Transcript pptx, 4552 K

Revitalising our Economy;
Rebuilding our Community?
Molly Scott Cato
Professor of Strategy and Sustainability
Roehampton Business School
Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces
real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas
that are lying around. That, I believe, is our
basic function: to develop alternatives to
existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible
becomes the politically inevitable.
Milton Friedman
The Last Great
Depression
• Failure of aggregate
demand
• Repayment of debts
• Failure of lending and
borrowing
• Recessionary spiral: ‘the
death spiral’
The Linear View
= wealth creation
= taxation
= private sector
= consumption
= public sector
= wealth circulation
The Systems View
= public sector
= wealth creation
= private sector
= wealth circulation
= taxation
= third sector
= recirculation of
taxed wealth
The view from No. 10
The full picture
CO2 emissions associated with UK
consumption 1990 to 2009 (Defra)
The Myth of Decoupling:
CO2 intensity of GDP across nations
Carbon Intensities Now and Required to Meet
450 ppm Target
Why the globalised economy is insecure
• 99% of UK food imports
depend: unsurprisingly
they are at sea-level.
• In 2007 the IPCC
predicted a 0.35m rise in
sea levels by the end of
the 21st century.
• In 2009 scientists
declared that sea-level
rise was occurring at
twice the rate they had
estimated just two years
earlier
Where are the world’s ports?
Farewell to Thrift
• ‘the whole system of an increasing
productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising
standard of material living, plus high-pressure
advertising and salesmanship, plus mass
communications, plus cultural democracy and
the creation of the mass mind, the mass man’
• J. B. Priestley, 1955
Growing Inequality
Climate change is a class issue
Where are we going?
The Bioregional
Economy
Localisation plus
What is a bioregion?
• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than
political) boundaries’
• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘lifeplace’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and
ecological character capable of supporting unique
human and non-human living communities. Bioregions
can be variously defined by the geography of
watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and
related identifiable landforms and by the unique
human cultures that grow from natural limits and
potentials of the region
An economic bioregion
• A bioregional economy would be embedded
within its bioregion and would acknowledge
ecological limits.
• Bioregions as natural social units determined
by ecology rather than economics
• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic
resources such as water, food, products and
services.
• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity
Accountability as reconnection
• Your bioregion is
your ‘backyard’
• Each bioregion
would be the area
of the global
economy for
which its
inhabitants were
responsible
Community not markets
• Reclaiming of public
space for citizenship
and relationship.
• ‘putting the economy in
its place’
• Market as agora—
public space for debate
and sharing of ideas,
not just commerce
Three key concepts
• Resilience: ‘the property of a material to
absorb energy when it is deformed elastically
and then, upon unloading to have this energy
recovered.’
• Ecological citizenship: intrinsic and ethical
motivations towards protecting the
environment
• Critique: the importance of political economy
Walking
the Land
Locality:
Walking
the Land
Stroud Community Agriculture
Local Currencies
Seeds of a greener future?
Find out more
www.greeneconomist.org
gaianeconomics.blogspot.com
Green Economics: An
Introduction to Theory, Policy
and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)
The Bioregional Economy:
Land, Liberty and the Pursuit
of Happiness
(Earthcan, 2012)