Revitalising our Economy; Rebuilding our Community?

Molly Scott CatoProfessor of Strategy and Sustainability

Roehampton Business School

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Milton Friedman

The Last Great Depression

• Failure of aggregate demand

• Repayment of debts• Failure of lending and

borrowing• Recessionary spiral: ‘the

death spiral’

= wealth creation

= taxation

= private sector = public sector

= consumption

The Linear View

= wealth circulation

= wealth creation

= taxation

= private sector

= public sector

The Systems View

= third sector

= wealth circulation

= recirculation of taxed wealth

The view from No. 10

The full picture

CO2 emissions associated with UK consumption 1990 to 2009 (Defra)

The Myth of Decoupling:CO2 intensity of GDP across nations

Carbon Intensities Now and Required to Meet 450 ppm Target

• 99% of UK food imports depend: unsurprisingly they are at sea-level.

• In 2007 the IPCC predicted a 0.35m rise in sea levels by the end of the 21st century.

• In 2009 scientists declared that sea-level rise was occurring at twice the rate they had estimated just two years earlier

Why the globalised economy is insecure

Where are the world’s ports?

Farewell to Thrift

• ‘the whole system of an increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of material living, plus high-pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man’

• J. B. Priestley, 1955

Growing Inequality

Climate change is a class issue

The Bioregional Economy

Localisation plus

Where are we going?

What is a bioregion?

• ‘a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries’

• A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’—with a geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region

An economic bioregion

• A bioregional economy would be embedded within its bioregion and would acknowledge ecological limits.

• Bioregions as natural social units determined by ecology rather than economics

• Can be largely self-sufficient in terms of basic resources such as water, food, products and services.

• Enshrine the principle of trade subsidiarity

Accountability as reconnection• Your bioregion is

your ‘backyard’• Each bioregion

would be the area of the global economy for which its inhabitants were responsible

Community not markets

• Reclaiming of public space for citizenship and relationship.

• ‘putting the economy in its place’

• Market as agora—public space for debate and sharing of ideas, not just commerce

• Resilience: ‘the property of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and then, upon unloading to have this energy recovered.’

• Ecological citizenship: intrinsic and ethical motivations towards protecting the environment

• Critique: the importance of political economy

Three key concepts

Locality: Walking the LandWalking the Land

Stroud Community Agriculture

Local Currencies

Seeds of a greener future?

Find out more

www.greeneconomist.org

gaianeconomics.blogspot.com

Green Economics: AnIntroduction to Theory, Policy and Practice (Earthscan, 2009)

The Bioregional Economy: Land, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness(Earthcan, 2012)