A collection of 39 essays on responding to the effects of economic and environmental collapse.

OFFICIAL LAUNCH SPEECH

ORDERS

REVIEW courtesy of Pacific Ecologist

A taste of the New Zealand contributions: 

Bryan Innes:

“Community economy engenders a new way of seeing, a way that sees human beings as naturally cooperative and life-affirming.” 

Jack Santa Barbara:

“New Zealand has a unique opportunity to provide global leadership in the transition to a steady-state economy unfolding by design rather than disaster.”

James Bellamy:

“Despite most governments adopting the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gases, it is clear now that the markets and governments causing these problems in the first place were never going to provide the solutions.” 

Joanna Santa Barbara:

“There is abundant research informing us of the importance of social equity for a multiplicity of social benefits, particularly health.”

John McKay:

“The conventional food distribution model - wholesaler, distributor, retailer - is responsible for the ever-diminishing quality of food, because it reduces returns to farmers who are forced to turn to commercial farming methods to survive.”

Laurence Boomert:

“I discovered that 99.9% of agriculture was not organic - that industrious people, the salt of my country, had been conned by superproductivity into practices antithetical to life on earth.”

Margaret Jefferies:

“Rather than waiting on the sidelines for a Government agency to hand out solutions, Lyttelton is seeking out what its own localised answers might be.”

Niki Harré:

“When we are attempting to change the social world before we reach a state of undeniable ecological crisis, then positivity will be much more likely to bring about creative and cooperative solutions.”

Pete Russell:

“If we help people to help themselves by providing the right tools, they will spontaneously improve their circumstances rather than complain about or wait for help from a higher authority.”

Phil Stevens:

“Recent years have seen a property bubble collapse, a tangible erosion of the wage-earner's prospects at the hands of globalised markets, and our love affair with the automobile carry on undiminished despite its role as an abusive partner.”

Sharon Te Apiti Stevens:

“We are called to take time to see others as persons, not as systemic functions, even when we have been brought together with them by an organisation for organisational purposes.”

Tuhi-Ao Bailey:

“We're not going out as radical activists but as ordinary local people who care deeply about the place we call home and we're saying, ‘Hey, this is our place you're threatening and there's heaps of us and we're organising and networking and we're going to stand up to you to protect it as best we can.’”