David Korten: What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like?

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


What Would a Down-to-Earth Economy Look Like?
How did we end up with Wall Street when models for a healthy economy are all around us?

by David Korten
posted Jan 17, 2013


With proper care and respect, Earth can provide a high quality of life for all people in perpetuity. Yet we devastate productive lands and waters for a quick profit, a few temporary jobs, or a one-time resource fix.

Our current expansion of tar sands oil extraction, deep-sea oil drilling, hydraulic fracturing natural gas extraction, and mountaintop-removal coal mining are but examples of this insanity. These highly profitable choices deepen our economic dependence on rapidly diminishing, nonrenewable fossil-energy reserves, disrupt the generative capacity of Earth’s living systems, and accelerate climate disruption.

A global economy dependent on this nonsense is already failing and its ultimate collapse is only a matter of time. For a surprisingly long time, we humans have successfully maintained the illusion that we are outside of, superior to, and not subject to the rules of nature. We do so, however, at a huge cost, and payment is coming due.

To secure the health and happiness of future generations, we must embrace life as our defining value, recognize that competition is but a subtext of life’s deeper narrative of cooperation, and restructure our institutions to conform to life’s favored organizing principle of radically decentralized, localized decision making and self-organization. This work begins with recognizing what nature has learned about the organization of complex living systems over billions of years. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-would-nature-do/inside-the-down-to-earth-economy

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Yeah ... Yeah ... Yeah ...

But nhow do I make a profit from that?

{sarcasm}

[Locrian]

2. but you're right

THAT (profit etc) is the zero sum game that will kill us unless we come up with another way to define success and happiness (vs how much $$ you have).