We live in a time of great uncertainty, with the triple threat of increasingly volatile climate change, political polarization, and income inequality. It feels like the political, economic, and governance systems of our civilization are not only unequal to these challenges, but being fractured by them. In times of great uncertainty, people tend to grasp at leaders with views they…
Think about your local walk to the park. You head down that shady street, turn left at the corner store, cut up that little alleyway, and – voila! – you are surrounded by bounding dogs, trees, and giggling children. Or maybe not. Maybe you have to navigate an urban obstacle course littered with poorly thought out street crossings, concrete corridors,…
The ability to adapt to climate change and minimize its effects rests on humankind’s ability to follow several pathways – the Pathways to Planetary Change that were the subject of the Garrison Institute’s symposium on April 17-19, 2018. They are Half-Earth, Ecological Civilization, Pervasive Altruism, and the topic of the second of our follow-up conversations, Regenerative Economics. We spoke about…
The term “Buddhist economics” first appeared in E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. In her new book, Buddhist Economics: An Enlightened Approach to the Dismal Science, Clair Brown builds on Schumacher’s understanding of the term while focusing on what she sees as our two biggest economic challenges: global warming and inequality. The Buddhist…