28 items | 10 visits
Shorter showers and "transition towns" along are not enough. We can't patch this boat, and we are sinking fast.
Updated on Sep 09, 17
Created on Feb 25, 10
Category: Cultures & Community
URL:
Personal lifestyle change makes us feel better and is good, but it is not enough. We need change from the top down and very soon.
We can't simply change within the past system of capitalism in a no-growth, steady-state sustainable future. If we do what we've always done, we'll get what we've always got.
Above all it must be a zero-growth economy, with a far lower GDP than at present, and most difficult of all, it cannot be an affluent society.
I refer to this alternative as The Simpler Way. Its core principles must be
• Far simpler material living standards.• High levels of self-sufficiency within households, national and especially neighbourhoods and towns, with relatively little travel, transport or trade. There must be mostly small, local economies in which most of the things we need are produced by local labour from local resources.
• Basically cooperative and participatory local systems.
• A quite different economic system, one not driven by market forces and profit, and in which there is far less work, production and consumption than at present, and a large cashless sector, including many free goods from local commons. There must be no economic growth at all. There must be mostly small local economies, under our control via participatory systems, and run to meet needs – not to make profits (although I think we could have markets and many private firms).
• Most problematic, a radically different culture, in which competitive and acquisitive individualism is replaced by frugal, self-sufficient collectivism.
SustainAbility Appetite for Change
video http://www.sustainability.com/library/appetite-for-change
Described by its authors, the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) provides citizens and policymakers fruitful insight by recognizing economic activity that diminishes both natural and social capital. Further, the GPI is designed to measure sustainable economic welfare rather than economic activity alone. To accomplish this, the GPI uses a simple three underlying principles for its methodology: account for income inequality, include non-market benefits that are not included in the Gross Domestic Product, and identify and deduct bads such as environmental degradation, human health effects, and loss of leisure time.
The GPI developers identified 26 indicators and then populate them with verifiable data. As one example, the pure economic activity stemming from the explosive growth of urban sprawl contributes greatly to the GSP. Yet, along with sprawl come increased commuting time, increased traffic congestion, land use conversion, and automobile impacts. In short, just because we are exchanging money within an economy does not necessarily mean that we are sustainable or prosperous.
In the effort of the GPI to measure prosperity, though, there are of course inherent challenges. The most obvious is, how do we quantify the unquantifiable? First, what are the indicators of social well-being? Next, how do we calculate such indicators? That is, what really is the cost of crime? What is the value of wetlands? Of forests? How do we measure human health? To answer, while the identification of each indicator is subjective, the use of cited, nationally accepted data and peer-reviewed studies lends considerable credibility. Because of this and its long track record, many countries and national jurisdictions have used the GPI as a construct and included indicators and data to assist policymakers as they guide their communities to the future.
Origins of the GPI
The precursors to the current Genuine Progress Indicator were the Measured Economic Welfare (MEW) and the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). In 1972, American economists William Nordhaus and Nobel Prize winner James Tobin developed the Measured Economic Welfare (MEW) in an attempt to answer if growth was obsolete. Ecological economist Herman Daly (currently at the University of Maryland, College Park) and theologian John Cobb picked up their work nearly two decades later as they investigated how to develop a macro measure of welfare by creating the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW).
28 items | 10 visits
Shorter showers and "transition towns" along are not enough. We can't patch this boat, and we are sinking fast.
Updated on Sep 09, 17
Created on Feb 25, 10
Category: Cultures & Community
URL: