Stern is not enough

Post office privatisation is closing offices, here in Berkshire there are no buses on a sunday or after 6.30 weekdays. Consumerism is virtually a secular religion. Stern draws attention to climate change but the solution is a green society based on local production for local need, open source economics, sharing more, making goods to last longer....and all the rest.

The realisation that we cannot treat our planet as a badly managed toilet, is slowly dawning.

However, everything requires a rethink.

Radical green politics I think so, alternatives to an economic system that works best when we consume more and more I know so.

A different kind of economy, cultural change....the Green Party needs to be raising awareness and supporting struggles to keep the local post office open (neo-liberalism is working to close it), arguing for a world which meets need (cheap housing for the next generation in Britain, please) and works against greed (£7.5 billion last year in city bonuses).

We need to get the message across and draw upon radicals from Illich to Bookchin and beyond.

Personalities to lead us into the promised land, hey its going to take more and look where Joshka Fischer took the German greens.


From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuries, and like boni patres familias, they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition. (Marx quoted in Kovel 2002: 238)

Or as Nandor notes in my book Babylon, 'We humans think that we can own the planet, as if fleas could own a dog. Our concepts of property ownership are vastly different from traditional practises of recognising use rights over various resources. A right to grow or gather food or other resources in a particular place is about meeting needs. Property ownership is about the ability to live on one side of the world and speculate on resources on the other, possibly without ever seeing it, without regard to need or consequence.'

See you at the lse perhaps tomorrow night or on saturday's climate change march.