We’re bringing collectively main economists, writers and activists to unpick a few of the best questions of our instances. How can we regenerative our economies, what would a future with out fossil fuels seem like, and the way can we localise our provide chains to pretty distribute wealth?
The SMALL IS THE FUTURE occasion is going down on Saturday, 17 June 2023 on the Paintworks, Bristol. Audio system embrace Dr Ann Pettifor, Charlie Hertzog Younger, Satish Kumar, Professor Herbert Girardet and Gareth Dale. Buy tickets here. If you wish to attend the occasion however can not afford a ticket e-mail brendan@theecologist.org.
We do perceive that these questions are monumental, ridden with complexities, and that there aren’t any in a single day options, definitely not ones that might be solved within the quick area of a day occasion. And but we hope that SMALL IS THE FUTURE might be a reference level, a manner of navigating our manner by means of the chaos of local weather breakdown.
We’re proud to host a distinguished panel of economists, together with Ann Pettifor, famend economist and creator of the influential ebook The Case for a Inexperienced New Deal; James Meadway, economist and co-author of The Value of Residing Disaster (and the right way to get out of it); and Satish Kumar, the editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist journal, and a founding father of Schumacher School.
Salt
Throughout the cost-of-living disaster, international vitality giants have been raking in hovering income. Shell reported record-breaking earnings of virtually US$40 billion for the complete yr of 2022, virtually double these of 2021. If that isn’t sufficient salt within the wound, Exxon Mobil reported US$56 billion in annual revenue, a document for the corporate.
We stay in instances of unprecedented financial inequality, pushed by the greed of some – accumulating wealth at the price of all residing programs on the planet.
It has been calculated that 47.8 per cent of world family wealth is within the palms of simply 1.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitants, based on a brand new Credit score Suisse report. I might hold throwing statistics round, however I feel all of us get the purpose.
It was the identical level E.F. Schumacher had made again within the Nineteen Seventies, when the idea of ‘small is gorgeous’ labored as an antidote to the capitalistic philosophy of ‘large is greatest’.
Schumacher seemed in direction of a future powered by renewable vitality, localised provide chains and an financial system that’s based mostly on nature’s regenerative methods, which Schumacher coined as ‘financial system of permanence’. That’s, the state of lasting, of being a viable option to maintain life on earth for generations to come back.
Radical
It’s no shock that younger individuals, significantly these within the international south, recognise the local weather emergency and really feel fearful concerning the future.
