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.
features
kick-starting the environmental movement
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Dan Mossip-Balkwill
the myth of the wealthy environmentalist
Connecting Finnish innovation & Mongolian degradation
By Chris Benjamin
envisioning ecological revolution
Why ecological transformation requires a social revolution
By John Bellamy Foster
salt & earth ( a photo essay)
A year and a half in the life of an ecovillage
A photo essay by Jonathan Taggart
old growth, new approach
Learning from the Haida Land Use Agreement
By Erik Haensel & Justine Townsend
why less is more
A conversation with six visionary thinkers about a scaled-down future
By Mark Brooks
six big ways to work for a smaller world
Small actions that add up
By Stephanie Dearing, Brittany Shoot, Anuradha Rao, Candace Hodder, Tim Rourke & Dalia Levy
online exclusive:
Resources & tools for powering down
departments
letter from the editor
How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession
reviews
Peter Victor’s Managing Without Growth: Smaller by Design, Not Disaster
Reviewed by Brett Dolter
E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Reviewed by Yarika Rose
luz: girl of the knowing
“Luz makes a refrigeration basket” by Claudia Dávila
quotes from the underground
Susan Sontag, Edward Abbey, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Motherwell, CrimethInc., Maximilien Robespierre, Peter Ustinov, Michael Stone & John Berger
parting shots
Generation LESS comes of age
By Jessica C. Y. Wong
To subscribe or order a copy of this issue, call 1-866-431-5777 or visit our secure online shop.
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November 7, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Trevor W Jackson
Humankind will go the way of all past dominant species, unless we overcome our Darwinian tendencies.
It is clear, from the ever-growing accumulation of wealth and power by the elites that they realize this and so it becomes self-fulfilling. Possibly a small minority of us will survive - ‘fittest’ equates to wealthiest apparently.