In historic breakthrough, Mass. Sen. Elizabeth Warren offers bill to force the Federal Reserve to finance student loans at 0.75% with no cost to taxpayers; measure embodies principles needed for US economic recovery from current depression. I urge a major all points mobilization in support of Sen Elizabeth Warren's Bank on Students bill mandating that the Federal Reserve provide...
Frances Coppola explores how increasing automation is fundamentally shifting the nature of work away from 'making stuff' towards personal services. One of the most interesting issues to arise in the course of the "comment-athon" on my post "The Golden Calf" was the suggestion that the link between money and work is broken, and indeed that there is no longer...
News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is a common thread of greed – and a common need for unionized resistance. “It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” said the mayor as a mushroom cloud soared...
1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy?, The Bronx, N.Y. Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial...
Yesterday, after 21 months in federal custody, climate activist Tim DeChristopher approached the pulpit at his church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a free man. The First Unitarian congregation rose in uproarious applause, tears streaming down more than a few faces. “It’s good to be home,” DeChristopher told the crowd. During his sermon, he said that he had never expected to...
The solar era has begun: the industry is booming, prices are dropping, and solar energy at last seems poised to help topple the climate-altering dominance of fossil fuels. But bringing it to the masses won’t be as simple as just soaking up the sun. To gain a better picture of the challenges to come—and of some possible solutions—electric companies and solar developers...
According to a report yesterday in Bloomberg Businessweek, former 2012 Republican Presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were very close to forming a “Unity Ticket” back in February of 2012, in an effort to knock Mitt Romney out of nomination contention. After Santorum claimed the Iowa caucus and three other primaries in early February, the talk of forming a...
As a filmmaker, it’s a rare privilege to stumble upon a completely unique story—in the case of my new documentary, Grasp the Nettle , a motley collection of land rights activists , squatting a three-acre piece of land in the heart of suburban London. With my video camera and microphone in hand, I decided to give up my job and flat to move in with a group of outsiders...
Clearly, we have a catastrophic problem on our hands. But climate change isn’t it. In fact, climate change isn’t a problem at all – to be precise, climate change is merely a very acute symptom of a much, much larger matrix of problems that, if left undiagnosed, will rapidly lead to limitless, albeit unnecessary, suffering for every living creature on the planet...
The persistently sky-high unemployment in the U.S. has clouded an equally problematic trend—deteriorating working conditions and diminishing pay for unskilled and low-skilled work. Home healthcare workers, childcare providers, and housekeepers are the backbone of our economy, but they receive low wages, practically no benefits, and face a dearth of opportunities to build assets and...
A leader in the revolutionary left in the US should feel like a fox in a chicken coop. Increasingly large capitalists (Walmart, Enron, Wall-Street) are being exposed as so destructive to our society. The Bush administration created global chaos and suffering. Attacks on democratic rights are expanding. Thoughtful people in all strata of our society realize that there are dangerous trends that...
Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative. It was our local credit union that saved us...
The worsening social pains of government austerity programs now intensify the vast social suffering caused by the crisis since 2007. Beyond this especially severe business cycle, longer-term trends show capitalist mega-corporations moving blue and white collar work to lower wage regions far from the former centers of capitalist production (US and western Europe especially). Profit and...
TRAVELING IS A GREAT WAY to learn about other cultures and ways of thinking. While most of our encounters with a host country’s legal system usually revolve around visas and Customs offices, there is a much broader and underlying set of laws that guides the flow of daily routines and reflects a people’s values and beliefs.
As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers' playfulness ; their playful religious practices ; their playful approach toward productive work ; their non-d
A team of three passionate environmental filmmakers recently returned from the Amazon and Choco´ rainforests of Ecuador, beginning their journey to make a documentary featuring the best ways to save tropical rainforests. During the month of February, Earth Soul Productions is turning to Kickstarter, a "crowd-funding" website, to raise funds to cover the expenses of documenting...
What is wrong with work? For the majority of us, most of our lives are dominated by work . Even when we are not actually at work, we are traveling to or from work, worrying about work, trying to recover from work in order to get back to work tomorrow, or trying to forget about work.
Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview is an exciting and surprisingly uplifting new documentary about the role of ideology in finding solutions to the urgent global crises humankind faces in the 21 st century.
Dr. Richard Wolff, currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University here in New York City is no shy flower when it comes to provoking thought; more "Thorny Rose" than "Sweet William." The New York Times Magazine has named him "America's most prominent Marxist Economist" and he continues to...
Disambiguation: According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates...
An increasing foundation of scientific research shows a significant linkage between personal well being and environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours . This is not coincidence; it is a profound truth of crucial importance in the quest to create sustainable societies. It proves beyond a doubt that sustainability has nothing to do with sacrifice and everything to do with creating a...
The healthcare industry is a textbook example of what Ivan Illich (in Tools for Conviviality ) called a “radical monopoly.” The central function of the government’s “safety” and “consumer protection” regulations, in most cases, is either to exclude competing providers of a good or service from the market, to circumscribe the areas of competition...
A coalition of aid agencies has launched a campaign on food, aid and hunger (the IF campaign ) to run in the UK during 2013. The campaign hopes to attract a similar level of public support to that enjoyed by th
This might seem a stretch but when John Muir said everything in the universe is connected to everything else he was serious. He was speaking of the ecology of natural systems in the broadest sense – and human ecologies too, no doubt. Ecology in both senses has to do with systems with complex chains of causes and effects and networks of cross influence, the patterns through time of which...
Ted Trainer is one of the wisest, boldest, and most dedicated advocates of The Simpler Way. In 2010 he published a book called, The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World , and I have to say that it is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. If you only have time to read one more book in your life, consider reading this one. It speaks directly to our global situation and...
This article proposes issuing Hour-denominated currency nationwide, to stimulate creative and ecological economies, make grants to community groups, and make interest-free loans. Twenty years ago I started printing money. Soon after, residents of Ithaca, New York, began exchanging colorful cash featuring children, waterfalls, trollies and bugs. Since then, millions of dollars worth of...
2012 was another big year for break-out films in the social change genre. With most of the bases covered for all of the major problems we're facing, more and more films this year focused on the solutions side of the equation, giving a voice to the uplifting stories of people working to realize their dreams of a thriving, sustainable world. For the films that focused on the...
A bold new threat to the economic status quo brings on a press blackout. Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the...
I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll [continue to vote in] elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together. For me, big government has become...
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Emmanuel of Oakland, California, responded when asked about carrying a reusable shopping bag. “It looks like a man-purse.” 1 Emmanuel was part of a recent OgilvyEarth study entitled, Mainstream Green: Moving Sustainability from Niche to Normal , which investigated the discrepancy between Americans’ actions and intentions...
If Mohandas Gandhi were a typical North American activist these days, he would probably be wearing a three-piece suit and working in a plush office with his law degree prominently displayed. He would have little time to lead protests, since every other week would be spent meeting with donors – and those power lunches would hardly go well with fasting. He would be careful to avoid salt...
If indigenous and modern world views are going to inform each other to shift the trajectory of humankind toward a just, thriving, and sustainable future , an important step in this direction is for the modern world to better understand indigenous peoples’ stories, perceptions, and values. In the past, indigenous peoples’ perspectives have too frequently been told by outsiders...
We know that television's numbing effect is an unhealthy side-effect of our modern world, however Jenny Nazak argues that we individually have the power to incite people to goodness using the bounty of multimedia platforms available to each and every one of us
In Brief : There will be at least 100 million more Americans by 2050, and likely 150 million more. Yet the cities that will house them are so spatially and economically unstable that it is impossible to do much beyond superficial sustainability planning. One solution is to anchor and recycle wealth in communities, using locally owned businesses as bulwarks against uncontrolled economic forces...
For those of you who are curious exactly how Richard Register's ideas would work in practice, here's what it could look like if Americans ever decided to retrofit their downtowns for true sustainability. We know how to build the ecocity. It's easy if you want to: up-zone for more density and diversity in the centers and withdraw from sprawl. We are replete with tools. The starting...
Imagine a world in which all the things we make, use, and consume provide nutrition for nature and industry—a world in which growth is good and human activity generates a delightful, restorative ecological footprint. While this may seem like heresy to many in the world of sustainable development, the destructive qualities of today’s cradle-to-grave industrial system can be seen...
What single change stands to give Americans more free time, healthier ecosystems, and more meaningful jobs? We tend to see growth as an unalloyed good, but an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for most it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people, and...
At his official post-election press conference, President Obama told reporters that he's serious about fighting climate change while creating jobs. "We can shape an agenda that says we can create jobs, advance growth and make a serious dent in climate change and be an international leader," he said, "I think that's something that the American people would support." We have just the answer...
40 percent of the food we produce in the United States goes uneaten. No matter how local or organic it is, if nearly half our edible food is ending up in the garbage, we’re not doing something right. Much of this food gets wasted at home, and I recently blogged about simple strategies we can all use to reduce this waste. About 43 billion pounds of food are thrown away in grocery...
Over the first half of 2012, the African Development Bank (AfDB) has been demonstrating its commitment to support the scaling up of renewable energy in Africa with the approval of US $800 million in loans to spur private investment in Morocco’s growing wind and solar markets. The Bank’s technical and financial support of Morocco’s plan to develop a concentrated solar power...
It speaks the language of riffles and babbles, not legal rights and codes, but the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third largest, has received something no other river in the country – and possibly the world – yet has: a legal voice. In a framework agreement signed last week between the Crown and the Whanganui River iwi (the local Maori people), the river will be...
Here in the United States, whether we look to the language used amongst ourselves, in the media, or by politicians, we may find that our standard method of communication is based on rhetoric – a style of argument that relies on a set of distinctly isolated viewpoints, with each view-holder applying a range of persuasive techniques in an effort to prevail over a perceived opponent. As...
Several years ago, like so many others, we got tired of the most influential news outlets failing to inform the public about so many critical issues. But rather than wait for these media conglomerates to reform, we decided: better to just become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait on anything; each one of us can become a micro distribution network for the news that matters. It...
There is no alternative ("Tina") to capitalism? Really? We are to believe, with Margaret Thatcher, that an economic system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do? Capitalism's recurring tendencies toward extreme and deepening inequalities of income, wealth, and political and cultural power require...
Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the...
Take a look at this info-graphic. And then this one . The disparity is absurd. Though personally I don't think raising the minimum wage is the solution, as it doesn't get anywhere close to solving the root problem.
A little over 30 years ago, a teenager named Jadav "Molai" Payeng began burying seeds along a barren sandbar near his birthplace in northern India's Assam region to grow a refuge for wildlife. Not long after, he decided to dedicate his life to this endeavor, so he moved to the site where he could work full-time creating a lush new forest ecosystem. Incredibly, the spot today hosts a...
If you're a regular reader of The Salt, you've probably noticed our interest in foraging. From San Francisco to Maryland , we've met wild food experts, nature guides and chefs passionate about picking foods growing in their backyards. Now, Washington state has jumped on the foraging bandwagon with plans to develop a 7-acre public plot into a food forest. The kicker? The lot sits smack in...
SolidarityNYC is a New York City-based group which works to create links between social movements and the "solidarity economy." The latter consists of cooperatives, small businesses, non-profits and other economic activities which "reinforce values of justice, ecological sustainability, cooperation, and democracy." The group aims to promote the solidarity economy as an alternative to the...
Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. By hosting community film screenings and sharing them online, they offer a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait for anyone or anything. Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries below. Just imagine...