As the wells run dry, Tanzanian youth help summon political will

KAMBI YA SIMBA, TANZANIA

—For a young person in this East African village near the Serengeti plains, global warming matters just as keenly as the maize porridge in the daily dinner bowl. The climate seems to be shifting underfoot here, turning every day's weather into a forecast of clear and present danger.

Everyone is a farmer in Kambi ya Simba, subsisting on crops like maize and pigeon peas. Water means life, and fortunes rise and fall with the rain. Villagers are accustomed to yearly fluctuations. "Too much rain," says Shangwe, a young woman of 16, "and seeds wash away. Too little, and soil crumbles in our hands." But recently, the pattern has held steady-every year brings too little rain.

While the industrialized world continues to search for the scientific evidence of global warming, the residents of Kambi ya Simba—like the Arctic natives who see their way of life disappear with the ice—suspect they are seeing its effects up close.

After three years of drought, streambeds are vanishing and crop yields have plunged. "Wet and dry, these have always been our seasons," says Pantaleo Victory, who teaches geography at the village's secondary school. "Short rains in November, long ones in March and April. Now, all our wet seasons seem short."

Of the 200 fountains that supply water to Kambi ya Simba's 5,000 residents, three-quarters ran dry this October. For the children who fetch water on foot for their families, a two-kilometer walk could turn into eight kilometers or more.

Lacking electricity and irrigation, residents of all ages have begun to find simple ways to conserve water. They save up for a piece of gutter, to direct rain from a tin roof into a pail. They plow hilly fields in contours, rather than up and down. They have started a tree nursery, and last year planted 20,000 tree seedlings to regenerate soil.

Students at the village's Awet Secondary School have contributed to these conservation efforts, especially the tree planting. They study global warming as much as they can, in a school where books are scarce, battery-operated radios provide the news, more than 50 students fill a classroom, and donations of maize and beans are part of the required tuition fees. Awet students know the details of the Kyoto Protocol, along with the chemistry and sources of the six gases that cause the "greenhouse effect." They are learning the ways geography and climate intersect around the globe.

These students realize their voices count little on the international stage. "It is my opinion that for industrialized nations like the United States, poor countries like Tanzania or villages like Kambi ya Simba don't really exist,² says Volcus, a fourth-year male student at Awet Secondary. ³Someone told me that if students there looked for us on a map, they wouldn't even know to look in Africa."

But these young people are not deterred. Heavenlight, 17, says she and her classmates believe that "knowledge builds strength."

The impacts of global warming "are felt mostly by the people who are poor and most vulnerable," Bangladesh Ambassador Rafiq Ahmed Khan told the December 2005 U.N. Climate Conference in Montreal, and "only strong political will can show the way." In Kambi ya Simba, every day, young people are summoning that will.

This past September, at the invitation of What Kids Can Do, all 350 students at Awet Secondary School in Kambi ya Simba wrote essays about global warming. Below we present a sample of their responses. (While the students learn English in school, Swahili is their native language.)

In order to reduce the harmful effects of global warming, steps should be taken to

Reduce the amount of waste products incurred by industrial plants that contribute to destruction of the ozone layer. Strict laws should be enforced that cut down on factory emissions of polluted air into the environment. Some examples of harmful pollutants are ethane, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and carbon monoxide. Fissoo Vitalis

Encourage industries to develop technologies that use waste materials as raw materials. This will cut down on harmful emissions and reduce industrial waste. Hayshi Begina

Use alternative sources of energy whenever possible. Alternative energy like hydroelectric power, wind power, and solar power should replace those energy sources like oil and coal that produce toxic gases like sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Factories should use low-sulfur fuels-high-sulfur materials mix with water vapor and create acid rain that damages the environment. John Bura

Prevent industrialized countries from producing poisonous chemicals like chemical fertilizers that spread carbon monoxide into the environment. Ahito Triphonia

Plant more trees that soak up carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Afforestation and reforestation are the most important ways to reduce the harmful gases in the atmosphere that damage the ozone layer and increase global warming. Firmina Safari

Reduce the toxic gases motor vehicles eject into the atmosphere as exhaust fumes. We should focus research and resources on developing internal combustion engines that don't emit so much exhaust that can destroy the environment. Augustino Kwaslema

Decrease intoxicants emitted by factories and cars. This can be done by using gadgets that convert smoke into vapor and carbon dioxide, which are currently being developed in many industrialized nations. Alternatively, we should try to make hydrogen fuel a more viable option than it is currently-hydrogen does not pollute the environment like oil and coal, but it's difficult to store and distribute. Kundi Kikombe

Reduce the amount of heavy industries in developed countries. The ozone layer is like a heavy blanket above the Earth's atmosphere that plays an important role in minimizing the amount of direct sun light that hits the Earth's surface. The ozone layer can be damaged by gaseous emissions from heavy industries in countries like the US, England, France, and others. Global warming results from industrial development and can be minimized if developed countries work to decrease exhaust from industrial plants. Reginald Aloyce

Reduce the production and testing of nuclear weapons. A nuclear explosion causes great harm to the environment, so we should discourage countries from testing them. Bertha Karatu

Confront global warming worldwide. Global warming affects everyone in the world-its impacts are not confined to certain countries, like industrialized ones. All people throughout the world suffer from the impacts of global warming and a damaged ozone layer. Therefore, countries should work together to confront this problem as a unified movement. War and fighting throughout the world should not prevent countries from understanding that global warming affects everyone equally. Pili Moshi

Educate people about how to conserve the environment, and how important it is to practice conservation. This is the most important means to controlling the spread of global warming. Secondly, governments should work with industries to place filters in their exhaust systems so that fewer toxic chemicals are released into the atmosphere. Joachim Delfine

Use more alternative sources of energy. Only when people put environmental conservation first and work to modify industries so that they don't harm the environment as much will we decrease the affects of global warming. Heavenlight Lawrence

http://www.whatkidscando.org/archives/studentwork/globalwarming.html

Educate youth on global warming, climate change

By: ajmer_alam200

Stressing the need to make the students and youth of the country aware about the issues of global warming, climate change and energy conservation, Professor Varun Sahni, the Vice Chancellor of University of Jammu today said that these burning issues were no longer any hypothesis but were “real issues of public debate”.

Speaking at the inauguration of Eni Children’s Education Programme on “Petroleum Geology, Global Warming and Energy Efficiency Campaign” here at S. P College Srinagar today which was organized by the University of Jammu in collaboration with Maghreb Petroleum Research Group, University College London, Directorate of School Education, J&K and S.P. College Srinagar, Professor Sahni, himself a internationally acclaimed defense analyst, said that Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was already working on the issues of global warming and climate but one needed to understand that there were human activities behind issues like global warming which have some consequences on the planetary ecosystems.

“Such issues will not be resolved by any single country unless all of us join hands together. In fact, the issues of concern should not be development versus environment or energy versus environment,” he said adding the policy dilemmas should never be about choosing good or bad but the two goods. The policy dilemmas before the policy makers, he added, should be to use both of these together so that energy and development can go together.

“What is extremely important is to plan a policy by which we are able to strike a right balance between the two and thus work towards making our planet a better place to live,” asserted Prof Sahni adding that it was extremely important to make our children aware and understand what are the challenges ahead in our planetary ecosystem.

He said it was not only important for the students and youth to understand the challenges and issues in our planetary ecosystems but it was equally important for them to spread out this message among their friends, students, brothers, sisters and the whole society. He also said that the University of Jammu is doing a tremendous job in making the children, our future generation, aware about the issues and challenges in the field of energy conservation and global warming which are extremely important.

He said that it was equally important to understand the issues in terms of basic and earth science as we are located in High Himalayas and which is a very fragile area is and undertaking earth science is the most important thing for the students.

He also underscored the need to strength the partnerships with our sister universities and educational institutions. He said we needed to join hand with our sister universities in this endeavour.

Earlier, Dr Ali. Mohd Mir, Principal of S P College Srinagar addressed the august gathering which included over 200 school children and accompanying teachers from various schools of Kashmir valley and acclaimed scientists and researchers from all over the world who converged in Srinagar for the event. He said policy of sustainable development has to be followed to check global warming and climate changes.

Dr. Bindra Thusu, MPRG, University College London, Visiting Professor, JU, while speaking at the occasion, till now over 1000 boys and girls have been sensitized in Jammu, Kargil, Leh, Jaislmer and Jodhpur where such Energy Efficiency Campaigns have been initiated for the students. He said today’s event which would spread awareness among over 200 students, would further spread the awareness in entire Kashmir valley.

Prof. G. M. Bhat, Principal Convenor, EEC, informed that UCL would soon go international in collaboration with University of Jammu and would conduct similar programmes in six countries including Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Angola and Congo in the next two years.

Mr. Franco Conticini, General Manager, Eni India, and Mr. Andrea Degli Alsanndrini also addressed the students.

Dr. Jonathan Craig, Vice-President, Regional Studies and Exploration Opportunities Selection, E&P Division, Eni S.p.A. Milan spoke to the children regarding petroleum geology which was followed by simple exercises for the students. Another practical session included a lecture by Dr Jonathan Craig on global warming followed by the more exercises for the students. He also informed the children that Eni is a major integrated energy company, committed to growth in the activities of finding, producing, transporting, transforming and marketing oil and gas. The Company has global operations in 70 countries and out 77,000 employees, a total of 1000 employees are in India.

Never before any such an initiative has been taken in Kashmir Valley. It is first programme of its kind to address these issues with the new generation in Kashmir valley.

The focus of the workshop was to provide essential basic education in Geosciences to the school children of Kashmir valley. Kashmir, as such, is already witnessing impact of global warming; the glaciers in the region are melting and the temperature is also rising. There is a very little snowfall in the valley since past few years due to global warming.

As there is a limited awareness among the school children on such themes, the most important component of the lecture series and exercises in this workshop for valley children was to make them aware about the critical global issues of the current energy crisis, depleting fossil fuel resources, alternative energy resources, energy efficiency and global warming.

The students participated in the workshop enthusiastically. They also made posters on the theme of global warming and climate change. Later prizes were distributed among the students. First prize of ENi Milam was given to Shahida Ashraf, student of class 11 at GGHS Verinag, second prize of University College London was awarded to Hina Ashraf, GHSS Kothibagh, third prize went to Salma and Ishrat of GGHS Kulgam.

Consolation prizes were given to Jehangr, GBHS Telbal, Sabia Abdullah, GGHSS Nishat, Shiekh Zaffar, GBHS Laar, Ganderbal, Shauket Ali Khan of Kulgam High School, Umer Hussian Shahn of Aram, Bandipore, Nilofer Tabassum of Budgam and Ms Nusrat of Pahalgam School.

The experts of the event were Mr. R.L.Kashkari and Dr. B.K.Raina, both former directors of Geological Survey of India, Dr. B.L.Dhar, Forest Research Insitute, Dehradun.

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3249810-educate-youth-on-global-warming-climate-change

youth play an important role in alleviate the Global Warming

People talk about climate change and global warming all the time, but a surprising amount of people still don't quite know what those terms really mean. Here's a quick, simple, jargon-free explanation of both of them for you:
Climate Change

Climate change is the term for the way the Earth's climate is slowly changing and getting warmer. When we talk about climate change and its effects, we mean that its about to get a lot warmer around here. This may seem like a good thing to us (especially during winter!) but there are the consequences to think about. If it gets warmer on this planet, then the ice caps in the Arctic will start to melt, and all of this sudden extra water in our oceans means that the sea level will rise. So what is the result of this? People may have to move away from coastlines to prevent being flooded, it might ruin crops, and hundreds of animals who thrive in the cold conditions will suddenly have nowhere to go. I bet you see why we want to stop climate change from happening now, don't you?
Global Warming

Global warming is the term for the Earth becoming too hot, a bit like climate change. As the rays from the sun travel to Earth, they sort of reflect off the huge cloud of gas surrounding our world like a protective bubble. This stops the rays from being trapped inside, heating up the planet. So there isn't any problem, right? Wrong! Now that so much gas from factories, cars and planes is being pumped into the atmosphere, it's getting thicker. This means the rays aren't reflected anymore; they're being absorbed into the Earth. This is causing temperatures to rise on Earth, which will in the long run cause climate change. Not a happy thought, is it?
Obviously, we’re going to need all the help we can get with saving our planet. (Ha!) If you too want to help, there are many ways of doing so:
· Going to local protests
· Joining a local eco-group
· Changing your lifestyle (Turning off light switches, recycling, etc...)
· Spreading the word! Tell you family, friends, neighbours, ANYONE!
We are challenging everyone to take these three simple steps to reduce your environmental impact. They're not hard and they will even save you money!
1. Replace all your light bulbs with low energy bulbs. 2. Only boil as much water as you need. 3. Recycle your paper and cardboard.

Energy Saving Ideas at home
Simple things make a difference
- Turning down your thermostat by 1ºC could cut heating bills by 10% per year, saving up to £40
- Turn lights off when out of the room, even for short times
- Replace light bulbs with energy efficient ones.
- Only boil as much water as you need in the kettle – but make sure to cover the heating elements.
- Open curtains and blinds as much as possible to let in natural light
- Close curtains at dusk to stop heat escaping through the windows
- Do not leave appliances on standby
- When charging batteries or mobile phones, unplug the charger when finished
- Unplug appliances when going on holiday; they may still be using energy
- When not using your computer, turn off the monitor. The monitor alone uses 60% of the energy needed for your computer.
- Unplug appliances that are not used often, they may still draw energy when turned off.
- Ensure you’re washing a full load in the washing machine, and if not, use the half-load or economy setting
- Using just a rinse cycle does not need warm water, using cold is just as effective.
- Tumble dryers are not necessary, a clothes horse inside or a clothes line outside in the summer will do the job just as effectively – saving you up to £40 per year
- Using a dishwasher, make sure it’s a full load and use a low temperature.
- Do not pre-rinse dishes, just scrape off food and put them in the dishwasher.
- Avoid putting warm food straight in the fridge, instead let it cool down first to save energy.
- An overfull fridge blocks air circulation and is less effective; conversely, a full freezer performs better than an empty one.
- A dripping hot water tap wastes 95 litres of water per month, costing 7kWh in one month.
A little effort makes a lot of difference
- Defrost your freezer regularly to keep it running efficiently.
- Turn down the thermostat at night or when away; it isn’t required during those times.
- Buy a laptop instead of a desktop computer, they run off a lower wattage so save more energy
- Using a shower rather than a bath saves two-thirds the energy and water
- Draught-proofing windows can save up to £20 per year
- Bigger steps reap even bigger rewards
- Purchase ‘Energy Saving’ appliances – from lightbulbs to dishwashers to loft insulation and draught proofing
- Uninsulated homes lose 26% energy through the roof; insulating the roof can save up to £160 and 1 tonne of CO 2 per year
- Insulating wall cavities can save up to £120 and 1 tonne of CO 2 per year
A condensing boiler will save around a third on your heating bill

On the move
- Drive less - where possible walk, cycle, take public transport or lift share.
- Tune Up - properly inflated tyres can save 3% of your fuel consumption
- Limit your speed - fuel consumption goes up rapidly whenever you drive over 60mph and is dreadful over 80mph. Reducing your motorway cruising speed by 5 mph will make a big difference. -When you replace your car check the fuel consumption of different models. Gas guzzlers are set to be taxed to the hilt over the next few years. -Buying a more economical car could easily save you thousands of pounds in road duty and fuel costs over the next few years.
-The cars of the future are now here. Hybrid cars (part electric, part petrol) are now convenient, efficient and more affordable. Because they contain a standard petrol engine, you don't need to worry about the battery running out or a lack of power. The car will run electrically at lower speeds and then the petrol engine will kick in when you need to go faster or if the battery needs charging.

Use Cleaner Energy
Switch to a Green Energy Tariff in 5 minutes and it might not cost anymore!
The burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity produces about 30% of the UK's carbon dioxide emissions.* It takes about five minutes to change your electricity supplier to one that supports renewable energy and it might not cost you anymore. There are a number of "Green" electricity suppliers in the UK. One example is Eccentricity who generate electricity using Wind Turbines. They claim to match the standard electricity price of your main local supplier. This means that if you are still on the standard tariff of your main local supplier you can switch to Ecotricity at no extra cost. (If you have previously switched to a better deal, you might find that Ecotricity is a little more expensive.).

Getting serious - Generate your own renewable energy at home:
Micro generation (where you generate small amounts of power close to where it's needed) is becoming increasingly affordable and economic.
By installing a solar panel or wind turbine you can start to generate your own electricity, replacing use of that generated from fossil fuels. Some schemes even let you sell any excess back to the national grid.
Small wind turbines or domestic solar panels are no longer the preserve of politicians or Hollywood celebrities.

Offset Your Carbon Emissions
What is Carbon Offsetting?
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the gas produced by burning fossil fuels and is thought to be the major cause of global warming. The best way to tackle this is to reduce the carbon dioxide we produce as far as possible. Inevitably we won't be able to eradicate carbon emissions totally so carbon offsetting is the next best thing. This is where we pay for projects to reduce carbon dioxide somewhere else to compensate for the carbon dioxide we have produced. In this way we become 'carbon neutral.' Examples of such projects are replacing light bulbs in a developing country with low energy ones (to reduce their carbon emissions) or to plant trees to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Reduce Waste and Recycling
Recycle as much of your waste as possible. Think about what you put into an ordinary bin. Make it easy to recycle - keep small containers or bags in convenient places in your home to collect items to recycle. The recycling can mostly be collected by the council, or take it to the recycling bins at most supermarkets; you don’t even need to make a special trip for it!
Reuse or repair something instead of throwing it away.
Borrow or rent something instead of buying new stuff, or consider buying used items. Recycling includes buying recycled items - in fact it's one the most important parts of the recycling process. Look for products that contain the largest amounts of "post-consumer waste."
A compost bin in the garden can be used to dispose of uncooked food waste; and the resulting product can be used on the garden plants.

Stop using disposable plastic bags. Take re-usable shopping bags with you.
At the supermarket: avoid products with ridiculous amounts of packaging. If you have the time, send an email to their customer care department to complain about it - if enough people boycott these products, the companies will change

The New World

It's not often that we get to see a historical catalyst in action.

This is no mere "bad recession." All of the assumptions we have about fundamental elements of the economy, from finance to trade to efficiency, are increasingly coming under scrutiny. The shape of the global economy at the end of this period of economic transformation will likely be unrecognizable to those stuck in the previous paradigm.

What will this new economy look like? Good question -- I don't think anyone knows yet. But it won't just be 2005 plus a few more regulations, or even 1939 with a digital upgrade. It will very likely be something entirely new, something that will take some time to understand or even characterize. I have a very tentative guess, but I'll post that tomorrow.

The scale of this situation is clear from the language we use. Mere "depression" doesn't seem to capture the sense of danger. Bruce Sterling catalogued a few examples in mid-March, with "Econopalypse" and "Collapsonomics" of particular note; I wouldn't be surprised to see "Financeageddon" show up at some point, too. (Sign of how my mind works: the first term that popped into my head was "Cha-chingularity." I doubt anyone will pick that one up.)

I'm not deeply trained in economics, so much of my thinking about this situation has been focused on getting a better understanding of what's happening. I suspect that some of you are in a similar state, so let me pass along some of the better pieces I've found over the past few months. Links and excerpts in the extended entry.

In December, 2008, Michael Lewis (author of the book that summed up the 1980s, Liar's Poker) wrote "The End" for Portfolio. This offers a bit of history, as well as a useful exploration of just who was in a position to spot what was happening.

This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’ ” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.

Matt Taibbi's piece for Rolling Stone, The Big Takeover, is also useful. Taibbi starts to outline the extent to which the financial industry has captured the US government (and, more generally, wester post-industrial governments in general). This is a vicious telling of how this came about, with an emphasis on understanding the politics of the situation -- not in a partisan sense, but in a power sense.

In essence, the bailout accelerated the decline of regional community lenders by boosting the political power of their giant national competitors.

Which, when you think about it, is insane: What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish. To fix this problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

Paul Krugman probably gives the best frequently-updated analysis of the situation, in both his New York Times column and his blog. His latest piece for the newspaper, "The Market Mystique," takes a sharp jab at the notion that the financial market will eventually self-correct.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

Reading these pieces readies you for Simon Johnson's "The Quiet Coup" in the May issue of The Atlantic. Johnson is a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, and he makes clear that he sees in what's happening in the United States (and, to a lesser extent, Europe) as the same thing he saw in developing nations pushed to the brink of economic collapse: financial oligarchies running the show. And he has a clear prescription: root them out.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign. [...]

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The New World emerges from the ashes of the old.

Tags: Economic Collapse, Economics

Posted by Jamais Cascio on March 28, 2009 10:30 PM

ECONOMIC LIFE/GRACE OF INNOVATING

Newsletters

ECONOMIC LIFE/GRACE OF INNOVATING January 28, 2009 Dear Friends, “Economic life develops by grace of innovating; it expands by grace of import-replacement.” --from "Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life" by Jane Jacobs In October the E. F. Schumacher Society bought a house for staff and interns. It was not a simple transaction, rather a complex and marvelous adventure weaving our work lives together with the story of a small manufacturing company: the innovation of its founding, the history of its employees, its significance in the regional community, the role of a regional equity fund in financing its growth, and the power of the vision of the fund's founder. It was (though we did not know it at first) a story about ingredients for building strong regional economies and the grace of that process. We are pleased to share the story in the narrative below. Photos are at: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/PAS/photos.html Best wishes, Susan Witt E. F. Schumacher Society 140 Jug End Road Great Barrington, MA 01230 413-528-1737 ********************************************************** Economic Life/Grace of Innovating For the past four years the Schumacher Society has rented a small house for staff and interns that we call Guilder House, located a short walk through the orchard from the Schumacher Library and office building. Because housing prices have been so high in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, it has been essential to provide free and/or affordable housing in order to enable young staff and interns to work with us. With its four bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths, Guilder House has served that purpose. In June the owner of the house offered to sell it to us, donating one third of its current appraised value as a gift to the Society. The offer was irresistible; nevertheless, repair work was necessary to responsibly care for the building. How would we get it all done? A week after signing the contract to purchase Guilder House, we had a call from Dan Levinson, the founder and managing partner of Main Street Resources (www.mainstreetresources.com), a private equity firm in Westport, Connecticut, that provides investment capital and resources to companies with great potential and great people. Main Street had recently invested in Protective Armored Systems (www.pasarmored.com), a small manufacturing firm in the Berkshires making bullet-proof glass for multiple applications. Dan told us that one of the autoclaves used to heat and pressurize the glass had exploded. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but a building was rendered useless, and production would be shut down for over a month. Like other good corporate citizens before it, PAS wanted to keep its workers employed during the rebuilding. The company was reaching out to community groups for appropriate volunteer projects. This was a welcome opportunity for us. For four weeks we watched as a crew of up to twelve per day worked to transform Guilder House--clearing brush and trees to open the site to more light, sealing cement walls against moisture, staining the exterior to protect the wood, replacing a rotting deck, removing moldy carpeting and sanding the newly exposed floors, insulating walls for heat efficiency, tiling, painting, cleaning. What was merely housing is now a warm, secure, lovely home, thanks to the team from Protective Armored Systems (PAS). Schumacher staff provided coffee, homemade muffins, home-cooked hot lunches served family style on a row of picnic tables, a refrigerator full of soft drinks, a priority list of projects, and plenty of ahs and heart-felt thanks. The PAS crew provided multiple skills, hard work, good will, and stories about what it takes to run a small manufacturing firm. Main Street Resources provided the inspiration, connection, and funding for building materials. Over lunches and coffee breaks we learned a great deal about the history of industrial development in the region. The Berkshire region was once home to a diversity of local manufacturing firms. Water from the Housatonic River powered wool, paper, and log mills. We grew much of the food we ate and processed much of the wood used in building our homes. Wood stoves provided a significant quantity of heat from October through April. There was a spirit of self-sufficiency coupled with a rich cultural tradition. However like many developed regions, the Berkshires have since “outsourced” that manufacturing. Remnants of the infrastructure remain, such as abandoned factories clustered along the river, but we are losing the memory of manufacturing skills and its ethos. The Berkshire economy is changing to a service economy. PAS is unique in the region, manufacturing its signature product for export and providing jobs for technically skilled employees. What are the characteristics that grew this firm, and how can we encourage additional manufacturing appropriate in scale and nature to the region? PAS is a small company with only forty employees. Its founder, Phil Martino, has deep roots in the Berkshire community. He basically built the business from scratch, inventing the manufacturing process for the bullet-proof glass, designing the equipment, and gaining the confidence of customers. He worked alongside his employees, training them in cutting the glass to specification, grinding the edges smooth, keeping the work space meticulously clean, and packing in such a way that no damage occurred during shipping. When asked about the philosophy of work behind his success, Phil Martino modestly claims that it is nothing special--essentially that of the Shakers, who believe that God is met in your work, so you perform each task with the love and care appropriate for that meeting. Further, you treat co-workers as you would be treated by them. That simple but profound work ethic permeates the business. Several of the PAS workers came from the closing paper mills (some of them third generation in the mills) or were laid off when General Electric closed its nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts, operations. Ranging in age from nineteen to sixty, they have worked as carpenters, as linemen trimming trees, as equipment installers, as stock clerks, as theater-set builders. Most were raised in the Berkshires. Two are recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. One is African-American with a young family. Another is Phil's grandson, learning the business by working alongside the others. The younger ones might have had some training in the trades in public high school. They wish they had had more. The employees all have friends who are looking for jobs, and they are grateful for the manufacturing job at PAS. It provides a relatively good salary, enough to provide security for a family. They are proud of their role in the business and report that PAS is different from other worksites. Because of the relatively small scale of the firm, they know all the stages of making the glass, not just their one task. That gives them greater ownership and pride in the finished product. They have read letters from American soldiers in Iraq thanking PAS for the bullet-proof glass in their vehicles that protects lives under fire. They have seen the copy of the U. S. Constitution kept safely behind their glass and know that it is a document of enormous significance to the history of this country. These men trained by Phil work alongside him in the production line, fish with him, see and respect the discipline it took to build the company, and so they do not hesitate to labor hard for him. If GE or the paper mills had been shut down by equipment failure, their employees would be on the dole, not working on a community project supported by PAS. I asked Phil Martino what he sees as the limitations to creating more manufacturing firms of the scale and quality of PAS. * Distribution of tax incentives Regional economic development programs provide tax incentives to lure big corporations to the region but fail to offer similar incentives for smaller home-grown businesses. * Infrastructure Building and site selection, while a concern, is not an insurmountable problem. Remnants of a once thriving industrial base along the rivers mean that suitable buildings remain vacant and affordable. It is important, however, to cultivate a citizenry that welcomes appropriately scaled manufacturing in their neighborhoods. * Transportation A lack of sufficient freight-train service to the region puts reliance on trucking, thus narrowing choices of locations to easy access from the few highways. * Skilled workers There is a base of good workers in the region, but they are not trained, so businesses must take the time for and bear the cost of training on the job. Though more technical education in the public schools would be helpful, better yet would be funds for apprenticeships so that job-skill development can be specific to the manufacturing process. * Financing Phil named lack of financing for small and medium sized businesses like his as the biggest hindrance to business start-ups and expansion. Large enterprises have national sources of funding, but not so the regional firms on the scale of PAS. Phil is quick to credit Main Street Resources with providing an answer to the problem of financing. Dan Levinson earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and holds a joint degree (with honors) in applied mathematics and economics from Brown University. But his real skill lies in recognizing the talent of individuals and encouraging those talents. His equity fund, Main Street Resources, is shaped in a particular way to best apply his skills and inclinations. Investing primarily in businesses within a hundred mile drive from his home in Westport, Connecticut, he knows the companies and their management teams personally. He is available on short notice for consulting and trouble-shooting. He is well-informed about his portfolio businesses, without micro-managing them. Phil Martino personally funded the startup of PAS, putting his home and family at risk. When PAS was ready to grow in an organic way, it needed a financial partner. Main Street understood the scale of the business, made the personal contact, and provided the right amount of financing while still keeping the successful management team in place--a team that knows the product as well as the ins and outs of the manufacturing process, the suppliers, the markets, and the local community. Main Street's engaged, personal, proven approach to financing has turned clients into new investors. Under Main Street's leadership a group of former owners of small businesses has coalesced into an informal mentoring team to help a new set of entrepreneurs, ensuring the success Main Street’s partner enterprises. It was Main Street that provided the capital to open a new facility at PAS to house a new autoclave. When the explosion occurred, the leased building next door was already under renovation and the autoclave was on order. Main Street's investment meant that production would resume in one month, not one year. What would the employees do during that time? For PAS, with its deep local roots and in partnership with an equity fund with strong social values and a commitment to the region, the answer was simple: seek a community service opportunity, supporting the workers and the community group at the same time. By good grace, that group was the E. F. Schumacher Society. For four weeks staff of the E. F. Schumacher Society and the Protective Armored Systems team ate lunch together on picnic tables stretched out across the lawn of Guilder House. Our co-worker, Kristen, spent the morning cooking, using fresh produce from local farms and my kitchen garden. The red, white, and yellow checkered table cloths and napkins were washed fresh each day. We all experienced a note of subdued festivity. I spent two hours every day interviewing each member of the team, learning what brought them to their work and asking what they thought was needed to create more manufacturing jobs in the region. Their stories lingered with me over the weekends, when they were not with us, and I began to realize that our stories, told over many lunches, lingered with them. One Monday morning I went over to Guilder House and found the crew already hard at work. Oronde, meaning the Appointed, whom everyone called "O," was scraping old paint from the side of the house in preparation for a fresh coat. "O," says I, after a pause while watching him work, "You are all pouring so much love into this house." "Susan," says O, "that's because you are all pouring so much love into us." Grace.

The Politics of Money

The following article was featured in the February 2006 issue of Vermont Commons.

The Politics of Money

by Hazel Henderson

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise. I have explored how the economics profession grew to dominate public policy and trump so many other academic disciplines and values in our daily lives. Economics and economists view reality through the lens of money. Everything has its price, they believe, from rain forests to human labor to the air we breathe. Economic textbooks, Gross National Product (GNP) and the statistics on employment, productivity, investment, and globalization – all follow the money. Happily, all this focus on money is leading to the widespread awareness of ways money is designed, created and manipulated. This politics of money is at last unraveling centuries of mystification.

Civic action with local currencies, barter, community credit and the more dubious rash of digital cybermoney all reveal the politics of money. Economics is now widely seen as the faulty sourcecode deep in societies’ hard drives….replicating unsustainability: booms, busts, bubbles, recessions, poverty, trade wars, pollution, disruption of communities, loss of cultural diversity and bio-diversity. Citizens all over the world are rejecting this malfunctioning economic sourcecode and its operating systems: the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and imperious central banks. Its hard-wired program: the now derided “Washington Consensus” recipe for hyping GNP-growth is challenged by the Human Development Index (HDI), Ecological Footprint Analysis, the Living Planet Index, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, the Genuine Progress Index and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness… not to mention scores of local city indices such as Jacksonville, Florida’s Quality Indicators for Progress, pioneered by the late Marian Chambers in 1983.

As with politics, all real money is local, created by people to facilitate exchange and transactions, and it is based on trust. The story of how this useful invention, money, grew into abstract national fiat currencies backed only by the promises of rulers and central bankers is being told anew. We witness how information technology and deregulation of banking and finance in the 1980s helped create today’s monstrous global casino where $1.5 trillion worth of fiat currencies slosh around the planet daily via mouse clicks on electronic exchanges, 90% in purely speculative trading.

New Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke opined that the mystery of low bond yields and interest rates was due to a “global savings glut.” Former Fed Chairman Greenspan, whose zero real interest rates flooded the US economy with excess liquidity and helped create the dot-com, housing, and global asset bubbles, declared himself “perplexed.” The anomaly involves the global economic imbalances between the USA, the world’s largest debtor – borrowing the lion’s share of global capital – and the developing countries of Asia and those exporting oil as the world’s new lenders. I doubt there is a “global savings glut” or a “Shift of Thrift” from indebted U.S. household’s zero saving rates to thrifty Asian savers as claimed in The Economist editorial of Sept. 24, 2005. My view is that there’s a global flood of fiat paper money – mostly trillions of US dollars – amplified by the pyramiding of financial “innovations” (derivatives, hedge funds, offshore “special purpose entities,” currency speculation, and tax havens) vis-à-vis real production of goods and services in the real world.

Today, we see worldwide experimentation with local exchange, barter and swap clubs, such as Deli-Dollars, LETS, Ithaca Hours and other scrip currencies in the USA and Canada. Billions of people still live in traditional non-money societies and the world’s mostly female voluntary sectors. I have described these huge uncharted sectors as the “Love Economy” estimated by the Human Development Report (United Nations Development Program 1995) as $16 trillion simply missing from economists’ global GDP that year of $24 trillion. Others have described these non-money sectors, notably Karl Polanyi in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (1968); Lewis Hyde in The Gift(1979); Genevieve Vaughan in For-Giving (1997); Dallas Morning News financial editor, Scott Burns in Home, Inc (1975); Edgar Cahn’s No More Throw Away People (2004) and his time-banking programs now emulated worldwide (The Time Dollar How To Manual, www.timedollar.org).

All this hands-on experimenting resulted in an explosion of grassroots awareness about the nature of money itself. As local groups and communities created their own local scrip currencies and exchange systems, they learned about economists’ deepest secret: money and information are equivalent – and neither is scarce! As money morphed from stone tablets, metal coins, gold and paper to electronic blips of pure information – the economic theories of scarcity and competition began to be bypassed by electronic sharing and community cooperation. Barter, dismissed in economic textbooks as a primitive relic – went hi-tech. eBay, the world’s largest garage sale, is an example of how to bypass existing markets.

People began to see how central banks and national money-systems control populations by macro-economic managing of scarcity, employment levels, availability of mortgages and car loans, via the money-supply, credit, interest rates and all the secretive levers and spigots used by central bankers. Even Nobel prizes were politicized as mathematicians in 2004 challenged the so-called “Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics” demanding its de-linking from the Nobel prizes and to confess its real name, “The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics.” The mathematicians, Peter Nobel, grandson of Nobel and many other scientists object that economists misuse mathematics to hide their faulty assumptions – and that economics is not a science but a profession. The row over the 2004 Bank of Sweden Prize was because its recipients had authored a 1977 paper with a mathematical model purporting to “prove” why central banks should be independent of political control – even in democracies. Central banking too, is politics in even deeper disguise, as I describe in “21st Century Strategies for Sustainability.”

Today, rapid social learning about the politics of money and how it functions is revealing this key mythology underlying our current societies and its transmission belt: that faulty economic sourcecode still replicating today’s unsustainable poverty gaps, energy crises, and resource depletion. Climate change creeping upon us for 25 years is the latest media wake up call, and predictably economists quickly “captured this issue for our profession,” as a UK economics group put it (Henderson, 1996), to promote their pollution and C02 trading “markets.” In spite of such efforts, the defrocking of economics, the deconstructing of money systems and the growth of all the healthy local, real world alternatives is propagating widely. The World Social Forum launched in sunny Porto Alegre in 2000 by Brasilian reformers is one of many such worldwide movements. Argentina’s default in 2001 taught its citizens that they could trust their own local scrip, flea markets and electronic swap systems more than the country’s official currency: the peso. Argentina, Brasil and Venezuela have announced they will repay their IMF loans in full – to free their economies from “Washington Consensus” prescriptions.

I have documented over the years many of the pioneers of money reform, from the Time Store in Cincinnati in the 1890s; Ralph Borsodi’s “Constants” in Exeter, NH in 1972; and during the 1930s “bank holiday,” Vermont’s own Malted Cereals Company scrip, issued in Burlington and the Wolfboro Chamber of Commerce’s scrip in New Hampshire. The Chicago Plan, promoted in the 1930s by University of Chicago economists sought to reform money-creation by private banks as debt. Through this fractional reserve system, banks are only required to keep less than 10% of their capital in reserve. Banks can lend out the rest at interest, simply creating money out of thin air as those loans in their accounting entries! The American Monetary Institute (www.monetary.org) founded by Stephen Zarlenga, has revived the Chicago Plan, which would raise the fraction of reserves banks must hold – and return the national money-creation function to the federal government. Money would be created and spent into circulation through building and maintaining public infrastructure, roads, education and vital services. Such interest-free money would save municipalities and states billions in interest payments on their bonds and prevent accumulation of debts that lead to bubbles, booms and busts. Ken Bohnsack’s Sovereignty Bill promotes these reforms, all summarized in Zarlanga’s The Lost Science of Money (2004) and The Truth in Money Book by Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner.

Other perennials—E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), James Robertson’s Future Wealth (1989), Margrit Kennedy’s tireless teachings, and a record of Robert Swann’s work and papers on community economics—are all available at the E. F. Schumacher Society’s Library (www.smallisbeautiful.org). The Society, engaged in both theory and practice, founded the SHARE micro-credit system in 1981, created Deli Dollars and other customer financing methods in 1989, and is about to help launch the BerkShare local currency program. Since its founding in 1980, the Society has documented other community credit pioneering, such as Michael Linton’s LETS experiments, Paul Glover’s Ithaca Hours, and other projects all highlighted at its 2004 conference Local Currencies in the Twenty-First Century. Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money(2001); Lynn Twist’s The Soul of Money (2004); William Krehm’s COMER Newsletter (www.comer.org) and James Robertson and Josef Huber’s Creating New Money (2004) continue to inform us.

My bookshelf on alternative economics, barter, credit and currency system continues to grow, and includes Ralph A. Mitchell and Neil Shafer’s indispensable, eye-opening self-published Standard Catalog of Depression Scrip of the United States in the 1930s (Krause Publications, Iola, WI) (1984). It contains thousands of pictures of alternative scrip currencies issued in almost every US state and city and many in Canada and Mexico after the Great Crash of 1929 and the bank failures that followed. During the 1980’s in all my talks across North America advocating local self-reliance and alternatives to fiat money, I carried this heavy volume along to show how local inventiveness helped overcome the failures of national banking and finance. People would raise their hands in recognition as I would show on overheads the scrip used in their state. “I remember these in my Dad’s bureau!” “My Mom used that to buy our groceries!”

So, today, as the global casino again reaches crises of abstraction, derivatives, currency futures, and financial bubbles – we have been here before. Today’s global imbalances, deficits, bouncing currencies, poverty and debt crises require a systemic redesign of that faulty economic sourcecode. Worried finance ministers and central bankers call vainly for a “new international financial architecture.” They do little but fret about this behind closed doors, at meetings of the G-8, WTO, and in Jackson Hole and Davos. Some clever libertarians try to beat the bankers at their own game with global digital currencies backed by gold, including e-gold Ltd, Gold Money and Web Money. Based in offshore havens, Nevis, Jersey, Moscow, and Panama, they have become platforms for cyber-crooks (Business Week, January 9, 2006). The rest of us are redesigning healthy homegrown sustainable local economies – all over the world.

Before we fall into “either/or” errors, we should avoid doctrinaire “smallness,” ideological localism, and knee-jerk libertarianism. None can protect local communities from the ravages of market fundamentalist-driven globalization. Like it or not, we are all “glocal” now. Communities, like cells in the body-politic and the body, need boundaries or membranes to keep out elements destructive to the cell’s integrity. But all cell membranes are semi-permeable to allow needed elements, information and energy exchanges from the environment to pass through. In today’s information saturated world, communities need to understand anew which elements to reject and which to embrace. Wholesale rejection can lead to rigidity, xenophobia, and misreading of history. Wholesale acceptance of current unsustainable economic global trends will surely lead to loss of local culture and biodiversity and to resource-depletion. We humans have been adept at creating new scenarios and technologies that mirror our lack of systemic knowledge and foresight. From such social changes and unanticipated consequences, we must then learn and evolve – or suffer ecological collapse.

*****

Hazel Henderson has authored many books since Creating Alternative Futures with Foreword by E. F. Schumacher (1978, 1996). She co-created with the Calvert Group, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, regularly updated at www.calvert-henderson.com. She serves on the Advisory Board of the E. F. Schumacher Society and often teaches at Schumacher College in Britain. She is currently writing (with co-author Simran Sethi) the companion book to her TV series, ETHICAL MARKETS aired on PBS stations nationally and on TV channels in Brasil and other countries. www.hazelhenderson.com .

© Hazel Henderson, Jan. 2006, All Rights Reserved

The New Economy Starts Now

The New Economy Starts Now

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by Sarah van Gelder

posted Jul 07, 2009

	GET THE NEW ECONOMY ISSUE OF YES! OR START YOUR SUBSCRIPTION WITH IT

As the financial system continues to crumble, a new economy is taking form. It’s an economy that recognizes that the only thing too big to fail is the Earth itself. It is designed to build sustainable wealth in communities and ecosystems, and it’s our best chance to improve prospects for future generations, instead of leaving them with ever-growing debt, conflict, and environmental destruction.

Politicians, pundits, and financiers defend deepening our national debt to bail out the institutions of a failed Wall Street system. But this system, built on speculation and the rule of money, is undermining the health of the planet and the well-being of all but the wealthiest few.

It’s time to let it go.

The new economy is built on new forms of money, and on democratic finance and business. In this issue, you’ll find stories of worker-owned cooperatives, for example, that distribute the benefits of hard work to employee-owners who call the shots in these democratic workplaces. These co-ops spend locally and are rooted locally, so they are long-term boons to their local economies.

Money, though hidden in plain sight, is another critical piece of the puzzle. As currently created, it destabilizes our economy and concentrates wealth. Many communities are developing new means of exchange that work even when there is a global shortage of credit.

We’re told we need Wall Street in order to finance business. But Wall Street has quit serving the real economy and has morphed into a global casino, creating exotic and toxic packages of “assets” that have no function but to make money for the already wealthy.

In the new economy, credit is provided through local banks rooted in the communities they serve. Credit unions, community development banks, and other democratic institutions also serve, rather than feed off, the real economy.

Americans know we’ve been living beyond our means, and we’re cutting back. That means the segment of the old economy centered on encouraging wasteful consumption will continue shrinking.

The new economy—sometimes with the aid of President Obama’s stimulus spending—is moving in to meet needs unmet by a system centered on mega-profits. New jobs are being created to install renewable energy and weatherize homes, raise food through more labor-intensive and less damaging means, build public transit systems and inter-city rail, and rebuild schools, bridges, water systems and neighborhoods. We can no longer defer these vital investments as we did when we oriented our economy around the desires of the ultra-rich.

The new economy is about increasing quality of life, improving health, and restoring the environment. The resources to pay for this will be the resources that previously went into multi-million-dollar CEO pay packages and oversized returns on speculation.

With reduced consumption, we’ll no longer need to fight for an excess share of the world’s resources, so we can slim down our bloated military budget. We can save on prisons and police, since people with access to good education and jobs less often turn to crime.

An Earth- and human-centered economy is not inevitable. We could revert to a winner-take-all system in which a few benefit and everyone else fights over the scraps. The current economic downturn, though, offers an exceptional opportunity to rebuild and, this time, to make it an economy that works for all.

1-How does the author distinguish the causes of the crisis (Political, Economic, Social) ?

2-Does he/she proposes any solution ?

3-Background on author and source ?

Youth against Climate Change !

Climate change is real and it will affect us all. The world is getting warmer and human activity is a major cause of this. The problem is now urgent but the situation is not entirely hopeless, at least, not yet. Many people care about global warming, but as young people, we are the next generation and we feel that we have the most at stake. Whilst many individuals and some governments are beginning to take action, experts agree that current efforts are way too feeble to solve the problem. We aim to transform public attitudes to climate change. We are run by young people and hope to engage students of all ages to help us spread our campaign. We provide ideas, resources and information to help students and teachers in schools, colleges and universities to run projects and promote practical solutions to climate change in their own communities. Together, this generation will tackle climate change. Human-caused global warming is real and it is now too late to do anything about its impact over the next 30 years. Global temperatures will rise by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. There will be as yet unimaginable devastation through flooding, changes in weather patterns, desertification and uprooting of entire populations. We will survive, but what then? If we do nothing, then the temperature rise could be 5 degrees within a century, at which point the survival of our species will be in the balance. Perhaps it is too late even to prevent this. We have to act soon, we have to think big and we have to work together. Humans are bad at all of those things, especially the last. And the window of opportunity is closing very quickly indeed. We probably have less than a decade to get it right.

From Bryan Appleyard, The Last Refuge, Sunday Times, June 2006

Commencement: Healing or Stealing?

By Paul Hawken

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there.

Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food—but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

( http://www.up.edu/commencement/default.aspx?cid=9456&pid=3144)