Local currencies are designed to encourage trade at locally owned businesses.   At the same time their very design can reflect and honor the history and culture or an area. This is true of BerkShares.  On the 20 BerkShare note, for example,  you find Herman Melville, novelist, essayist, poet, and mariner.  Melville is best known as the author of one of the greatest of all American novels, “Moby Dick” (1851). Written at his Arrowhead farmhouse in Pittsfield,...

There is no doubt that the number of new ideas emerging in the field of humane, sustainable economics is accelerating. But complete blueprints are still pretty few and far between.  Even so, our British colleagues, the New Economics Foundation (nef), have tested the waters with exactly that.

Their outline is impressive and hopeful.  It still requires the econometric framework for a sustainable model of the economy and it requires a...

Imagine if leading economists spent time in the wilderness. Perhaps the chair of the Federal Reserve could spend an afternoon standing at the mouth of the Tsiu River on central Alaska's little explored lost coast, as the sleek bodies of silver salmon everywhere swelled upstream pushing against him.

Andrew Kimbrell, driven by his personal experience of the Coho salmon on the Pacific Coast, is on a quest for an economic ecology, a consideration of our economic system as...

Judith Schwartz's article on the Mondragon Cooperatives was posted today at Miller-McCune.

The loss of productive capacity and skills leaves regional economies vulnerable. Mondragon provides an example of how to reverse that trend and create new jobs.

http://...

Ralph Nader has helped us drive safer cars, eat healthier food, breathe better air, drink cleaner water, and work in safer environments for more than four decades. "The Atlantic" named him one of the hundred most influential figures in American history.

Mr. Nader's new book "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is a work of fiction but it rests on the fervent hope and belief that if we all, as engaged citizens, turn our talents and resources to the most...

Judith Schwartz turns to Jane Jacobs for ideas that matter when it comes to economics. See her Miller-McCune article below.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/what-jane-jacobs-can-tea...

What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the...

As part of his vision for diverse regional economies, E. F. Schumacher advocated for production and manufacturing from local resources for local needs. “It is not a question of choosing between modern growth and traditional stagnation,” Schumacher advised, but rather “of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility…” More than ever before, the current economic crisis implores us to identify...

Concept2 Rowing and the Craftsbury Green Nordic Racing Program are organizing a worldwide rowing/skiing challenge that will cover 350 million meters all before October 24. Volunteers in Panama City’s Parque Nacional Soberania gathered to plant 350 native species trees and almost doubled their target. Community members are gathering in Vancouver for a 350-person salsa dancing extravaganza. Five thousand school children in the Netherlands created a large installation using their bodies...

We are pleased to announce speakers for this year's Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture program on October 17th, 2009, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and invite you to attend (http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/events/29th.html). Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz have each made important contributions in articulating characteristics of a new economy.

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