Oct 8, 2011 | Carolyn's Videos, Video
To find meaning and purpose, Carolyn advocates a process called ‘inner transition,’ which focuses the individual on answering two questions: “Who do I want to be?” and “What am I here to do?” The process is about redefining our relationship to work, to each other, and to the world around us – in short, redefining what “prosperity” means. For too many in the recent past, prosperity = money. In a future where many current professions and industries may no longer exist, those who respect the work they do – whatever it is – will find much more fulfillment than those remaining fixated on a specific income level that they may not be able to return to.
Oct 5, 2011 | Video
Mike Ruppert and Peter Joseph discuss the current unraveling and where it’s headed.
Sep 19, 2011 | Options/ New Paradigm
If, in the midst of converging global crises, we wish to enhance our awareness of the interrelatedness of all things, and promote genuine spiritual contentment, we must emphasize and live by another way of life: the steady-state economy. In this fashion we can minimize, for ourselves and others, the social difficulties of transition from decades of economic growth to decades of economic contraction.
Sep 16, 2011 | Economic Meltdown
After World War II, the industrial nations of the world set out to rebuild their economies and needed a yardstick by which to measure their progress. The index soon settled upon was the Gross National Product, or GNP—defined as the market value of all goods and services produced in one year by the labor and property supplied by the residents of a given country. A similar measure, Gross Domestic Product, or GDP (which defines production based on its geographic location rather than its ownership) is more often used today; when considered globally, GDP and GNP are equivalent terms.
Jul 24, 2011 | Economic Meltdown
While “experts” assure us that the economy is slowly emerging from recession, a growing camp of well-informed dissenters thinks not. The scant evidence of recovery, insists this group, is not an anomaly but the sign of a profound sea change. The End of Growth, one book unequivocally calls it, next to a cover image of a burst balloon and a pin. The book’s author, Richard Heinberg, makes his case by far the most eloquently and comprehensively—and though it may be a decidedly unwelcome one for those now struggling, that doesn’t detract from its validity.
Jul 21, 2011 | Economic Meltdown, Options/ New Paradigm
We have lived in an Age of Separation. One by one, our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world. The loss of these bonds is more than a reduction of our wealth, it is a reduction of our very being. The impoverishment we feel, cut off from community and cut off from nature, is an impoverishment of our souls. That is because, contrary to the assumptions of economics, biology, political philosophy, psychology, and institutional religion, we are not in essence separate beings having relationships. We are relationship.
Jul 15, 2011 | Options/ New Paradigm
Money is woven into our minds, our perceptions, our identities. That is why, when a crisis of money strikes, it seems that the fabric of reality is unraveling, too—that the very world is falling apart. Yet this is also cause for great optimism, because money is a social construction that we have the power to change. What new kinds of perceptions, and what new kinds of collective actions, would accompany a new kind of money? – The fourth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition.
Jul 9, 2011 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
We are now well into a global crisis that may mark the end of this cycle of human civilization. In this note I present a summary of what’s going on as far as I can tell, as well as a scenario for how things might develop over the next 75 years or so. The issue is enormous, so an overview like this is inevitably going to be skimpy on details. This is, after all, not an academic journal. However, like every other fact in the known universe, those details are just a Google away…
Jul 7, 2011 | Economic Meltdown
It’s business as usual that’s the utopian fantasy, while creating something very new and different is the pragmatic way forward.
Jul 4, 2011 | Options/ New Paradigm
What Transition calls “reskilling” – what other people call by other names, including Christian homemaking and radical homemaking, and “doing it like Grandma used to” is actually the reinvention of the most important resource we may have for our future – the restoration of the informal economy. It is a hugely political and hugely important act, being done by multiple ends of the political spectrum at once, and this matters.
