Lietaer’s Shadow Side
The shadow side of the Great Mother archetype Bernard Lietaer, in a brilliant 1997 article, describes the repression of the Great Mother archetype: “The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout…
What might it look like?
What it won’t be If we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too lateIf we act as individuals, it’ll be too littleBut if we act as communities, it might just be enough,just in time.– Transition movement, Cheerful Disclaimer…
Hartmann’s Older Culture view
Thom Hartmann, in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, gives us an idea of the magnitude of change that will be required. He reminds us of the Older Culture view, the tribal culture, of which Native Americans are an example.…
Beyond Emergency Care
Once our “trauma center” is up and running, we can turn to Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles: “Observe and interact.” We must learn how to observe, and what to observe. We must retrain our powers of observation for the new economy —…
10. Crafting the Shadow Structure
George Bernard Shaw famously said that all progress depends on not being reasonable. It’s time for a large amount of civic unreasonableness. – James Gustave Speth At the beginning of Part III, I quoted David Ehrenfeld. He reminds us that…
9. Strive for a Socially-Just Economy
Economics and social injustice is such a significant issue that it demands its own Practical Tool point. Our society currently has deep economic divides which are worsened by race, culture, geography and prejudice. NEF writes of the Great Redistribution where…
Social Enterprise
The concept of “social enterprise” has been gathering traction in the U.S. It’s kind of like a hybrid of the business world and the nonprofit world. In its most basic form, there’s the example of a gift store within a…
6. Community-based investment
The shift from a growth economy to economic contraction has turned our concepts of “profit” and “income” upside down. The idea of “investment” has similarly been radically altered. In the old paradigm, when we thought about “investments,” it meant turning…
5. A Multiplicity of Financial Vehicles
At the beginning of Part III we reminded each other than the economy is basically the sum total of transactions between people. At that same basic level, “money” is simply the markers we use to record those transactions. There is…
Questions we might invite our local businesses and proprietorships to consider
1) How dependent is your overall industry on oil, power, low-cost transportation and shipping — can your industry survive as we leave the era of cheap oil? 2) If your industry will survive, it will undoubtedly be radically altered. How?…