Bill McKibben on what it's really like to deal in a regional currency

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:



Want to encourage the local economy? Try printing your own regional money.

In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I gave the nice man in the Mr. Ding a Ling truck a W.E.B. Du Bois for my fudgesicle, and he gave me four Mohicans back in change. I walked over to the food co-op and broke a 50—the one with Norman Rockwell on the face—and my excellent sandwich came with four Robyn Van Ens in change. If I hadn't been so hungry, I could have spent my BerkShares on website design, some septic work, a game of billiards, snowplowing, or a horseback-riding lesson. Hell, if the horse got sick, I could have taken her to the vet. But I was still hungry, so I wandered north to Stockbridge and headed over to the tavern at the Red Lion Inn, the quintessential Berkshires hostelry. And there I found waiting for me a nice glass of Berkshire Blonde ale and a burger, only a Melville all together.

Also waiting was Susan Witt, the force behind America's most successful alternative currency. "Oh," she said when I told her about my day, "the midwife takes BerkShares, and so does the undertaker. You can get a will done; you can build an addition to your home, fix your car... I like shoes," she added, wiggling her toes. "These weren't cheap."

Money, when you think about it, is hard to explain. Where it comes from, who decides how much is in circulation, where you get a spare trillion to bail out your banking system—it's all kind of mysterious. How can I take paper out of my wallet and use it to persuade someone in China to make me something? But most of the time we don't think much about it, any more than we ponder the mysteries of gravity. If gravity stopped working from time to time, however, we might start wondering a little more—which may explain why the BerkShares website got 3.5 million hits in the year after our financial crisis erupted. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-berkshare