Thinking Outside the Box

[This was a reply I made on August 27, 2011 to a question poised on the steadystaters@googlegroups.com listserv. It mainly points out how raising awareness among the general public is the underlying action that needs to happen -- which can be thought of a lifelong service to a noble goal.] Sharon, To reply to your questions, please see my responses below: is there something else that needs to happen besides abolishing the right of corporations to be treated as 'people'? I think what needs to happen is raising awareness and education among the general public which amounts to consciousness raising about the issue of corporate personhood and why we must change it. This will not happen quickly, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of activist organizations all over the world working hard on this goal. Have you heard of Bioneers and wiserearth.org , started by Paul Hawken ? They are certainly in the vanguard but unfortunately the mainstream media does not quite ...

[Another post to the steadystaters@google.com listserv....on August 26, 2011] I fully agree with Sharon of Australia. What she makes clear is that all of us are facing the same economic, environmental and political problem. But this political aspect is what I saw missing from Sharon's compassionate description of what needs to happen to improve our economic and environmental situation -- but which is critical to acknowledge within the steady state community. From my viewpoint, the economic and environmental situation will never change until the political perception changes to the point where we begin to pass legislation that supports the environment and supports an economy based on people, and not corporations. And it is this struggle between the rights of people and the rights of corporations which will become more and more clear, as our problems intensify, and the causes of them become more and more obvious. This will require changing the stated public purpose of the insti...

[This is a post I made to a listserv dedicated to ecological economics, sometimes referred to as steady state economics. I sidestep the ideological discussions that the question below could devolve into, and point that if ecological economists are sincere about the change they say they seek, they must get involved political process...otherwise their contributions are merely "academic", i.e. without effect in the so-called 'real world.'] On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 10:43 PM, cruxcatalyst (sharon) wrote: Here's a curly question for the economists among us with more expertise than myself: how can a capitalist world model exist (theoretically and practically) without an ever expanding world population? Cheers Sharon To answer, such questions, I agree that it is wise to avoid ideology. My following comments are based solely on the practical recent lessons of why we are experiencing the current recession, and the direction we sure...

[This is a post that I wrote to an email list that is subscribed to by those interested in the field of Ecological Economics. This field has personally inspired me to return to teaching economics -- but only environmental economics, because it represents a crack in the door to let the message of Ecological Economics get through to our existing institutions -- which sorely need to hear its message.] Thank you Mr John Veitch. Your reply is, to my mind, what this email list is for: to inform and educate each other, and I appreciate this quick sketch of the milestones in the background thinking that underlies modern thinking in ecological economics. While I don't wish to discourage easy camaraderie among its subscribers, the more I see uninformative posts that simply take up cycles of my time, the less inclined am I to take this list seriously; but I see Mr Veitch's post as an opening for a plea that I have been wanting to post to this list for some time. I am just a ...