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Simpler OneEarth Living Podcast
A co-production of Simple Living Works! and The Common Good Podcast (Jubilee OneEarth Economics)
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SHOW NOTES
Can the current economy handle the global pandemic that increasingly shows it will be with us for a long time? Month by month signs intensify to unveil the economy’s weaknesses, leaving many to conclude that this economy is not flexible enough to bring wellbeing, but is delivering suffering instead. How, then, can we live according to a new economy? That’s the conversation we are into today. Stay with us.
This podcast episode is built around the presentation Lee gave recently to a Zoom gathering of the Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace in the Pasadena-Los Angeles area. Visit the ICUJP website for further information. It formed quickly following 9/11 in 2001. They’ve held a forum nearly every Friday since. A truly amazing interfaith coalition of learning and action!
They asked Lee to speak about a new economy because “You’ve been working on a jubilee economy for a long time in both the U.S. and Mexico.” They recognized that the space we’ve been ushered into, not just by the coronavirus, but by multiple dynamics, requires a new economic model from what we have. The current economy shows a weak capacity to handle the coronavirus. It’s working for fewer and fewer people. And all the while, climate heating continues without governments applying the brakes.
Lee’s presentation was called “Our Exodus from Superpower to a Creation-Size Economy.” A new economy doesn’t work inside a superpower worldview focused on domination of others and extracting whatever we want from nature as cheaply as we can get it. Instead, we need to recognize creation as our frame of reference for all economic decisions.
Speaking to interfaith communities means that people of faith can explicitly act from our various faiths to bear startling witness to the needed transformation to a creation-size economy. We have begun a most critical decade–the 2020s. By 2030, the needed transformations will be too late. We have to act now. This decade has an apocalyptic reality. It is filled with breakdowns of systems familiar to us. It also reveals the breakthrough to what is new. So, at this time, we feel the anxiety of enormous tension between (1) powers and big money clinging to what privileges them and (2) thousands of grassroots efforts working from the bottom up to show us how to live a new creation-based economy. That’s where the Jubilee economy fits in so well.
Because this tension exceeds understanding by rational means alone, we need a framework in which to handle the emotions and thoughts triggered by the current apocalyptic experiences.
Apocalyptic can be a frightening word. It feels surreal. Yet, what we are experiencing today are existential events that do not have an end in sight. I’m thinking of Covid-19, of over-consuming, of overpopulation, of industrial farming, of authoritarian and fascist government, and of global heating. A lot of energies feed into this storm. Current systems are being overwhelmed when we assess them honestly. I guess that’s what apocalyptic means. How we live in this apocalyptic time?
Lee used something from our previous podcast episode–the “adaptive cycle” developed by the late ecological economist C.S. Holling. It really helps us think about the rise and fall of human systems. They grow, then they conserve their success, then they weaken and decline, and finally a regeneration of a new system happens.
That’s the life cycle of the current systems that are the building blocks of a superpower. These systems are not eternal. They have not always been with us. Nor will they be with us forever.
So, where are we in that life cycle now? The growth phase happened as the industrial age grew and grew. Then in the 20th century policies and corporations conserved the gains made and urged people to buy our way into great living. But already in the 20th century, early signs of decline began to appear as scientists warned of greenhouse gases and many economists saw that growth economics was outstripping the planet’s resources. Now in the decade of the 2020s we are fully into what Holling called the release phase, meaning, large powers of creation are forcing humans to let go of civilization’s systems that are killing life on the planet. Thousands of people have already let go; others are being coerced to do so. And those clinging to the privileges of the past are moving into ever greater violence against change. But even as the top-down structures collapse, small scale enterprises expressing creation-size living rise into the consciousness of thousands.
The pandemic is hurrying the process along. A year ago, none of us were planning that within one year the economy would be contracting and the healthcare systems would be overworked. Or that millions of people would understand with new clarity that people of color have been forced by our systems to build the U.S. economy. They continue to be systemically repressed and deprived by every system of civilization. Now, the pandemic has exploded our consciousness about this systemic unfairness. We feel the wrenching struggle of good and evil in this moment as the death struggle of what has been and the birthing of what is to be. What has been unimaginable is now inevitable.
And that’s why faith communities need to claim quite boldly and explicitly the economics and practices of creation living. The time is right for us to rediscover the power of an economic message.
Right-wing authoritarianism is ever a threat in this unstable, apocalyptic situation. But if such authoritarianism prevails, that tyranny too will fail, though the toll upon life will be devastating.
How does one describe the world that is being revealed as the breakthrough—that which we move toward?
All of of our podcast episodes present aspects of the OneEarth Jubilee economy and worldview—an economy rooted in creation and taught in sacred texts.
The name comes from the Bible. In the Bible, it is not a matter of a few obscure texts that we strain to make work in today’s world. Jubilee is a worldview that precedes the Bible, is active in the biblical narratives, and continues to the present. The worldview is akin to what Indigenous people often call the “Original Instructions.”
Both in the Bible and today, Jubilee actions resist empires and monarchies and their economies and offer alternatives to them. The worldview is rooted in the organic structures of creation, not the corporate structures of civilization.
OneEarth vs. MultiEarth from Lee’s book Blinded by Progress, pp. 8-11
What specifics do you recommend given the strong grip that past ways have on us? It certainly is a time for lots of unlearning much of what we’ve been doing and thinking. Faith-based actions—I’m thinking here of what congregations of all beliefs have taught as discipleship, mission, or spiritual practices—need redefinition. So, how do people of faith learn and teach discipleship that matters for the 2020s?
- We need to read sacred texts economically
- Jubilee in the Bible comes from different authors over a millennium of time. It’s not a one-shot effort that didn’t work and was given up.
- Jubilee passages are in parts of the Bible that prefer a worldview that makes Creation the context and measure of all life, from economics to religion.
- Jubilee rises from below and is most accurately understood from the perspective of oppressed people.
- Get away from capitalism vs socialism which is fruitless and non-transforming. We do have an economic message that is able to transform people and societies.
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Invitation to Sign OneEarth Jubilee Covenant for the 2020’s
Have you listened to our recent episodes? In April we shared some of the most thought-provoking interpretations of the pandemic, entitled CoronaVirus: A Devastating Natural Disaster with a Message–Live Differently. In May, Life with Covid-19: Heading Toward a More Ecological World. In June, Pandemic Shows Food System Broken, Opens Door to Better Choices. In July, As This World Ends, the Light at the End…
Please tell us your thoughts on these subjects. Leave a message on Jubilee OneEarth Economics and Simple Living Works! Facebook pages.
NOTES: Consider using Lee’s new book “The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story to Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils” this Advent.
Watch for details on the new ZOOM series in September by Wes Howard Brook for OneEarth Economics.
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Earlier Episodes
Ep. 0720–As This World Ends, the Light at the End…
In this episode we give a better way to think about life after the pandemic than getting back to doing what we did before. How do we get from this stage of life with the pandemic and other multiple crises to a better world than we had before. We need new systems that support life for all instead of hyper profits for some that grow the punishing disparities everywhere we look in our societies.
As you listen, the questions are, “How can I now choose for the future instead of choosing to get back to how I was doing it? How can I choose for a planet in balance for the wellbeing of all beings?”
We depend heavily on the work of Nafeez Ahmed as presented in an article in YES! magazine, summer 2020 edition.
“The Light at the End” Nafeez Ahmed in YES! magazine, summer 2020
issue. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/coronavirus-community-
power/2020/05/11/coronavirus-community-power-survival/
NAFEEZ AHMED is executive director of the System Shift Lab, editor of the crowdfunded platform INSURGE intelligence, and research fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems.
# # #
Ep. 0620–Pandemic Shows Food System Broken, Opens Door to Better Choices
CoronaVirus is revealing breakdowns and lack of resilience in our food supply systems. Which links in the chain are broken? Rather than fixing them, what are new and better choices for us in how we bring food from soil to savory, healthy eating?
This is the third successive podcast episode in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Covid-19 abruptly stopped the fragile food supply system we’ve been depending on. The system that’s broken down is driven by industrial agriculture, global markets, trade breakdowns and corporate control.
Excellent sources that (1) explain the breakdown and (2) help us identify the systems we need going forward.
Richard Heinberg wrote The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. The final chapter is loaded with things people are doing to adopt practices of OneEarth living and economics measured by wellbeing, not growth. He is senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and continues to share the wisdom of that think and action group in his Museletter on his website, https://richardheinberg.com.
I interviewed Richard for this podcast, Ep. 109.
In 4/20 Museletter #326, “Fraying Food System May Be Our Next Crisis” summarizes flaws in the current system.
https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-326-pandemic-response-requires-post-growth-economic-thinking
“Experts who study what makes societies sustainable (or unsustainable) have been warning for decades that our modern food system is packed with ticking bombs. The ways we grow, process, package, and distribute food depend overwhelmingly on finite, depleting, and polluting fossil fuels. Industrial agriculture contributes to climate change, and results in soil erosion and salinization. Ammonia-based fertilizers create “dead zones” near river deltas while petrochemical pesticides and herbicides pollute air and water. Modern agriculture also contributes to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Monocrops—huge fields of genetically uniform corn and soybeans—are especially vulnerable to pests and diseases. Long supply chains make localities increasingly dependent on distant suppliers. The system tends to exploit low-wage workers. And food is often unequally distributed and even unhealthful, contributing to poor nutrition as well as diabetes and other diseases.”
Heinberg: five of the links that are breaking down currently in the food supply chain’s “wicked complexity.”
These five give us a big picture of what corporations and globalization have been creating in recent decades.
1. Vulnerable Food Workers
2. Fragile Distribution Networks
3. Broken Global Supply Chains
4. Bankrupt Farmers
5. Vanishing Affordability
Solutions We Suggest
1. Growing more of our own. — growing more of their own food. // Baker Creek seed company,
2. Rationing. — At the national level, food price controls have an uneven history of success. Stan Cox: Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing // Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program
3. Shorten supply chains. LINKS: capture atmospheric carbon and sequester it in soil, that build healthy and biologically rich topsoil // nutritious and affordable food // fair to farmers and farmworkers.
4. Guides for how Our Choices can reconfigure food supply post-Covid-19 (mid-Covid-19)
From the Reader Supported News website, an article on young adults turning their grief to action: Anna McClurkan
a. Local supply—growers, retailers, markets. Focus in communities instead of corporations.
b. Reduce Meat by at least 50%
c. Organic—no pesticides, herbicides
5. The Land Institute, Salina, KS, — reconfiguring farming (notes from Panel with Stan Cox, 5/23/20)
- Stop thinking that economic growth is good and takes care of everything else. Limits is the replacement word. Generate a community of learning around new thinking. Do it soon.
- Disconnect food from fossil fuel use.
- Value local crops, perennial crops.
- Resettle small farms and small towns. Not because of nostalgia, but because that is how Homo sapiens function better.
Other Links for this episode
Published on Friday, May 22, 2020 by Common Dreams
Fridays for Future Europe Calls for Transforming Agricultural Policy to Tackle the Climate Crisis by Jessica Corbett, staff writer
Fasting From Food Waste in a Season of Hoarding
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement — ICCI — IowaCCI.org
The Food & Farm System We Need and Deserve: A Webinar Series – for farmers, workers, eaters and the land. Our food and farm system belongs in the hands of more diverse base of farmers and workers, not under the control of a small handful of giant corporations. (SLW! Podcast ep. 02/19)
# # #
Ep. 0520–Life with Covid-19: Heading Toward a More Ecological World
CoronaVirus is reshaping life and society, moving in the direction of ecological living. We acknowledge the intense resistance to that move as many powers want to get back to normal. But that normal is an illusion of unlimited growth on a planet with great, but limited, resources. The illusion elevated the lives of many in the 20th century. But in the 21st century, it’s failing life on the planet.
It’s nothing we want to go back to. Many people are hearing quite clearly the call of the Creator and all of creation to join her in generating new societies that respect science, integrate spirit, and embrace the economy able to shape life in this decade. The industrialized world has fought against her for far too many decades. As we listen deeply to Earth and her Spirit, let’s frame what we learn around a global worldview and act locally with what we learn to generate local, living communities.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ message for International Mother Earth Day, 4/22/20 — six climate-related actions to shape the recovery and the work ahead.
Pandemic side-effects offer glimpse of alternative future on Earth Day 2020: Coronavirus has led to reduced pollution, re-emerging wildlife and plunging oil prices and shown the size of the task facing humanity — by Oliver Milman from The Guardian
COVID-19: Crisis and Call to Humanity for a Better Way Forward By T. Larsen in Green America, 4/16/20
- Move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030
- Shift to regenerative agriculture.
- Create a pathway to free public college education and address crushing student loan debt and medical debts.
- Shape a story of America that is finally being honest about “the all” words in “liberty and justice for all.”
Richard Heinberg – Transition Towns: a great unraveling is underway. Transition towns are visionary and focus in community instead of corporations. A sane way as globalization unravels–from MuseLetter 326, 4/20
Episode 109: Richard Heinberg on Choosing to Get Off Fossil Energy—Our Best Local Choices
http://simpleliving.startlogic.com/SLW-PODCAST/?p=1887
# # #
Ep. 0420::CoronaVirus: A Devastating Nature Disaster with a Message–Live Differently!
“Perhaps the most important message the coronavirus offers is that the natural world is conspiring to save us from ourselves, to slow our materialistic greed and reign in our aggressive, self-centered, short-term, and xenophobic tendencies.” –John Perkins, co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance
Hear the Letter from Covid-19 to Humans in its original language with art/illustrations at: https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/a-letter-from-the-virus-listen/ [from Psychology Today, 3/24/20]
The UN Environmental Chief, Inger Andersen, was reported on Commondreams by Damian Carrington, 3/25/20, entitled, Coronavirus: ‘Nature is sending us a message.’
David Korten, 3/29/20, in Yes! Magazine (also on Commondreams), entitled, “Why Coronavirus Is Humanity’s Wakeup Call.”
“Pandemics: Lessons Looking Back from 2050,” by Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets Media. Hazel was our guest: Part 1, Episode 91; Part 2, Episode 92.
6 Lessons CoronaVirus Can Teach Us About Climate Change
Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and Leah D. Schade are co-editors of the book Rooted and Rising: Voices of Courage in a Time of Climate Crisis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), an anthology of essays from religious environmental activists on finding the spiritual wisdom for facing the difficult days ahead.
Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, guest on this podcast, Ep.10/19
# # #
Ep. 0329–Dave Gardner on three major efforts he has developed—all designed to bring change from the present: (1) GrowthBusters, (2) World Population Balance and (3) the One Planet/One Child Campaign.
Colleagues: GrowthBusters (Dave Gardner)–film and podcast; World Population Balance // OverPopulation Podcast; Post-Carbon Institute programs + CrazyTown podcast (SLW! Ep. 109–Richard Heinberg); CASSE: Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy (The Common Good Podcast Ep. 46–Brian Czech); Center for Sustainable Economy; and Population Connection (SLW! Ep. Ep. 72: John Seager of Population Connection, Part 1; Ep. 73, Part 2); Bill Ryerson of the Population Institute and Population Media Center (SLW! Ep. 113: Part 1–Population Crises; TCGP #97: Part 2–Reducing Population Using Methods that Work)
ESSAY: Overconsumption and Overpopulation as the primary drivers of the Climate Crisis
All of our Jubilee Circles are keenly aware that the 2020’s is last decade for major climate action to save life in the sacred creation where we live. May we live in the Spirit who is eager to partner with us all.
# # #
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