I’ll be honest, when I first learned of 350.org, I was skeptical. I don’t like the focus of organizing around emission targets, which reinforces climate as a pollution problem rather than a sustainable development issue. I’m hesitant about trying to organize communities you are not a part of – it doesn’t tend to build lasting power and relationships and often fails to mesh with the local culture and values. Still, I was encouraged that someone was working to coordinate global mobilization around the United Nations Climate negotiations.

Similarly, when I first learned of Avaaz, my feelings were lukewarm. Hadn’t MoveOn already done this same kind of multi-issue, internet-based mobilization in this country? First thoughts: “Jeez, another online petition? I’ve signed more of these than I can count. But why not? It’s bound to have some kind of effect.” I doubted the impact internet organizing would have on decision makers.

350.org and Avaaz are engaging people around the world in calling for global action on climate issues. They use the internet, communications tools and social media to mobilize through rallies, messages to governments, international petitions and other visible actions.

Since my first introduction, I have come to understand the immense value they bring to the movement. 350.org and Avaaz not only engage individuals in developing countries in influencing global climate policy, but they also reinforce individual empowerment, which is necessary for developing fair, stable societies capable of sustainable development.  They reinforce the idea that all people in this world should have be able to voice their opinions and promote the cultural values of personal autonomy and agency.

Addressing climate change will require development in the world’s poorest countries to bring people out of poverty, improve health, lower birth rates, improve resource management and establish the physical and political infrastructures necessary for continued development. As Jeffery Sachs notes in Common Wealth, this development is crucial to stem the trend of unfettered resource exploitation, civil unrest and upheaval and international cooperation. Stable, uncorrupt governments are necessary for foreign investment and technology transfer to be successful. They can be fostered through improving the socioeconomic conditions of the general population, which means that there is less pressure to exploit people and resources.

Additionally, sustainable development involves adapting modern technologies to local lifestyles and conditions; in short it requires innovation.

Innovation and initiative are qualities more commonly seen in postindustrial rather than industrialized societies.  Although industrializing countries provide improved economic opportunity for their citizens, they reinforce an ethic of discipline and rigid social norms. The reason for this is that fledging industries require consistency and stability to become established. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel write in Modernization, Culture Change and Democracy, “…industrialization does not emancipate people from authority. The industrial standardization of life discourages self-expression values.”

The transition to a postindustrial society fosters a growing emphasis on individual autonomy. Service industries require personal initiative; the security of meeting basic survival needs allows individuals to expand their attention to other needs like self-expression.

However, as Inglehart and Welzel assert, the culture of a given society and the degree to which it values individual choice and expression are major factors in the progression of a country from a industrialized to postindustrialized society.

Increasingly, people are using the public sphere as a stage for expressing commitments to alternative life-styles. As the leaders of political machines are losing their ability to mobilize voter turnout, the publics of postindustrial societies are engaging in new, largely self-organizing and self-expressive forms of participation.

Beyond simply taking action around international climate negotiations, 350.org and Avaaz are exposing people in the developing world to forms of participation that will ultimately foster the attitudes needed to enact sustainable development.  And for that I fully support their efforts.

Lately, I’ve found myself basking in the warm glow of the potential for Community Wealth Building – a new approach to Community Economic Development that uses a decentralized, post-corporate asset-based approach to engage communities in developing their own self sufficiency via participatory processes. This is almost exactly the movement I have been envisioning, except its already happening, and is well under way with well developed concepts, models, and etcetera!  Now that I have discovered all of this, and have realized that its going on in my hometown of Cleveland Ohio, I have a better focus of where I want to become engaged in this and other movements… in connecting them to America’s folk and cultural narratives, to our history and to our values. These concepts can easily be applied to new trends in agriculture, in emerging decentralized deliberative planning processes, and can be enabled by novel technologies and concepts.

These are many concepts which are coming to a head – on one hand novel, ingenious, innovative, and in these times of increasing wealth disparity and resource uncertainty: essential, but also rooted, directly democratic and participatory, and which seek in some ways a return to more traditional economic systems while utilizing a new wave of appropriate, sustainable and commons based technologies, new concepts and approaches, and re-emerging ideas about the role of civil society and local governance in economic development and self sufficiency and community resilience.

I began this amazing journey after having a friend of mine – who has a masters in economics from the University of Missouri – began opening my mind with the amazing ideas of David Korten – the author of The Post Corporate World, The Great Turning, and what I recently just read Agenda for A New Economy – From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.(the website contains in-depth summaries of the different sections). I actually originally introduced my friend to YES! Magazine, of which Korten is a board member of, as well as a member of BALLE.  Check out YES!’s latest issue for some eye-opening articles on the New Economy Agenda, much of which is successfully being put into practice right here in the US as we speak.

When I read this issue and learned that Community Wealth was extending co-operative, worker-owned businesses to my hometown – the Cleveland area - I immediately started jumping with joy in the middle of Powells Books in Portland.  These were ideas I had developed on my own, and was scheming only several months ago of extending to Cleveland via Dennis Kucinich.  I figured that co-operative, worker owned businesses, despite how appropriate they would be to Cleveland given the record of economic development and disenfranchisement over the past few decades, would be far too radical and would stir up too much trouble.  Little did I know this ground was being broken and all of these things are being put into practice in the very places I imagined.

Worker-owned cooperatives represent $450 Million in Annual Economic Activity in the US. That is huge, not to mention $840 Million from retail food cooperatives, and far more combined in agricultural, utility, telecom, health care, housing, retail and child care cooperatives as well.  Co-operatives are a rapidly growing economic model in the United States – accounting for millions of jobs and billions in economic productivity. They allow employees to develop real assetts – by providing a steady, living wage and extending services that enable safe mortgaging in housing, as well as providing for the greater good of the community through a balanced work complex, sustainable practices and resources, developing capacity for localisation and freeing up time for civic engagement, education, family time, community service and public participation.

What concepts, models, best practices, and other resources does Community Wealth offer?

(from the website):

Local Communities:

• Community Development Corporations (CDCs)
• Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)
• Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
• Cooperatives (Co-ops)
• Cross-Sectoral
• Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
• Green Collar Jobs
• Individual Wealth Building
• Program Related Investments
• Reclaiming the Commons
• Social Enterprise
• Socially Responsible Investing

Government:

• Municipal Enterprise
• New State & Local Policies
• State Asset Building Initiatives
• State & Local Investments
• Transit-Oriented Development

Place-Based Institutions:

• Anchor Institutions
• Universities and Community Partnerships

There are a few things I would add in there: Revolving Loans, Microenterprise Development, Community Currencies, Community Software, Local Supply Chain Development, Community Cultural Resurgence etc.  For the most part, though, they have all the bases covered, and more.

As well, they are not throwing around just pie-in-the-sky ideas.  These folks have all had a wealth of Community Economic Development experience, and have carefully developed these models based on their exemplary applications stretching back many years.  They are developed with a keen understanding of the needs, assetts, capacities and possibilites of communities in mind – understanding the institutions, the people, the infrastructure, the economic conditions and civic capacities.

- – - – - -

So whats the use of all of this?  Why do we need a new economy?  I suggest, again, reading some of the articles in YES! magazine: ‘Why This Crisis May Be Our Best Chance; Let Wall Street go and rebuild a Main Street economy’ . Korten really spells it out, as do other authors in the issue, including the likes of Wendell Berry and Vandana Shiva.  Our current economic model has consistently failed us – boom and bust cycles are not inevitable, they are signs of a failed system, moreover, a system that has failed the vast amount of people.  What do you do with a failed system?  I know someone who could offer some good advice:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Richard Buckminster Fuller

This is what I wrote, almost a year ago, about Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty:

“I know that some of what he says or has done is hotly debated, but I would encourage any and every thinking person to read Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty”, if you haven’t already. Some of the proposals are counterintuitive, and maybe some elements are oversimplified, but by far, overall, it’s an incredibly effective and convincing book. And the most important thing? It’s made me think of extreme poverty, and its attendant conditions, as a problem or series of problems that have solutions, rather than one that is too big and too heartbreaking to think about.”

This is equally true of Sachs’ 2008 book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.  The writing has a few more uneven patches (although it is still astoundingly clear and convincing), and there’s a great deal more criticism of George W. Bush’s policies (having lived through another 3 years of them, I guess there’s good reason), but overall it was an eye-opening, heartening argument.

And the things I liked about the first one are still here: the focus on multilateral, multidisciplinary solutions to these massive problems (ie, Sachs argues that corporations, NGOs, academia, local, national and international governmental bodies are all going to have to play a role in sustainable development) ; a commitment to rationalism and reasonable solutions, even when these might not fit with our idealism ; an understanding of both failed and successful development efforts ; an economic quantification of what it would take to resolve these issues ; and incredible (but, as I say, even better because he makes it credible) optimism.

Common Wealth argues that the greatest challenge facing the world now is our thinking: that we need to begin thinking and working more globally (because our economy is already working on a global level), and that the financial and logistical problems surrounding extreme poverty, climate change, and sustainable development are simple once our mindset has changed:

“We must keep remembering that complex global problems can be solved by collective global goal setting, reliance on scientific evidence, mobilization of technology, and most crucially, thinking ahead. We will have to appreciate, with urgency, that the ecological challenges will not solve themselves in a ’self-organizing’ manner. Markets, we have emphasized, won’t do the job by themselves. Social norms do not suffice. Governments are often cruelly short-sighted. Sustainability has to be a choice, a choice of a global society that thinks ahead and acts in unaccustomed harmony.” (81)

And then he gets to the figures. “One day’s Pentagon spending would provide enough funds to ensure antimalarial bed net protection for every sleeping site in Africa for five years” (274). On page 301 he outlines how “seven global funds would cover the vast range of sustainable development needs”. On 309 and 310 he describes the costs of failure and the financial commitment needed to address the Millenium Promises. The 0.7 % of rich countries’ GNP already committed, but not given, would eliminate extreme poverty and put all countries “on the development ladder”, as Sachs says. All of the goals he outlines would require 2.4 % of the GNP of donor countries:

“The difference between the dangherous and unsustainable global trajectory we are on now and a sustainable trajectory that addresses the challenges of environment, population, and poverty, is a modest 2 to 3 percent of annual income. Yes, that is politically large, but it is not large in terms of human well-being, or investments needed to save the world from dire and growing risks…[As] in so many cases in the past, the ultimate costs of action are likely to prove far smaller than we fear today, since we are more clever than we know once we’ve mobilized our efforts.”   (311)

And he finishes with 8 actions we all can make:

1. Educate ourselves about the science and economics of sustainable development.

2. “To the extent that it is personally possible, travel.”

3. Start or join an organization committed to sustainable development.

4. Encourage engagement of and in your community.

5. Promote sustainable development through your social network(ing sites).

6. Become politically engaged.

7. Engage your workplace.

8. “Live personally according to the standards of the Millenium Promises. Seek out contacts across countries, cultures, and class divides to ensure that we can each appreciate the common interests of our generation.”

(337-338)

And let me know if you want to borrow my copy to read it for yourself.

Vergeet de bestseller van Al Gore over de dreigende klimaatproblemen. Hier is het magnum opus van waarschijnlijk de meest getalenteerde, betrokken en invloedrijke econoom van de wereld: Jeffrey Sachs, directeur van het Earth Institute van Columbia University en ‘special adviser’ van Ban Ki-moon, de secretaris-generaal van de Verenigde Naties. Dat schreef Rick van der Ploeg op 8 april 2008 in nrc next.

In ‘Common Wealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet’ benoemt en analyseert Sachs de grote problemen van onze overvolle planeet. En zoals we gewend zijn van zijn vorige bestseller, ‘The End of Poverty’, komt hij met een reeks praktische oplossingen. Sachs’ boek is een soort total bodyscan van de planeet. Als nijpendste, met elkaar samenhangende kwesties beschrijft hij de schadelijke gevolgen van menselijke activiteiten voor het klimaat en de biodiversiteit, maar ook de steeds grotere overbevolking in ontwikkelingslanden en de miljard wereldburgers die onder de armoedegrens leven.
Hilde Roothart

Bienvenue sur Terre le 27 février !

Stalingrad

d’autres vues d’ailleurs, ici.

Love this.

Tom Wintringham was born 1898 in Grimsby, Lincolnshire. He was educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, Norfolk and Balliol College, Oxford but abandoned his university career at the outbreak of the First World War to join the Royal Flying Corps. At the end of the war he was involved in a brief barracks mutiny, one of many minor insurrections which went unnoticed in the period. He returned to Oxford, and in a long vacation made a visit of some months to Moscow, after which he returned to England and formed a group of students aiming to establish a British section of the Third International: a Communist Party. As the party formed, Wintringham graduated from Oxford and moved to London, ostensibly to study for the bar at the Temple, but in fact to work full time in politics.

In 1923 Wintringham joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In 1925 he was one of twelve CPGB officials imprisoned for seditious libel and incitement to mutiny. In 1930, he founded a newspaper, Daily Worker, and was one of the few named writers to publish articles in it. In writing for the Communist party’s theoretic journal Labour Monthly, he established himself as the party’s military expert. In LM articles and in booklets on the subject, Wintringham formed the arguments against Air Assault and called for ARP precautions several years before Guernica. His arguments were the basis for the most successful of the Communist Party’s wartime campaigns, that for ARP provision, and shaped government policy on the issue in the years leading up to the war. Although at the centre of the CPGB organisation, he was often at odds with Party policy, believing in a communism of alliance and co-operation, rather than the dominant comintern ideology of class against class. Wintringham’s ideas became party dogma when the Comintern announced the ‘Popular Front’, a form of communism Wintringham was prepared to fight for.

In 1934, he became the founder, editor and major contributor of Left Review, the first British literary journal with a stated Marxist intent. Although published by Wintringham and funded by the CPGB, it embraced writers of all shades of socialism, regardless of their party affiliations. The journal established a pattern for what was to become cultural studies.

During the Spanish Civil War, Wintringham went to Spain as a journalist, but he joined and eventually commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigades. Some socialist commentators have credited him with the whole idea of “international” brigades. He also had an affair with a US journalist, Kitty Bowler, whom he later married. In February 1937 he was wounded in the Battle of Jarama. While injured in Spain he became friends with Ernest Hemingway who based one of his characters upon him. He spent some months as a machine gun instructor. When he returned to the battalion the next summer he contracted typhoid, was again wounded at Quinto in August 1937 and was repatriated in October. His later book English Captain is based on these experiences.

In 1938 the Communist Party condemned his wife as a Trotskyist spy but he refused to leave her – he quit the party instead. He came to mistrust the party’s subservience to Stalin’s Russia and Comintern.

Back in England, Tom Hopkinson recruited him to work for the newspaper Picture Post.

At the outbreak of World War II, Wintringham applied for an army officer’s commission but was rejected. When the Communist Party promulgated its policy of staying out of the war due to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, he strongly condemned their policies. Because of the appeasement policies of prime minister Neville Chamberlain, he also regarded the Tories as Nazi sympathizers and wrote that they should be removed from office. He wrote for Picture Post, the Daily Mirror, and wrote columns for Tribune and the New Statesman.

In May 1940, after the escape from Dunkirk, Wintringham began to write in support of the Local Defence Volunteers, the forerunner of the Home Guard. On July 10, he opened the private Home Guard training school at Osterley Park, London.

Wintringham’s training methods were mainly based on his experience in Spain. He even had trainers who had fought alongside him in Spain who trained volunteers in anti-tank warfare and demolitions. He also taught street fighting and guerrilla warfare. He wrote many articles in Picture Post and the Daily Mirror propagating his views about the Home Guard with the motto “a people’s war for a people’s peace”.

The British Army still did not dare trust Wintringham because of his communist past. After September 1940 the army began to take charge of the Home Guard training in Osterley and Wintringham and his comrades were gradually sidelined. Wintringham resigned in April 1941. Ironically, despite his activities in support of the Home Guard, Wintringham was never allowed to join the organisation himself because of a policy barring membership to Communists and Fascists.

From the Wikipedia entry on Tom Wintringham.

Fascinating chap!

Tip o’ the titfer: Paul Stott (“At Ian Bone’s Christmas piss-up yesterday, I was disbelieved when I stated that one episode of Dad’s Army contains a Spanish Civil War character, brought in to teach the men guerilla warfare. Captain Mainwaring is particularly wary of our Spanish comrade, fearing he may be an Anarchist… More seriously, the political nature of the Home Guard, and in particular one of its key figures, Tom Wintringham, is often forgotten. A reappraisal of Wintringham by modern Socialists is long overdue. If you get any book tokens this Christmas, can I suggest you spend them on Hugh Purcell’s study of Wintringham The Last English Revolutionary?”)