Climate – what if?
The International Panel on Climate Change came out with a report last year saying that we have twelve years to turn this climate thing around. It’s eleven now. But, in a point that was lost on many, they also said we could do it. There are big obstacles in the way, for sure, but none are insurmountable.
A significant one is our own despair—which our culture feeds. Books, movies and media of all kinds play out scary, and seemingly inevitable dystopian futures, and we are numbed into a strange kind of passive acceptance. A perceptive friend has said that it’s easier to imagine total destruction of the world as we know it than a transformation of our economic system.
It’s easy to feel scared and hopeless. It’s also easy to feel divided. But at its core, climate is not a divisive issue. Everyone wants a future for their children and grandchildren. And, if we think about it, none of us want our children and grandchildren to learn that we were bystanders during these critical years. We want to be able to tell stories of courage and creativity, of tenacity and unexpected discoveries—of a time when we learned that we were bigger than we knew.
What if we can turn this thing around and have a livable future? What if we can find a way to step outside of all the feelings and pressures that keep us in the role of helpless bystanders, and be who we really are—with all the boldness, vision and courage that we can muster?
This will, of course, take more than scared and lonely individuals changing lightbulbs and signing on-line petitions. But we can do more, and we can do it together. Here are some ideas about steps that everyone can take.
Learn about what’s working. Pay attention to reasons to be hopeful, like this one:
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/10-reasons-feel-hopeful-about-climate-change-2019
Develop a conscious strategy that works for you to not get immobilized by bad news—don’t let climate change have the last word.
Get support. Find people to talk with about what scares you, what you want, what you love, the part of this challenge that calls out to you. Better yet, make a plan to get together over time with two or three others to share ideas, set goals and report back on them.
Start conversations. Ask people what they love about the world around them. Focus more on solutions than problems. Share why you decided to act and what gives you energy to keep going. Give space for people’s worries and feelings of despair, but don’t get sucked in. Talk about how to dissipate fear’s hold on us by acting together.
Build on your strengths. Good at writing? Look for ways to get the word out about climate solutions. Active on social media? Post things that offer opportunities, energize people and give hope. Good at website design or art? Offer your services to an activist group. Love cooking? Cook for the local youth climate change house or do a fundraising dinner. Have friends? Invite them over for an inspiring movie or a conversation about what’s possible.
Take what you’re already doing up a notch. Passionate about living a sustainable life style, for example? Encourage others in your extended family, social or faith circles, or neighborhood to do the same. Already doing that? Get involved with your township or municipality’s sustainability plan, or your local or state emission reduction goals.
Explore new territory. Try things that seem just a little too scary (not alone!). There are so many possibilities: visiting city officials, calling a group to action, asking your friends to back you, giving testimony, looking for common ground with someone you disagree with, facing arrest for civil disobedience, believing you have the power to shift the tone of a group.
Help others. If your circumstances don’t allow you to do much, find someone who is able to be more active, and put energy into supporting them. If you don’t have time even for that, help others by just holding out the belief that this thing can be done.
As we steep ourselves in the possible, remembering that we are part of a vast majority rather than a beleaguered minority, what if, together, we can do this?
Bubbles
A child is blowing bubbles
from the back of the trolley.
Tiny, they float and drift.
People turn, smile.
“I thought it was snowing” says one
and laughter ripples
through the car.
Singlehandedly
a small child
has lifted our spirits.
Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
Costa Rica’s Banco Popular
Costa Rica’s BPDC is perhaps the most democratic bank in the world, with its highest governing body the Assembly of Workers, which represents nearly 1.2 million savers, or 20% of the population. Effective control over daily operations is exercised by the National Board of Directors, which is composed of four representatives of the Assembly and three of the Government. Presently, there are four women and three men on the Board, fulfilling the requirement that it be at least half women.
The third largest bank in Costa Rica, BPDC operates with a triple bottom-line: economic, environmental, and social. A quarter of its returns are channeled into a series of ‘special funds’ to meet the social needs of those typically excluded from the banking system, yet its earnings are greater than the average private bank.
All public and private employers contribute 0.5% of paid monthly wages to the bank’s capital base and workers contribute 1% of their monthly wages. After a year, 1.25% of these savings are transferred to each worker’s own pension fund; the bank holds the other 0.25% as a means of permanent capitalization and economic stability. The BPDC also accepts over 40% of the public-sector payroll deposits and receives deposits and loans from other publicly-owned development banks to support its own lending operations.
The BPDC has developed specialty green and sustainable lending facilities, with loans for solar energy panels in residential settings, and the provisioning of safe local water supply systems. The bank has begun tracing its own consumption of energy; the pensions division, for example, has been certified as ‘carbon neutral’ for the last four years.
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/how_public_banks_can_help_finance_a_green_and_just_energy_transformation.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
The Sunrise Movement, that is mobilizing youth all over the US to fight climate change and push a Green New Deal into the mainstream of public conversation.
https://actionnetwork.org/forms/join-us-112?source=direct_link&
The deal that ended the largest private-sector strike in the US in years, in which 31,000 New England Stop & Shop workers won raises and preserved retirement and healthcare benefits, standing up to one of the biggest and most profitable supermarket chains in the country.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/22/when-workers-fight-workers-win-union-declares-victory-stop-shop-strike-ends-deal
https://ips-dc.org/stop-shop-workers-end-11-day-strike-with-a-tentative-agreement/
Sudanese women, whose lives have traditionally been tightly controlled by men, playing a decisive role in the protests that overthrew the autocratic Bashir this spring.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sudan-politics-women-idUSKCN1S60X3
The antidote to despair in laying out reasons to feel hopeful about our future on earth.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/10-reasons-feel-hopeful-about-climate-change-2019
Resources
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
Monday, May 20, 2019
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
#188 Commonwealth
Commonwealth
One of the things I love about living in my state is our name. I’m not speaking of “Penn’s Woods”, though that’s lovely as well, but of the “Commonwealth” of Pennsylvania. What a concept: common wealth.
It’s related to “the commons”, which some of us learned about in history class. As part of the Industrial Revolution, the open areas in English villages where everybody freely grazed their cows and sheep were increasingly enclosed as private land, threatening rural livelihood and forcing villagers to move to the cities as industrial laborers.
We learned that it was sad but inevitable, and it all happened a long time ago. Yet the enclosure of the commons is a very current threat, with the idea of common wealth as central. In the US, our common land is in the form of parks (and state game lands in places), whose integrity is under increasing attack. There is also our common water, our common air, our common airwaves, all being exploited for private profit in one way or another. Privatization is steadily expanding to include our common heritage: knowledge, culture and even DNA.
Then there is all the wealth of our economy. Some flows to private owners as profit, some goes to maintain ourselves, some goes to taxes. While we could argue until those English village cows come home about who deserves the profits, I want to think here just about the taxes.
In Philadelphia, our local tax base and our share of federal taxes that come back as grants make up this part of our common wealth. Yet we currently have no control over the part that is not immediately put to use. We pay the big banks on Wall Street—the only ones currently big enough to manage that amount of money—to hold our wealth. They, in turn, invest it where they will get the greatest return—which is not in the social and infrastructure needs of our citizens. To pay for such needs, we float bonds and borrow it back from them. With interest between a third and a half of the total costs of such projects, this is no small deal. In Philadelphia last year, we paid $170 million in debt service.
What would it mean to keep our common wealth at home, in a public bank, owned by—and operated for the benefit of—the people of Philadelphia? Such a bank could be professionally managed under the governance of a Board that is politically independent and representative of our communities. It could reduce the costs of funding public projects and invest our common money locally rather than remain dependent on Wall Street banks. In this way it could promote programs of public benefit such as low-cost housing, renewable energy, energy efficiency, education, and the creation of family-sustaining jobs.
It can be done. The state Bank of North Dakota has been in operation for 100 years, receiving state funds and reinvesting them in state projects. It consistently makes a profit—40% of which is returned to the state treasury, and it supports more community banks per capita than any other state. Not surprisingly, North Dakota was the only state in the country to come through the recession of 2008 unscathed, because its money was not in the bubbles of Wall Street.
It’s exciting to be part of an effort to encourage Philadelphia to establish a public bank. The concept is powerful and the logic is compelling. Once ordinary people have the opportunity to imagine an alternative to the status quo, they get it immediately. We have found City Council members and staff remarkably receptive. All the studies that have been done are clear on the advantages of keeping our public money at home.
Of course it will be a battle because, as Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand”, and this is a challenge to the locus of greatest power in the world—the private financial sector. Yet there’s something refreshing about not nibbling around the edges, but going straight to the center and naming the big question: who should control our common wealth?
Private?
Our backyard neighbors
put up a tall wooden fence—
ensuring their privacy
blocking our little bit of sun,
the life of my lettuce and herbs,
flowers and currants
not their problem.
Our school’s neighbors
have cut down the great oak tree
that shaded us all.
I pass the magnolia
two blocks down
a neighborhood treasure—
now in full and glorious bloom.
It sits in a private yard—
fills it up.
My heart constricts.
What if they no longer chose
to have it there? Cut it down,
as is their right?
As is the right of wall builders
and tree cutters everywhere
on private property.
How did beauty
and sunlight
and shade
become private?
Dare to imagine – a new economy is possible!
Banking on Values
Beneficial State Bank, with more than 250 employees at 17 locations throughout California, Oregon, and Washington, boasts about $1 billion in assets. The bank is mandated to produce meaningful social justice and environmental benefits at the same time that it is financially sustainable. All the owners are non-profit organizations which collectively reinvest all distributed bank profits back into the communities they serve. Their main business is providing credit to constructive businesses and non-profits—especially those boosting entrepreneurial activity in inner cities, following and strengthening wellness models, or reconnecting vital rural/urban dependencies—with credit allowing these beneficial activities to grow and scale.
https://beneficialstatebank.com/our-story/about-us/our-history
Bank president, Kat Taylor, says that if Beneficial’s return exceeds 10%, “we’re likely either overcharging our customers or underpaying our colleagues”—and that “would be in defiance of our mission.” She believes that Beneficial can help upend the banking sector by demonstrating that a bank can thrive competitively, loan money in a way that boosts economic justice, is restorative to the planet, and still pay its workers 150% of a living wage.
https://capitalandmain.com/upending-the-nations-financial-giants-with-beneficial-state-banks-kat-taylor-0621
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The news that thousands of bees living on top of Notre Dame have survived the fire, https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/bees-living-on-top-of-notre-dame-have-survived-fire/
along with the action by France to ban all five pesticides linked to bee deaths—the first country to do so. https://returntonow.net/2019/01/24/france-becomes-the-first-country-to-ban-all-five-pesticides-linked-to-bee-deaths/?fbclid=IwAR1uc9bsP80YiSXLHFCF11JtkRDY2FGRSUWOLQYHe3j0ialBuvLKTLYZS_g
A new movement, Freedom to Prosper, working to stop the student loan trap, and restore education to its rightful place as a public good. http://www.freedomtoprosper.org
A clean energy act in Washington DC which requires the city to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2032 and to invest millions of dollars in clean energy and sustainability projects that will benefit all D.C. residents. Read more and watch the video.
A barber whose training of other Black barbers in the South to act as informal mental health counselors has started a movement.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/mental-health/what-is-barbershop-therapy-20180823
Resources
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
One of the things I love about living in my state is our name. I’m not speaking of “Penn’s Woods”, though that’s lovely as well, but of the “Commonwealth” of Pennsylvania. What a concept: common wealth.
It’s related to “the commons”, which some of us learned about in history class. As part of the Industrial Revolution, the open areas in English villages where everybody freely grazed their cows and sheep were increasingly enclosed as private land, threatening rural livelihood and forcing villagers to move to the cities as industrial laborers.
We learned that it was sad but inevitable, and it all happened a long time ago. Yet the enclosure of the commons is a very current threat, with the idea of common wealth as central. In the US, our common land is in the form of parks (and state game lands in places), whose integrity is under increasing attack. There is also our common water, our common air, our common airwaves, all being exploited for private profit in one way or another. Privatization is steadily expanding to include our common heritage: knowledge, culture and even DNA.
Then there is all the wealth of our economy. Some flows to private owners as profit, some goes to maintain ourselves, some goes to taxes. While we could argue until those English village cows come home about who deserves the profits, I want to think here just about the taxes.
In Philadelphia, our local tax base and our share of federal taxes that come back as grants make up this part of our common wealth. Yet we currently have no control over the part that is not immediately put to use. We pay the big banks on Wall Street—the only ones currently big enough to manage that amount of money—to hold our wealth. They, in turn, invest it where they will get the greatest return—which is not in the social and infrastructure needs of our citizens. To pay for such needs, we float bonds and borrow it back from them. With interest between a third and a half of the total costs of such projects, this is no small deal. In Philadelphia last year, we paid $170 million in debt service.
What would it mean to keep our common wealth at home, in a public bank, owned by—and operated for the benefit of—the people of Philadelphia? Such a bank could be professionally managed under the governance of a Board that is politically independent and representative of our communities. It could reduce the costs of funding public projects and invest our common money locally rather than remain dependent on Wall Street banks. In this way it could promote programs of public benefit such as low-cost housing, renewable energy, energy efficiency, education, and the creation of family-sustaining jobs.
It can be done. The state Bank of North Dakota has been in operation for 100 years, receiving state funds and reinvesting them in state projects. It consistently makes a profit—40% of which is returned to the state treasury, and it supports more community banks per capita than any other state. Not surprisingly, North Dakota was the only state in the country to come through the recession of 2008 unscathed, because its money was not in the bubbles of Wall Street.
It’s exciting to be part of an effort to encourage Philadelphia to establish a public bank. The concept is powerful and the logic is compelling. Once ordinary people have the opportunity to imagine an alternative to the status quo, they get it immediately. We have found City Council members and staff remarkably receptive. All the studies that have been done are clear on the advantages of keeping our public money at home.
Of course it will be a battle because, as Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand”, and this is a challenge to the locus of greatest power in the world—the private financial sector. Yet there’s something refreshing about not nibbling around the edges, but going straight to the center and naming the big question: who should control our common wealth?
Private?
Our backyard neighbors
put up a tall wooden fence—
ensuring their privacy
blocking our little bit of sun,
the life of my lettuce and herbs,
flowers and currants
not their problem.
Our school’s neighbors
have cut down the great oak tree
that shaded us all.
I pass the magnolia
two blocks down
a neighborhood treasure—
now in full and glorious bloom.
It sits in a private yard—
fills it up.
My heart constricts.
What if they no longer chose
to have it there? Cut it down,
as is their right?
As is the right of wall builders
and tree cutters everywhere
on private property.
How did beauty
and sunlight
and shade
become private?
Dare to imagine – a new economy is possible!
Banking on Values
Beneficial State Bank, with more than 250 employees at 17 locations throughout California, Oregon, and Washington, boasts about $1 billion in assets. The bank is mandated to produce meaningful social justice and environmental benefits at the same time that it is financially sustainable. All the owners are non-profit organizations which collectively reinvest all distributed bank profits back into the communities they serve. Their main business is providing credit to constructive businesses and non-profits—especially those boosting entrepreneurial activity in inner cities, following and strengthening wellness models, or reconnecting vital rural/urban dependencies—with credit allowing these beneficial activities to grow and scale.
https://beneficialstatebank.com/our-story/about-us/our-history
Bank president, Kat Taylor, says that if Beneficial’s return exceeds 10%, “we’re likely either overcharging our customers or underpaying our colleagues”—and that “would be in defiance of our mission.” She believes that Beneficial can help upend the banking sector by demonstrating that a bank can thrive competitively, loan money in a way that boosts economic justice, is restorative to the planet, and still pay its workers 150% of a living wage.
https://capitalandmain.com/upending-the-nations-financial-giants-with-beneficial-state-banks-kat-taylor-0621
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The news that thousands of bees living on top of Notre Dame have survived the fire, https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/bees-living-on-top-of-notre-dame-have-survived-fire/
along with the action by France to ban all five pesticides linked to bee deaths—the first country to do so. https://returntonow.net/2019/01/24/france-becomes-the-first-country-to-ban-all-five-pesticides-linked-to-bee-deaths/?fbclid=IwAR1uc9bsP80YiSXLHFCF11JtkRDY2FGRSUWOLQYHe3j0ialBuvLKTLYZS_g
A new movement, Freedom to Prosper, working to stop the student loan trap, and restore education to its rightful place as a public good. http://www.freedomtoprosper.org
A clean energy act in Washington DC which requires the city to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2032 and to invest millions of dollars in clean energy and sustainability projects that will benefit all D.C. residents. Read more and watch the video.
A barber whose training of other Black barbers in the South to act as informal mental health counselors has started a movement.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/mental-health/what-is-barbershop-therapy-20180823
Resources
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
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