in a secluded spot in the nearby hills. They were sometimes joined there by Alice, a woman older and more straight-laced than the others in Boyd’s group.
Boyd describes her as “A middle-aged white woman from Salt Lake City [with] right-wing political views.” So why did she hang out with R.T.? Because “she was also a chemist and experienced herbalist,” and they helped each other identify and find new uses for medicinal plants.
After one herb-gathering trip with R.T., Boyd writes, Alice came down the path toward him, walking very fast. “I want to tell you something;” she puffed, “it couldn’t have happened without Rolling Thunder, I know, but I actually communicated with bees. I talked to them and they understood.”
She said R.T. told her to tell Boyd what happened because it was his job to write about such things. They had gone to get horehound plants:
"Rolling Thunder knew right where they were. [But] I saw that the plants were absolutely covered with bees. I’m deathly afraid of bees, it frightens me just to look at them and they always sting me. [So] I was just ready to leave. [Well] Rolling Thunder talked to me, he was so kind and gentle. He sensed what I was feeling, [he] told me I was not afraid of animals, I only thought I was … He told me [such fears] are based on misunderstanding.
He said ‘Now Alice, I want you to talk to those bees. I saw how you talked to the dogs [at the camp who needed help], to the babies and the mother, and you said the right things in the right way. If you can talk to dogs that way you can talk to bees, and they will understand, [not] the English language, but your meaning.’
So he told me [to] ask the bees to share the plants with me, to tell them I wouldn’t harm them and to explain that I needed the plants for good medicine, but I would leave enough for the bees and for seeds for the coming year. He told me to say it loud and clear.
I did as he said, and do you know, the bees actually understood me, and they moved! They all moved together to the back of the plant. I took only from the front half of the plant.”
She said that she then moved to another plant covered with bees:
“And the same thing happened again! On one of the plants, when the bees moved back and I started to cut they all made the strangest buzzing sound [as though they were] telling me to stop, and I was understanding. I looked at Rolling Thunder and he said ‘There now, you see? You and the bees have agreed to share and now you’re cutting back too far. They’ll expect you now to do as you said.’ So I cut only from the front half very carefully.”
She added that when she was done Rolling Thunder said she had been given a gift, and not by him. Boyd notes that she seemed “filled with emotion” when she said this. “Immediately she turned and walked back along the path as quickly as she had come.”
It may be difficult for scientists to replicate such accounts of cooperation between people and non-humans. But they can still be celebrated in our songs and poems and movies.
Examples of cooperation across species are not hard to find. One summer I watched a couple of bees, a few flower-flies, and a bumble bee working in tight quarters, either on a single flower or on a small cluster of them. They moved around but there was no bumping or shoving that I could see. The bumble bee looked huge next to the littlest of the flower-flies. It had a sting, they didn’t. But it seemed content to share the goodies with them.
References
[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[2] GDP: Gross Domestic Product
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/t-magazine/gene-sharp-theorist-of-power.html; Sharp is credited with, among other things, helping to create the non-violent movement that enabled some Baltic states to gain independence from Russia.
[4] COP26: the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow from 31 October to 13 November 2021.
[5] Website: https://timjackson.org.uk/; A minimally technical Opinion piece and two Papers are: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/lets-be-less-productive.html
Wellbeing Matters: https://limits2growth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/AETW-Policy-Briefing-No-3-digital.pdf#tj
Beyond Consumer Capitalism: https://www.cusp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP02-Beyond-consumer-capitalism.pdf
Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_jackson_an_economic_reality_check
[6] This example, Not Enough, is from a teacher, Chris Randall, who writes, sings, and records songs to amuse himself and his students, friends and family. https://ajchopraessays.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/not-enough-mastered-with-clear-sky-at-50pct.mp3
[7] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). See Endnote.
[8] TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
Endnote
The birth of a myth (extracted from Against the Grain).
The widely accepted story of how our civilization arose doesn’t hold in the light of recent findings. That story began in the early city-states when some tribal chief found that certain grains could be used to monitor and tax captive laborers used to harvest them.
How to keep the captives from fleeing? The siren song of the free life was powerful. A counter mythology was developed. “[Farming] it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads… [This story] was underwritten by a
mythology [in which] a powerful god or goddess entrusted the sacred grain to a chosen people.” Never mind that hunter gatherers “[were] nothing like the famished, one-day-from-starvation desperados of folklore. [They] have, in fact, never looked so good – in terms of their diet, health, and leisure … The current fad of ‘Paleolithic’ diets reflects [this] archaeological evidence in the popular culture.” But the myth persists.
In its latest report the IPCC[1] urges nations to take coordinated action to reduce greenhouse gases before we reach a nasty tipping point. Our leaders nod but don’t do enough to avert that outcome.
I have young people in my life that I care about. I worry about the world they and their children’s kids will inherit from us. The worry threatens to slide into despair if I don’t keep in mind that there are ways to make their future less grim.
We have to get off the path we are on. Our current scheme for living is unsustainable and headed for climate change disaster. There are two powerful forces that keep us glued to that path. But we created them, so we can also undo their hold on us.
The proximate force
The modern world is trapped in an economy that is fueled by consumption. To stay healthy, it requires us to buy ever increasing amounts of goods and services. Slow it down, as our current pandemic has done, and businesses go bankrupt, millions lose their jobs. In the US the government had to pump in trillions of dollars to keep the economy barely afloat, and it is poised to do it again. But the consumption it is designed to revive is driving us to that nasty tipping point.
What we need is a vision of an alternative economy that won’t crash if we buy less stuff. One that provides us with meaningful jobs, gives us opportunities to grow mentally and spiritually. And that does not create more inequality. And that is less unstable.
Sounds like a pipedream, but it’s not.
The economist Tim Jackson has a vision of an economy that would do all this. He calls it “Prosperity without Growth,” also the title of both the 2009 and 2017 editions of his book. (The subtitles are different.)
Jackson’s ideas on the subject are the most well thought through of any that I’ve come across. I’m not an economist, but eminent ones have applauded his ideas.
His scheme would change the measure of an economy’s success from increases in goods and services consumed (GDP)[2], to measures of increases in wellbeing. The former may be necessary in underdeveloped countries, but only as much as it takes to ensure an adequate level of food, housing, and healthcare for its citizens. He provides evidence that beyond that level, further increases in GDP and material possessions do not lead to a greater sense of wellbeing.
Jackson’s “wellbeing economy” includes moving towards a greener way of living, and a proper valuing of the services of teachers, health care providers, and others who help improve the quality of our lives. With great attention to detail he answers all the questions you might want to ask about his scheme, such as where the jobs come from without GDP growth, how to reduce income inequality, and how to dismantle the “culture of consumerism.”
But the leaders of the major polluting economies – Britain, China, Germany, France, India, Japan, and the U.S. – seem to be unaware of his way out of their jobs-versus-climate change trap. Perhaps because it requires big government investments in such things as green energy and the service sector, typically investments that are long-term with below market rates of return.
And perhaps because a move to Jackson’s well-being economy would be a radical shift from our current scheme for living. Such a move would be resisted by all who derive their power from the status quo. How to overcome that resistance? A powerful mechanism already exists, but it needs some redirection.
When I discovered that Gene Sharp was practically a neighbor – he lived across the Charles river from me – I went to see him.[3] This was before I was aware of Jackson or his thinking. Even back then I was frustrated by the lack of action on the climate change front by our policy makers. The scientists’ warnings hadn’t done it, what else could be done to get them off their butts?
All Gene said in his quiet voice was: “If you want people to change, you have to give them options.”
The answer felt right, but I walked away from our meeting more discouraged than ever. Because I couldn’t see any options to our way of life that wouldn’t cause our economy to collapse. Until I came across Jackson’s book, Prosperity without Growth. I was excited. Here was the option!
But what is still missing is a connection between Jackson’s option and the growing power of the climate change protest movement, led by young people. It gives rise to events such as the recent outpouring of people in Glasgow, young and old, after the COP26 meeting[4] announced its targets for reducing emissions. Their shouts and posters echoed what Jackson says: Nowhere near enough to avert a coming climate change catastrophe.
I saw the photos and videos. A surging tide of protest passion. But no mention of the way out of the trap that keeps policy makers glued to our current scheme for living. No posters that said: “Wellbeing Economy Now!” or “Prosperity Yes, Growth No!”
But there will be more protests. What’s needed is some redirection. Greta Thunberg led the outcry in Glasgow. She dares to speak truth to power. But though she gets applause and Nobel prize nominations, her words don’t help those who run things to get unglued from their current course. What might help is some empathy for the trap they are in and suggestions for getting out of it.
And, an understanding that radical changes such as a move to Jackson’s scheme for living may need to start at a local level, with communities or towns best equipped to experiment with it. Success at that level would pave the way for the adoption of something like it at a larger scale. But that move needs to begin now.
In the meantime, we can all spread the word about the option. Out of several dozen of my friends and acquaintances only one had heard of Jackson. These are people who care about the environment and are relatively well informed about it.
Jackson’s website has a wealth of material about his option. It includes his many papers and articles, TED and other talks, and videos of discussions about his ideas.[5]
In “Post Growth,” his latest book, Jackson talks about the impact of what Greta Thunberg says: “Her words [spawn] artistic and musical interpretations that reach beyond audiences scientists ever could.” The same could be said about some of his words.[6]
The deeper force
We must move in the direction of Jackson’s “prosperity without growth” before we cross a climate tipping point. That greener, less consumption-driven economy would use fewer natural resources, and in that sense be more eco-friendly than our current way of life. But we don’t need to wait for that move to happen before we begin to shift our stance toward the Earth. We can do that in a different bur ultimately complementary way.
How we relate to the natural world is determined by our worldview: our ideas and beliefs about it and about our place in it. The shift needed is from one that equates our success as a species with our ability to dominate and exploit nature, to one that sees that our survival depends on being able to cooperate with and be guided by it.
Our modern way of life is built on the spoils of our war against the natural world. On strip mining, on deforestation, on depleting its aquifers, on polluting its air and waters and soil, on driving a massive number of its species into extinction.
We, as Homo Sap., have been here for close to 200,000 years. For 97.5 percent of that time we lived in relative harmony with the natural world. Then, about 5,000 years ago some of us went on the warpath against our neighbors and against nature. Along with that war we also began to create stories that justified it. We in the modern world are the products of two hundred generations of that brainwashing.[7] But that inherited narrative leads to a climate change disaster. We have to wash that story out of our heads and find the seeds of a fresh vision in the wisdom of our deep past, a wisdom about how to work with the Earth kept alive in the indigenous world.
The good news is that the 5,000 years of programming is erasable. Because we are all born with a measure of creativity.
Creativity, ultimately, is the ability to transcend our conditioning, to break free of it and see the world through new eyes. It is hard wired into our genes because it is needed to adapt to changing circumstances. We have successfully lived through ice ages, we have found ways to make a good enough living in rain forests, deserts, and the Arctic.
We’ve come to the end of a five-thousand-year old experiment in living that looks like a dead-end. It has brought us some magical things: space travel, the internet, modern medicines, ragas, Bach and Beethoven. But none of those things are of much use to a species that is no longer around or back to living in caves.
It is still not too late to avoid a truly devastating climate change future. If we move toward a more sustainable way of life. If we wind down our war against the natural world. Big tasks, but we have some time in which to do them, perhaps two or three generations worth. And we have our creativity.
How do we get rid of the programming that invites eco-disaster? One way is to change the stories that underpin that narrative. We can start with the part of it that justifies our war against the natural world: hey, that’s how things are in it, a struggle for survival that pits every species against all others. We’re just doing what comes naturally.
Those who live close to that world would say: not so. Indigenous people, but also increasingly our scientists. The stories they tell suggest our biosphere flourishes on cooperation.
Currently the best-known story may be that of the Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her meticulous work demonstrates how the trees in a forest use underground networks to exchange nutrients, water, and information about the presence of pests and diseases. Older trees nurture young ones. They cooperate across species and make forests a collaborative venture. [8]
Simard’s work also validates indigenous forestry practices, based on similar ideas about the trees in it. But such validation may not be possible for some indigenous insights into the cooperative nature of the world. Here is an example.
Alice and the bees
Rolling Thunder was a Cherokee medicine man. He is the subject of a book named after him and written by Doug Boyd, a member of the Research Department of the Menninger Foundation.
R.T., as he let himself be called, still performed healing rituals for individuals but much of his time was taken up by work on issues related to Indian rights. He lived in a house at the edge of a small town in Nevada.
Boyd was part of a group of non-Indians that R.T. allowed to witness some of his work. When they needed to be around they usually camped in a secluded spot in the nearby hills. They were sometimes joined there by Alice, a woman older and more straight-laced than the others in Boyd’s group.
Boyd describes her as “A middle-aged white woman from Salt Lake City [with] right-wing political views.” So why did she hang out with R.T.? Because “she was also a chemist and experienced herbalist,” and they helped each other identify and find new uses for medicinal plants.
After one herb-gathering trip with R.T., Boyd writes, Alice came down the path toward him, walking very fast. “I want to tell you something;” she puffed, “it couldn’t have happened without Rolling Thunder, I know, but I actually communicated with bees. I talked to them and they understood.”
She said R.T. told her to tell Boyd what happened because it was his job to write about such things. They had gone to get horehound plants:
"Rolling Thunder knew right where they were. [But] I saw that the plants were absolutely covered with bees. I’m deathly afraid of bees, it frightens me just to look at them and they always sting me. [So] I was just ready to leave. [Well] Rolling Thunder talked to me, he was so kind and gentle. He sensed what I was feeling, [he] told me I was not afraid of animals, I only thought I was … He told me [such fears] are based on misunderstanding.
He said ‘Now Alice, I want you to talk to those bees. I saw how you talked to the dogs [at the camp who needed help], to the babies and the mother, and you said the right things in the right way. If you can talk to dogs that way you can talk to bees, and they will understand, [not] the English language, but your meaning.’
So he told me [to] ask the bees to share the plants with me, to tell them I wouldn’t harm them and to explain that I needed the plants for good medicine, but I would leave enough for the bees and for seeds for the coming year. He told me to say it loud and clear.
I did as he said, and do you know, the bees actually understood me, and they moved! They all moved together to the back of the plant. I took only from the front half of the plant.”
She said that she then moved to another plant covered with bees:
“And the same thing happened again! On one of the plants, when the bees moved back and I started to cut they all made the strangest buzzing sound [as though they were] telling me to stop, and I was understanding. I looked at Rolling Thunder and he said ‘There now, you see? You and the bees have agreed to share and now you’re cutting back too far. They’ll expect you now to do as you said.’ So I cut only from the front half very carefully.”
She added that when she was done Rolling Thunder said she had been given a gift, and not by him. Boyd notes that she seemed “filled with emotion” when she said this. “Immediately she turned and walked back along the path as quickly as she had come.”
It may be difficult for scientists to replicate such accounts of cooperation between people and non-humans. But they can still be celebrated in our songs and poems and movies.
Examples of cooperation across species are not hard to find. One summer I watched a couple of bees, a few flower-flies, and a bumble bee working in tight quarters, either on a single flower or on a small cluster of them. They moved around but there was no bumping or shoving that I could see. The bumble bee looked huge next to the littlest of the flower-flies. It had a sting, they didn’t. But it seemed content to share the goodies with them.
References
[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[2] GDP: Gross Domestic Product
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/t-magazine/gene-sharp-theorist-of-power.html; Sharp is credited with, among other things, helping to create the non-violent movement that enabled some Baltic states to gain independence from Russia.
[4] COP26: the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow from 31 October to 13 November 2021.
[5] Website: https://timjackson.org.uk/; A minimally technical Opinion piece and two Papers are: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/lets-be-less-productive.html
Wellbeing Matters: https://limits2growth.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/AETW-Policy-Briefing-No-3-digital.pdf#tj
Beyond Consumer Capitalism: https://www.cusp.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP02-Beyond-consumer-capitalism.pdf
Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_jackson_an_economic_reality_check
[6] This example, Not Enough, is from a teacher, Chris Randall, who writes, sings, and records songs to amuse himself and his students, friends and family. https://ajchopraessays.files.wordpress.com/2021/10/not-enough-mastered-with-clear-sky-at-50pct.mp3
[7] James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). See Endnote.
[8] TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other
Endnote
The birth of a myth (extracted from Against the Grain).
The widely accepted story of how our civilization arose doesn’t hold in the light of recent findings. That story began in the early city-states when some tribal chief found that certain grains could be used to monitor and tax captive laborers used to harvest them.
How to keep the captives from fleeing? The siren song of the free life was powerful. A counter mythology was developed. “[Farming] it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads… [This story] was underwritten by a
mythology [in which] a powerful god or goddess entrusted the sacred grain to a chosen people.” Never mind that hunter gatherers “[were] nothing like the famished, one-day-from-starvation desperados of folklore. [They] have, in fact, never looked so good – in terms of their diet, health, and leisure … The current fad of ‘Paleolithic’ diets reflects [this] archaeological evidence in the popular culture.” But the myth persists.
Amarjit Chopra is an innovation facilitator and writer. Publications include: “The Other Self” (The Humanist Magazine, May/June 2020); “The America I made my home: Will it endure? (Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, December 2018); and Managing the People Side of Innovation (Randolph, Vermont: The Public Press, 2014).