Subverting the Global Economy through Local Action Part 2

[part 1 here]

For a while, I had intended to write this post all by myself and make it a masterpiece of bloggery, so I started looking around for inspiration and links.

And I found others have already mastered this topic.

So I'm not going to write an article, post, diatribe, or paean: I'm going to stop right here and link to others' works that cover the topic far more thoroughly than I could in a single article. The overriding thesis: we don't need to do anything particularly organised to overturn the current economic order. All we need to do is reduce our overall need for money. That can be done through sharing, gifting, cooperation, crafting, making, and swapping - all of which is fun and builds community, which is far more useful than money. But don't take my word for it:

The concept of Earthship Village Ecologies links ecological concepts by creating work and resource flows rather than currency flows, and creating community instead of economy.

This is a good core article on the economic underpinnings of the Sharing Economy, and how we can resuscitate it for the modern age.

The Creative Commons is a global open-source style movement that gives a legal basis for sharing IP without giving corporations or individuals the opportunity to monetise or acquire the rights to an idea, product, or piece of work. A good example is this website for the sharing of free designs for 3d printing, in this case featuring designs for how to print an entire flying quadcopter. It's quite simply a fact that IP stifles small-scale economic development and in many cases is counterproductive. The people who realise this can share their concepts and code through these above movements so that their ideas serve the greater good of the community and allow small-scale economic development to expand.

The anti-colonial and anti-enclosure movement rising in (primarily) the third world seeks to defend cultural legacy from corporate patents.

The Transition Towns movement seeks to create regional and local economic autonomy and development from the "great powering down" that is starting now. The link is a practical primer on how to get local research to assist in economic development on a local level.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but countless groups are looking at a less cash-intensive future that is more community-based, sustainable, and happy. Less money can mean less security in these cash-intensive times, but less need for money means greater security, more community, and in the end, more happiness for all concerned (except the bankers, who might actually have to learn to work for a living).

Subverting the Global Economy through Local Action, Part 1

It's a common and nonetheless sad story that, no matter where or who we are, we assume that the only way to change our lot in life is to rally behind a figure who, inevitably, betrays his or her ideals once in a position of power. The politicians who win elections can bend but won't act, and those who won't bend and would act: don't win. Leaders are, on the whole, incapable of NOT doing what the system is set up to make them do. In a democracy, politicians appeal to their base with stirring rhetoric to get elected, and once in power, must compromise and please the majority. That's the democratic system. On the other hand, authoritarian concentration of power comes greater need to offer power and wealth to the people who support you, and no matter how benevolent the despot, his innate sense of entitlement and ability to rationalise make it impossible for him to resist the trappings of power and reject its substance. So much for leaders.

So what have we got to rely on? First, we must take power over ourselves. Power over oneself is the greatest of powers, but we just happened to have become acculturated to giving this power up to authority to the point that we don’t know that it’s gone. Next, realise that there’s a lot more in this society than just governments and individuals. We're not only talking about ourselves, but the communities that we left behind to inhabit our soulless suburbia. Building on a few of my previous articles, I wanted to talk about how to use your personal power to make the world a better place. No, this isn't intended to be some kind of self-help or inspirational article. This is a blueprint for a peaceful and insidious revolution that just happens to be inspiring.

The global economy has made many goods very affordable. The more globalised we become, the cheaper everyday items seem to get. Economies of scale, container ships, and big box stores are efficient: they are able to produce the most amount of widgets for the lowest price. Efficiency is exactly what the global economy is about. Companies can move production of widgets to the countries with the lowest-cost workforce, countries that provide the most favourable tax laws, or countries that subsidise corporate inputs. Given the smorgasbord of potential options for cost externalisation (fancy language for how corporations make other people pay for the stuff they use) and arbitrage (fancy talk for simultaneously exploiting the margin in price between two regions for profit), companies can naturally make their homes in locations that offer them lowest cost for their operations.

The problem with this efficiency is that it means one thing: concentration. Profits become concentrated when corporations operate in an environment where they are free to reduce or externalise their costs. As much as I believe in the free market, I believe that everything from lower salaries and cheap electricity to favourable tax legislation and undervalued currencies are externalities naturally produced by the current way of doing business. My definition of a truly free market is as free of these corporate advantages as it is free of hindrances. All externalities must be internalised to create a truly free market. Economies work best when all actors have an even playing field. When the field is uneven, groups can effectively arbitrage (for example) the high-currency consumer power of country A with the low currency and tiny salaries of country B. There are plenty of multinationals that would be unable to survive if it wasn't for these arbitrages and externalities. In my opinion, they shouldn't survive: they are poster-children for unfair business practices and unsustainability... but I also understand that, when the only goal of a corporation is to expand share value, they will naturally act amorally to achieve these ends.

The WTO (formerly GATT) has facilitated a kind of corporate wonderland where corporations (through their governmental proxies) can take countries to court for throwing up trade barriers. Trade barriers, in this case, can mean even something as simple as health legislation (where the US forced the EU to accept hormone-laden beef that has been linked with increased risk for cancer) or environmental protection legislation (where Venezuela forced the US to allow them - effectively - to sell more polluted gasoline on the US market than extant EPA legislation allowed), or indeed human rights legislation (where Massachusetts was forced to deal with Myanmar even though they had made legislation that disallowed them to deal directly with despotic regimes). This is simply in their nature: corporations act to increase share value. They will use all tools at their disposal to grow, and prying open other markets is one of the things necessary for growth past a certain point. It is no surprise that GATT became the WTO and the WTO may likely expand to the TPP. It's a natural evolution. Predictable, really.

We need a way for economic proverbial Davids to compete against proverbial economic Goliaths. The purpose is not to abolish the WTO, throw out the multinationals, eat the rich, and establish a dictatorship of the unions. That can't be done, especially not through any kind of direct conflict. No, the purpose is to make the people in your immediate area able to compete against money. Not simply against this company or that company, or this product or that product, but against the fundamental underpinnings of the entire neoliberal economy: money itself. 

More in the next instalment. Read this for a taste of the direction we're going. A shout out to The Valhalla Movement, a step in the right direction.

More farming issues

A few links for you:

The era of cheap food may be over (overview)

If the World Bank's projections are anything like accurate, further massive productivity gains from agriculture are going to be needed over the next two decades. There will be an extra 70m mouths to feed every year, which will result in a 50% increase in demand for food by 2030. Meanwhile, the amount of arable land per person will continue its long-run downward trend.

Britain's farming crisis: 'People don't realise how tough everything is' (cost of feed due to scarcity)

So they had to turn to higher volumes of concentrates than usual, where costs have shot up too, because of grain price rises on the international markets. "Feed has gone up by £50 or £60 a tonne." With each animal consuming a couple of tonnes of concentrate a year, that's a major cost. "As a result, the milk price is still below the cost of production because of the cost of that feed."

UK farmers face disaster as 'perfect storm' strikes (environmental pressures)

Farming faces a perfect storm. Appalling weather – 2012 was the second wettest year on record in England – has coincided with disease in livestock, including bovine TB and Schmallenberg in sheep, which causes birth defects. On top of this there are commercial pressures, with retailers driving prices down because of the state of the economy, combined with the cost of animal feed needed to replace poor quality silage due to the weather, shooting up by 40%.

This summer is probably going to be pretty expensive to shop for food.

Mycelium Running... for real this time.

I appear to have had some luck running mycelium in coir and wood chips lately. See the above three jars filled with bits of happy mycelium? They are from left to right, pure-ish coir to mixed coir and wood chips. So far it seems like the rightmost mixture is the happiest, though it could also have something to do with the fact it appears to have retained a little more moisture than the others. The pure-ish coir jar seems to have good, fuzzy mycelium in it:

Whereas the one in the mason jar seems to have developed some other form of mould to compete with the pleurotus ostreatus. Perhaps a holdover from its days holding other foods and not being as thoroughly cleaned as it should have been:

If I had supervision of any kind at this time, I might be forced to throw it out, but I really want to see just what happens... and if it goes rank, I'm putting it under the microscope, by gum!

The black soldier fly is doing well. They are crawling off a lot nowadays, so I hope we are getting an increase in the local population. I am not yet ready to start collecting them as I have nothing to use them for. If the neighbourhood allowed it, I would have gotten a chicken or something to et the BSFL, but I think they are going to have to go into an aquarium of fish eventually as fish food. They eat bloody fast though and I'm alone in the house now with dwindling amounts of food to give them. I had a bunch of people over last night, so we had some scraps, but I can't well have a party every night just to feed my BSFL. 

Then again, I suppose I could, and it would be pretty awesome to have a maggot-themed party, I'm sure.

Lastly, I've ordered a vericomposting kit to compost the castings of the BSFL into some friable compost. In order to keep moisture in the indoor food collection bin down, I've been putting dustings of coir in the bottom. These are slowly building up in the BSFL bucket as the BSFL can't really eat coir. After a good soak in the bacteria-rich goo that the BSFL leave in the bucket, it should be soft enough to be able to be eventually digested by the worms I hope. Also would like to plug the vermicomposter's designer, from UFO  (Urban Farms Organic). Check out their designs for high-volume modular composters. I will be reporting back to UFO on how they work out here in the tropics on BSFL leavings.

That's me up-to-date, more news as it happens...

Black Soldier Fly

I've been trying to attract black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) for some time now. First, I started with rotten coconut. That dried out, moulded, and ended out nasty and disgusting. I then tried reconstituting corn, putting it in the coconut to rot, and attracting BSFL that way. The corn moulded and ended up not being colonised. Finally, I had some old cabbage pickles that were going rancid in the fridge. I put those in the coconut and kept them wet but under a cover. After a week or two, I spotted what I believe to be BSFL. since then, I've gotten a bucket and started feeding them outside the coconut. While they've not completely colonised the bucket, they are slowly eating our biodegradables. See disgusting picture below :) (the BSFL are the white things in the middle of the bottom third of the picture)

Of course it doesn't disgust me, I'm the proud father of highly useful maggots :)

Mulching

Here is a shot of some okra in the home-made mulch from our shredder.

Mulching, of course, is highly useful. In our case, we have a confluence of two very important factors that make me believe mulching is an optimal practice for our yard. First, it's the dry season. Mulching helps in moisture retention. I dropped this mulch down after a (very rare!) summer rain. Second, our garden is full of palm trees that are regularly shedding lower leaves in their constant struggle to beat other plants to the canopy. This, combined with sticks I steal from the neighbours' garbage heap, coconut husks, and leaves from the bamboo stand, makes a great and varied texture mulch - and keeps that valuable carbon in our ecosystem. Tropical ecosystems seem to shed carbon like mad, but in a natural tropical ecosystem, the decomposers are totally on steroids - they break stuff down real fast. In the gardens in this part of the world, all the hired gardeners are told to do is get rid of the detritus and make it look presentable. The garden slowly sheds all its nutrients and carbon to the garbage heap, leaving a nasty, hard soil. I'm trying to stem that tide and keep the good stuff where it belongs...

...and stealing other people's good stuff from their garbage. Let's face it, I have no shame.

It's like Capitalism... except that it's Fair!

The next ten years are the prelimaries for our species' final exams, in which we discover whether this bold evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs was really a good idea.  Practically, that means: can we get our act together enough to do what we know how to do to solve our environmental problems or, better still, eliminate and avoid those problems, not at a cost but at a profit, in a way that is trans-ideological, attractive to everybody, and with no, or hardly any, losers?

-Amory Lovins

Economics is a topic far and cheap to my heart. This is because traditional economics only sees the environment as a source of raw material, and therefore as a part of the greater economy. As my heavily German-accented TA from one of my graduate seminars in international relations put it: "[economists] worship a false God". From a guy who started out his academic career in Economics, that's something of a grand condemnation. Our current economic trajectory is set by an economics of endless growth:

"The current system is broken," says Bob Watson, the UK’s chief scientific advisor on environmental issues and a winner of the prestigious Blue Planet prize in 2010. "It is driving humanity to a future that is 3-5°C warmer than our species has ever known, and is eliminating the ecology that we depend on for our health, wealth and senses of self." (emphasis mine)

Economics itself is, at best, a pseudoscience. It is a dark art that attempts to explain complex, multidimensional, and cyclic behaviour through simple, monovariable, and linear means. It is better explained as part of the ecology rather than with the ecology as part of the economy. The problem is that many people conflate the word economy with money, or Capitalism - as if all economies since the Cold War are Capitalistic. Money economies have the problem that they tend to need to grow in order to survive, and that infinite growth has an inevitable run-in with a finite planet.

Capitalism today abuses the people, environment, politics and culture in equal measures. It has fostered new extremes of wealth and poverty inside most countries, and such extremes always undermine or prevent democratic politics. Capitalist production for profit likewise endangers us by its global warming, widening pollution, and looming energy crisis. And now capitalism’s recurrent instability (what others call the “business cycle”) has plunged the world into the second massive global economic crisis in the last 75 years. Manifesto for Economic Democracy and Ecological Sanity  

Economies are not all money-based, and it has taken a huge economic downturn - that is to say, a gigantic failure of Capitalism to do its job and spread the wealth equitably - to bring alternative economies to the fore. The Occupy Gift Economy is a prime example of the genre, but there are others. In Greece, for example, alternative economies are emerging to free the people from the yoke that money imposes. Such debrouillard economies - Systeme D - are growing like an economic superpower across the world. Their adherents know - just like your mechanic knows - barter is nigh impossible to tax. They also know that the purpose of the economy is not to amass the most green pieces of paper, it's to redistribute wealth. Accumulation is about the ego, redistribution is about the community. It's hard going in Greece, but they have been given an opportunity to show the world that the birthplace of Democracy - a force far more important than cash - can democratise economics, too.

Ironically it is in the gaps of a broken system that the shoots of a different, new economy get a chance to grow. ... But while disaster reveals a society’s economic and social weaknesses, it also reveals where true resilience and real value can be found - in the ability of people to cooperate at the local level to meet a community’s needs.

-Andrew Simms

The change into a local economy, based on barter and a local - informally issued - currency, can actually serve to revitalise the economy without need of money. Europe, especially Germany, has been experimenting with local currencies for years now. They are complete fiction, just like any other currency, but they get buy-in because they can be spent locally. Local merchants make excellent first adopters because they realise no big-box store would ever accept such stuff. In Canada, we have the brilliant idea of Canadian Tire Money, which some local bars even accept on the occasional special promotion night. Canadian Tire knows that Canadian Tire Money keeps people coming back. Parts of Greece are now using the Local Alternative Unit to purchase goods. Does money have to be centrally issued? No. In Canada, you can settle a debt for goosefeathers if both parties agree. You can't pay taxes with them, but contract laws allow you to barter anything for anything, so long as both parties agree to the transaction.


People are even considering new ways of making business equitable. Co-ops are growing in popularity. There is a plethora of startup information online for creating co-ops, and analyses of how a cooperative economic system might develop.Other systems exist, such as a "Circular Economy" based on recycling; Holonic credit networks that are holographic groups of groups of groups that trust one another and are willing to extend one another credit based on their relationships; and Sharing Economies much like the gift economy discussed above. These are all viable ideas that fly in the face of the monetized "everything has a dollar value" paradigm. 



Economies that run on money work, but they don't work equitably. Certainly they drive all sorts of interesting social and industrial forces... but I'd rather be assured by my economy that I can eat than be assured by my economy that I can keep my teeth white and hair tangle-free. The goal of an economy is to redistribute wealth fairly. A even a free market can distribute wealth fairly - if we construct it with that aim in mind.

Organic Farming in India

A marvellous article in the Guardian today on organic farming in India.

For all those addicted to fertiliser and pesticide, chew on this (to paraphrase):

First, there's a 10% to 20% premium to be earned by selling organic products abroad

Second, organic farming slashes cultivation and input costs by up to 70% due to the use of cheaper, natural products like manure instead of chemicals and fertilisers.

Third, western, modern farming has spoiled agriculture in the country. An overuse of chemicals has made land acidic and hard, which means it needs even more water to produce, which is costly.

Read the article, it's a perfect and pragmatic rebuttal to the need for fertiliser and pesticide. Those tools only help agricultural companies, not farmers.

Zero Carbon, Zero Waste City

Masdar City in the Abu Dhabi Emirate of the UAE is slated to be the first zero carbon zero waste city. Why in Abu Dhabi, the largest and "most equal" of all the "equals" in the UAE? I have a thought... perhaps this is Abu Dhabi's claim to fame for after the oil boom. Perhaps the oil boom is coming to an end sooner than we thought.

I've been to Dubai a couple times, but never Abu Dhabi - though I hear it's pretty livable. Dubai is cool, modern, fun - for a couple days, anyhow. Dubai, of course, has one of the most forward-thinking Emirs of the region, and his determination to make Dubai the Hong Kong of the Middle East is paying off. The place is slowly becoming a financial centre, especially with the rise of Islamic Finance. Even HSBC is getting into the act (with, I might add, some amazing commercials for Islamic Banking that would make even the hardest of hearts consider conversion). Abu Dhabi, the bigger, governmental, and less cool neighbour always seems to lag behind. After Dubai built Emirates Airlines, Abu Dhabi made Etihad. With Dubai's post-oil future seemingly built out of being a banking, transport, and convention hub, Abu Dhabi was clearly looking for a different angle.

This is promising. Not only promising that the progressivism of Dubai is contagious, but promising that the future Abu Dhabi is mapping is actually sustainable. I guess once the oil runs out for us, it runs out for them, too...

Fiscal Responsibility - Part 1: Wealth Redistribution, Chapter II: Consumption Taxes

Canadians are predominantly slightly left or slightly right of centre. They mainly want less deficit and more services. When voters see government spending go over the top, they are rightly concerned about it, and it becomes a hot political issue... but the national budget is not about "cutting" or "becoming leaner" to be more fiscally conservative. Fiscal conservativism is rooted in only spending what you have, not cutting the services you need. When voters see services cut, they are rightly concerned about it, and it becomes a hot political issue... but providing adequate services for the public isn't a financial issue, it's a matter of accomplishing the will of the electorate. Political parties seem to see "issues" in isolation from one another, like the problem of voters wanting lots of services is somehow perceived separately from the problem that the treasury holds inadequate funds. Most political parties seem to have their approach to budgeting backwards. What political parties don't seem to get is that these two issues are not a problem of leftist voters demanding more services and rightist voters demanding less expenditure.  The problem is that political parties won't do what will solve both problems: select exactly the services that Canadians require, and then raise the revenues to pay for them. Why these two issues continue to be handled in isolation to one another boggles my mind and deprives me of much-needed sleep.

This is why the first part of this plan is about finding more wiggle-room for the government to get its financial footing and fund the programs necessary to support the economy and, more importantly, the electorate. Once the government has the funds, then it can modernise the economy, and seek efficiency through devolution of services to the lowest natural level of government. The function of the federal government must be to collect and direct funds where they need to be. If programs from the Department of Veterans' Affairs or Health Canada (just for random examples) would be better delivered by cities, then cities should not only receive the money but receive the mandate to implement those programs. Here's a bit of foreshadowing: I think cities can do a lot of this stuff, and save money doing it. Each level of government should do what it's good at, and cities are the best place for direct service-delivery to Canadian citizens (and permanent residents).

Consumption taxes, in this scheme, cover off a little bit of each of these issues. In part, they engage all levels of government, they also assist in the delivery of service to Canadians, and offset the hidden subsidies of the items they tax. Except for the GST, all consumption taxes are geared at preventing harmful or costly activity from hurting the treasury too much. By engaging the power of consumption taxes, we can increase the coffers of the governments that fund the programs we require. We can also use them to penalise the inefficient and unsustainable, and make sustainable products and services more appealing to the consumer. In this way, we will assist the market in pushing consumption patterns from the unsustainable to the sustainable.


REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH
Consumption Taxes: from the unsustainable to the sustainable

Consumption taxes are an essential tool for governments to offset the costs of unsustainable and dangerous activity. Consumption taxes, in some ways, act as insurance policies: alcohol and tobacco taxes are a case in point. If you drink and smoke often, chances are higher you will contract a disease that is expensive to treat or cause a road accident. Though a few people might chafe at these concepts, look at the insurance industry: they may charge more if you drive a red car rather than a white one, because stats show more red cars are involved in accidents than others. Certainly we can accept that if red cars cause more accidents, drinking and smoking cost the economy more than not drinking and not smoking. The taxes on these products serve to offset the costs these activities incur, or can potentially incur, on the health system of the respective polity.

A solution to this can be implemented by engaging two rather disparate stakeholders: insurance companies and civil society groups. The former, because it has the greatest expertise at estimating the potential costs of a certain activity. The latter, because parts of it have a natural interest in limiting behaviour that is a drain on the treasury. I propose that insurance companies be allowed to bid on contracts to insure potential drains on the treasury. The lowest bidders on the tender will be allowed to participate in the program. The insurers must pay for all issues arising from their given program, but they keep the profits (if any) from the tax levy. Also included in the tax levy will be an incentive to civil society groups to reduce the behaviour that is a drain on the treasury. If the stats show a reduction in the activity, the participating groups get a donation. Insurance companies, of course, would stand to gain considerably through reductions in the behaviour, and therefore would be thrust together with the civil society groups through sheer self-interest... that benefits both the common citizen as well as the treasury. When you create a system that privileges cooperation - get this - cooperation happens. I've seen it before in academic writing on the Prisoner's Dilemma and I even tried it out myself: In a class of MBA students, I got the group to play an iterated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. We split the group in half: I had the group where I explained the game in cooperative terminology. The actual professor of the class described the game using specially selected competitive terms. Guess what? The people who were instructed the game in cooperative terms were cooperative in the game. That was just changing the framing language of the rules! Imagine if there was monetary incentive for cooperation between groups in the system. Each group will reinforce the other in its own domain. A useful side effect of the engagement of both civil society groups and corporations under the benevolent guidance of the central government is the production of numerous warm and fuzzy anecdotes about working together to solve social problems. Never underestimate the power of a warm and fuzzy anecdote during a political campaign, especially when it can simultaneously involve corporations making money, civil society groups making a difference, and the government saving money. Triple win.

Consumption taxes are, however, more than simply tools to offset costs. They can also redress hidden subsidies. I was talking to a man who is in the mining industry about the price of gas at the pump, and he indicated (only partly correctly) that a large part of the cost of gas is tax. Yes, there is a lot of tax on gas, but not enough. This isn't because of carbon emissions or environmental impact or anything of the sort (though that does matter). No, it is principally because the petroleum industry receives ample subsidies from the government for supporting the overuse of gas. Let me raise just two:
1) Roads - while most people will scoff at the insinuation that roads are a subsidy to gas companies, we should remind ourselves that the suburb - that road-intensive invention of the 50's - necessitated a huge increase in road building. Trucks carry huge numbers of containers across country that could be handled more efficiently and cost-effectively by train, but instead we insist on maintaining enormous trans-continental stretches of road all so that cars and trucks can burn gas on it. Gas prices should reflect ALL costs inherent in road construction and maintenance at all levels of government. Canada is one of those weird and rare animals that has only a couple real toll roads. The rest are all totally free of charge. This needs to change, and users should pay.
2) Accidents - cars cause automobile accidents. All costs related to the direct car-related health problems should be borne by gas prices. Natural Capitalism suggests that car insurance payments be made directly at the pump, and this is not a bad idea. It is perhaps easier to simply ask the cities to make a cost estimate for emergency and police services related to traffic accidents and pass this directly on to the pump.

Again, through the engagement of civil society and all levels of government, the central government can identify the hidden subsidies being given to industry and offset them with appropriate taxation. Increased prices for these products means better services related to those products and, hopefully, reduced consumption and increased conservation.

Finally, there is a need to encourage  recycling and conservation as well as discouraging waste and linear production models. To list the fundamentals of such a consumption tax regime, I'd identify the following points:

• If it isn't recyclable, add to its cost.
• If it's within a class of "industrial nutrient" (something that can be reused over and over again in industrial processes) per Cradle to Cradle, give a rebate.
• If it's virgin raw material, add to its cost.
• If it's recycled material, give a rebate.

Taxing waste directly would also assist in its reduction.

All together, there are ample tools here to guide the market along a sustainable path and raise funds at the same time. The end result of this taxation regime must be a reduction in the taxed behaviour, and therefore a reduction in the amount of tax paid. This is fine. The key is to build up a head of financial steam in the beginning, and let off pressure as the economy changes tack. Part of the pressure will be let off simply by the economy shifting to sustainable practices. Part of the pressure will be let off by more responsible consumption. In the end, the government will take in much less money for all consumption taxes included in this regime, and that is exactly what this regime of taxes is designed to do: move purchasing behaviour from the unsustainable to the sustainable.

The Movement

That would be the one, yes.

The Sustainability Revolution

I just finished reading The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift, and it's a well laid-out survey of the goals of large parts of the sustainability movement, but I think it might have been a good idea to have read earlier rather than later. A lot of the stuff was already covered in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, and Natural Capitalism. Still, a good survey of the literature and proposed policies for sustainability.