"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

This is brilliant

Among other things, this is only the second piece of advice on improving environmental messaging that I've seen that makes sense to me and gives me hope, the first being Bruce Sterling's blobjects talk.

It's Jason Scorse pitching What Environmentalists Need to Know About Economics



Update: Posted in a hurry last night. Lots of doubts arising in the light of day. Still, I think there is much of value here.

Lou has some thoughts too.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a great video, MT. Thanks a lot!

It's easy for me to criticize (I could never go about it as analytically thorough as Jason Scorse), but he could have gone on a bit more about those pseudo-economists and charlatans and how they came up with this economic concept of infinite growth. In fact, I believe he doesn't mention this fallacious en detrimental concept anywhere.

So although I believe all the solutions he comes up with in the video are extremely valid, he has to couple them to a new dominant economic concept for the solutions to have a chance of being implemented.

And you don't get to a new economic concept by not talking about it. At least, he didn't in the video. But I will buy his book and read it when I have time for it the coming 2 years.

So to add to his list of points of advice to environmentalists: Every environmental organization needs to have an explicit stance on our current dominant economic concept of infinite growth.

word verif: trabu (you see, that's what I mean, minus the 'r' of course)

steven said...

nice. Agreed on the bits about insurance and subsidy.

Seems like the start of a good middle ground.

John said...

I've posted the following comment at "The Cost of Energy"
----

What everyone, including, environmentalists need to know about economics is that "it doesn’t create a new trade in some item that no one wants."

All should also be informed that it is a grave mistake to assume that said economic system has NO influence over what "anyone wants." The mere existence of the concept of "externalities" (as fine an example of "economic assholery" as can be found!!) is proof that the system is "informing" its adherents what they may ignore, that is, "not want."

To the extent, then, that our survival needs something our economic system has "informed" us we need not want, then, said economic system is to be identified as, at best, irrelevant.

To the extent our economics system is taken as religion, even supplanting the "great experiment in self-governance" itself, perhaps our economics system is more accurately considered detrimental to our continued existence.

John Puma