Reclaiming the Crisis

Transition Towns and Participatory Economics

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

Economic crisis causes decline in environmental concern

• In 2011, 37% thought many claims about environmental threats are exaggerated, compared with 24% in 2000 (British Social Attitudes Survey)

• A YouGov poll commissioned by EDF energy indicated that of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62% (published in The Guardian)

Can we make the rich pay for their emissions?

What really happened?

What really happened

Is ‘peak money’ helpful?

• It links the exhaustion of a finite, natural resource with a socially determined tool

• It suggests a powerlessness in terms of taking control of money systems

• It supports the economist’s flaw of equating abstract with the real: undermines money as a ‘fictitious commodity’

Money: Unstable and Unsustainable

Resilience hierarchy

• Economics enables the extortion of resources from people and planet via a process of abstraction

• We need instead to engage in re-embedding

• Refocusing our attention on the least abstract: money → fossil fuels → land

Citizens’ Audit Committee

• The concept of ‘odious debt’

• Transparency to facilitate a public debate

• Prioritise citizens and not the financiers

• Irish audit led to ‘zombie banks’ campaigns

• Show Debtocracy film

Who Owes Whom?

Where do we act?

• Lobbying? Pointless because of the finance coup

• Local action in communities?

• Move your money• Reframing the

debate?

Positive directions

• We predicted this and are prepared• Local Liquidity: local currencies can be reframed

as a means of injecting new liquidity into floundering local economies (paper from Green House)

• Transition to support Citizens’ Audit?• Resilience hierarchy• Lobbying is pointless because of the finance

coup

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

www.greenhousethinktank.org

Green Economics (Earthscan, 2009)

Environment and Economy(Routledge, 2011)

The Bioregional Economy (Earthscan, 2012)