July/Aug 2009: Unplugged

What if the ongoing economic recession is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back our footprint to a more sustainable level?

How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing our society and economy around conservation and community well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit?

The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental transformation in every aspect of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc. At the risk of biting off more than we can chew, these are the questions we set out to answer in our July/August 2009 issue: “Briarpatch Unplugged, Or How I Learned to Stop Destroying the Planet and Love the Global Recession.”

To subscribe or order a copy of this issue, call 1-866-431-5777 or visit our secure online shop. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: This is, of course, an incomplete list. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comment section below.

Books

Mark Anielski, The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth (2007)

Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (2008)

John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009)

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By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

And all of the crew they were brave men,
But the Captain he was braver.
He said ‘Never mind the ship me boys
There’s none of us here can save her.

Let her go down. Swim for your lives!
Swim for your children, swim for your wives
But let her go down.’

Knight, sung by Steeleye Span

This ship may not yet be going down, but it’s certainly heading straight for the rocks.

How do we change course? Or failing that, where are the lifeboats that can preserve us and carry us back to shore? In less nautical terms, these are the sorts of questions with which this issue of Briarpatch is concerned.

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Illustration: Nick Craine

By John Bellamy Foster
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

This essay is excerpted with permission from John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, (2009).

Underlying the goal of ecological revolution is the premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the planet’s entire web of life is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

This is no longer a controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that it raises. At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme are those who believe the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control it, giving rise to gloomy forebodings.

Although polar opposites, these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.”

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