Letters from Chile – a Little Historical Context
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Consumerism, Demonstration Sites, Development & Property Trusts, Eco-Villages, Economics, Education Centers, Ethical Investment, Networking Sites, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh May 15, 2010
Editor’s Note: This is Part VIII of a series. If you haven’t already, be sure to catch Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI and Part VII.
Contemplating the past, present and future – and land redistribution – in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Chile.
All photos © copyright Craig Mackintosh
He stares back at us from the t-shirts of millions of youths worldwide. Che Guevara’s face has become one of the most recognisable counter-cultural and political symbols ever known. The history books tell us the man was famously sympathetic to the lot of the poor, and that his overriding passion was to fight against inequality, oppression, control. Che comes to my mind as I write this article from South America, because, in his rise to power, one of his driving ambitions, and which became one of his key responsibilities under Castro, was land redistribution – where he sought to break the stranglehold that was keeping the masses impoverished and robbing them of their potential. I bring this topic up, as, when I look at what’s happening in the world, and the radical changes needed to put us onto a sustainable path, the issue keeps coming back to my mind. These two words – land redistribution – strike fear into the hearts of the rich, and feelings of ambition and even violent revolution in those of the poor, yet, if we’re to stake a claim on the future, I feel we must, both rich and poor, come to terms with them.
Comments (0)Things That Can’t Go On Forever, and Things That Can: A Few Thoughts
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Peak Oil, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Rhamis Kent April 2, 2010
Properly defining and orienting permaculture is of prime importance in its being appropriately applied. I’ve found it to be a very useful personal exercise. Doing so prevents me from straying too far from its practical origins and helps to keep it from being transformed into some kind of Utopian, escapist ideal.
Comments (1)The Fed and the Two Tillion Dollars – Ask No Questions, We’ll Tell You No Liesr
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems — by Craig Mackintosh April 1, 2010
The following clip is fascinating. Watch Donald Kohn, deputy to the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, stick dutifully to his script of non-disclosure as novice Congressman Alan Greyson, who, according to his own confession, "didn’t get the memo about which questions not to ask" presses him on what, exactly, happened to the two trillion dollars of U.S. Taxpayer money the Fed’s been tasked with manufacturing out of thin air and handling since last September (and note, this is in addition to the 700 billion dollar treasury bail-out):
In case two trillion dollars doesn’t mean a lot to you – here’s an equation to help put this into perspective: If you were to spend one million dollars, every day, from today onwards, for the next 5,500 years, you’d have spent just a little over two trillion dollars….
No wonder these people are getting upset:
Comments (1)Calling for Separation of Oil and State
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics — by Craig Mackintosh March 30, 2010
In a sane world, such a post as this would be unnecessary. But, alas….
I recently had to share with you all (here and here) the recent U.S. supreme court ruling that allows U.S. (and international) corporations to:
- provide unlimited funding to promote their preferred choice of presidential candidate
- provide unlimited funding for smear campaigns against opponents of the above – those whose policies might not be congenial to their activities
Oil Change International just made me aware of a citizen’s action against this ruling that deserves promoting. I’ll paste below their intro to a citizens’ group that is seeking justice and a reinstatement of democracy. All power to them:
Comments (0)Money Literacy – Part V
Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organizations, Consumerism, Development & Property Trusts, Eco-Villages, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher January 20, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part V of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV if you haven’t already.
"Money" is nothing but a social construct that comes with a number of "rules of the game". In one way, "money" has much in common with computer operating systems: most users are completely unaware of the degree to which these rules are flexible, malleable, and allow very different designs. So, before we ask ourselves: in what way could a different design of rules lead to a different role of money, it is worthwhile taking a look at what sort of phenomena the present arrangement gives rise to. A telling passage can be found in Bill Mollison’s autobiography:
Permaculture Master Plan: Planting up the Global Garden
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organizations, Commercial Farm Projects, Community Projects, Courses/Workshops, Demonstration Sites, Eco-Villages, Education Centers, Ethical Investment, Networking Sites, People Systems, Project Positions, Society, Urban Projects, Village Development — by Andy Homer January 19, 2010
You’re trying to say that you can live in the modern way and continue to think in the traditional way. That’s not true. The way you live affects the way you think. – Danny Billie, Traditional Seminole
I’d like to recount here my impressions of the PRI, and how different it is from many other organizations. We (Tribal Networks) first came across them when looking for solutions to problems we found in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where we were starting a project to bring in a school and an internet / community centre. Searching for "dry land permaculture" soon found Geoff’s "Greening the Desert" clip, and things progressed from there.
Money Literacy – Part IV
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 14, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part IV of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, Part II and Part III if you haven’t already.
Patterns are amazing things. Maybe, their fascination comes from the human mind being very good at spotting them, while at the same time also being very bad at spotting them. It is sometimes claimed that "a genius is someone who sees something that is patently obvious for the first time" and, very often, patterns are fascinatingly obvious – in hindsight.
By what process precisely does a culture lose its indigenous money as it gets connected to a more powerful economy? One might of course guess that "bait" is an important factor: Look at all these shiny new gadgets that the new money can buy. There’s even television screens! Still, some may not be that easily seduced, and as, unfortunately, we all feel better about major life decisions if we can avoid permanent confrontation with observations that force us to re-evaluate whether they might have been a major mistake, the question arises how to "connect" those to the new money economy who value their independence of it very highly.
Comments (4)Money Literacy – Part III
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems, Village Development — by Thomas Fischbacher January 12, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part III of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I and Part II, if you haven’t already.
A small economy joins the big economy
In the last part of this series, we saw that linking a big economy to a small economy is by no means an innocent act: naively, this might be regarded as just ‘giving everybody more choice’, i.e. more options for trade, hence more ‘freedom’. But everything works in two ways: one cannot link a big economy to a small economy without linking the small economy to the big economy. So, this will simultaneously give the big economy a strong handle on the small economy. What would in principle prevent a small population of economically powerful participants in the big economy from using their sheer weight to e.g. buy up key resources such as land in the small economy? This is not a purely theoretical issue – we see such processes all around us. Note that this is practically bound to happen if the big economy keeps on generating major internal pressure to "grow". And, as one cannot separate a culture from its economy, this effectively means that the largest aggressive-expansive economy, that of the culture called "western civilization", keeps on re-programming other cultures’ economies, and eventually these cultures themselves. Might that even be called ethnocide?
Comments (0)Money Literacy – Part II
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 10, 2010
Editor’s Note: This Part II of a series. Before continuing, please read Part I, if you haven’t already.
Any society practices division of labour to some extent, and hence, needs some way to keep track of who is pulling their weight, and who is not. The fundamental idea is, of course, that someone who contributes to society’s well-being acquires some form of credit that gives him permission to ask society to do him some favour in turn. It is entirely conceivable that in some small societies – such as some close-knit families, or maybe some abbeys, all this bookkeeping on who owes whom how big a favour is done only mentally, without any form of written record or specific token. Usually, however, this keeping track of favours easily gets out of hand and becomes so confusing that societies soon start to rely on some sort of additional device – not for all processes, but at least for a considerable share of them. Let us for now call any such socially agreed upon way of keeping track "a currency". It is perfectly normal in any society to see multiple quite different currencies being in circulation simultaneously, from bank notes to invitations to a barbeque. This is important to note, for we normally associate only one concept with the term "currency": some sort of "formal money" (where we usually think of coins, or bank notes, etc.). Hence, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that this might be overly narrow-minded.
Comments (0)Money Literacy – Part I
Alternatives to Political Systems, Financial Management, People Systems — by Thomas Fischbacher January 7, 2010
The 20th century was strongly dominated by two schools of thought on how to design a system that guides human effort towards the improvement of living conditions and the advancement of human society: On the one hand, we have "capitalism", on the other hand "communism". While both are often regarded as irreconcilably opposing philosophies, the one proposing a de-centralized market mechanism, the other one a centralized planned economy to allocate "scarce resources", it is important to notice that, in the past century, both gave disturbingly similar results in one important respect: Back then, they both amounted to increasingly damaging vital life support system resources in order to meddle through the problems of the day. One might try to capture this thought in a succinct provocative phrase: The one thing communism and capitalism could not agree on is whether the process of destroying the current best available remaining resources should proceed in a centralized or de-centralized way. Mindless bickering over this – essentially minor – detail brought the world insanely close to the brink of instant nuclear annihilation at least thrice in the 20th century, in October 1962 [1], in October 1969 [2], and in September 1983 [3]: we should perhaps count ourselves lucky we even made it so far.
Move Your Money
Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organizations, Consumerism, Development & Property Trusts, Eco-Villages, Economics, Ethical Investment, Financial Management, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh January 1, 2010
I want to wish all our readers a very happy new year. May the next year, the next decade, become a major step forward for all of us in finding ways to build a better future. I personally see the next decade as being rife with problems that need addressing at their most root levels. Challenges are afoot, but we live in exciting times, to be sure.
The last decade was quite an eye opener to the world. Multiple converging events collided to shake many awake out of their apathy, and the proliferation of the internet helped spread the word like never before. Environmentalism went from a concept that was scoffed at to being the overriding concern of the majority. Today you’ll find sandal wearing tree huggers side by side with briefcase wielding wannabes. The tanked economy woke people up, worldwide, with the startling realisation that free market capitalism has completely failed them. Celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism were half-hearted and filled with cynicism, with the realisation that the greed that forms the basis capitalism brings very real consequences. We watched in horror, while the ‘invisible hand‘ (see also) went AWOL when we needed it most and governments worldwide took trillions of taxpayer dollars and spent us all into the next century to salvage the largest industries from their own stupidity and lack of foresight. By now we were so punch drunk we could only stare as the Wall Street bankers who orchestrated the collapse made off with golden parachutes and bonuses that defied belief. And, although the economic slowback reduced oil prices from the through-the-roof highs of 2008, thus muting alarm over this for too many with short attention spans, we now have millions more people the world over conscious of the outright vulnerability of our present situation as we ride the crest of peak oil. The unjust wars fought with a veiled but obvious motive disgusted and infuriated all but the most callous or ignorant, and the decade was peppered with annual, high level international talks about climate change that were doomed to fail from the outset.
With these thoughts in mind, I share the video clip below. Despite only being uploaded onto YouTube three days ago (Dec 29), it’s already been watched 173,000 times.
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Serco – the “Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard Of”
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Population, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 31, 2009
One of our readers provided a link to the following video in a recent comment. I thought it was worth putting it up as a post itself. A perfect example of why I spend time examining options for a ‘third way’, that doesn’t allow centralisation to occur.
It these kind of trends don’t wake us up, what will?
Comments (0)Letters from Sri Lanka – Sarvodaya Builds Community and National Resilience, Part II
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Community Projects, People Systems, Social Gatherings, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 30, 2009
Part V of a series – If you haven’t already, please read Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV before continuing. This series is part of my work for the Sustainable (R)evolution book project.
Post-civil war security in Sri Lanka
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh
Standing, jostling in a small space with 15,000 people of mixed ethnicity and religion, just after a deadly civil war had been quashed by Sri Lanka’s government forces, could make a person feel a tad jittery – particularly when the event that attracted the aforesaid 15,000 people was in respect to Lord Kathirgaman, a six-headed Hindu god of war.
But here I was.
Comments (2)Pinky’s Scary School Nightmare – and Deschooling Society
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 21, 2009
From looking at site stats, I see that significant numbers of people have read my recent ‘Carbon Trading – and What Should Be on the Negotiating Table at Copenhagen‘ post. The climate talks are over now, and appear to have achieved little more than add to a global atmosphere of discouragement, and so it’s left to us, the average guy on the street, to do what they should have done – that being to deeply consider what the world we want to develop should look like and to then consider how we can get from where we are now to that destination.
One of the key points I raised in the aforesaid article is the need to educate, educate, educate. The kind of education I’m referring to is not your contemporary, institutionalised, factory-type schooling that churns out faithful drones of consumption – but rather more practical-based education that enables individuals to take on the very real social, ecologic, resource challenges we now face.
The clip below, I think, is a good way to get one thinking about the topic in an outside-the-box fashion:
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Letters from Sri Lanka – Sarvodaya Builds Community and National Resilience
Aid Projects, Alternatives to Political Systems, Bio-regional Organizations, Community Projects, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh December 18, 2009
Part IV of a series – If you haven’t already, please read Part I, Part II and Part III before continuing. This series is part of my work for the Sustainable (R)evolution book project.
The 2300 year old sacred fig of Anuradhapura in north central Sri Lanka
All photographs © Craig Mackintosh
It was kind of humbling, and strangely reassuring, standing next to one of the oldest living trees in the world. It is, in fact, the oldest known human-planted tree. Its limbs are aided by vertical supports now, lest they tumble, but despite being 2300 years old, its wide spreading branches were still flush with green leaves.
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