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Local Currency: The Totnes Pound

8 Mar

I was leafing through Rob Hopkins’ Transition Handbook (thanks! CK) and came across a discussion of the Totnes Pound, local currency established in Totnes, UK, the first town to undertake the Transition. But you don’t have to have the handbook to read about it. You can google it and finds lots of stuff on the web.

And, of course, the Transition Town Totnes has its own write-up. According to that write-up, they started the Totnes Pound in 2007:

  • To build resilience in the local economy by keeping money circulating in the community and building new relationships
  • To get people thinking and talking about how they spend their money
  • To encourage more local trade and thus reduce food and trade miles
  • To encourage tourists to use local businesses

The basic idea is simple: “Totnes Pounds enter circulation when people choose to exchange their sterling currency into Totnes pounds at one of four places around Totnes. At present the exchange rate is 1TP for £1.” People can then use the Totnes Pounds at local businesses that accept them (roughly 70).

Such local currency does well during a recession:

As the country heads into recession the benefits of local currencies can really be felt. Keeping money within the community becomes even more important at making the local economy resilient. Most local currencies around the world have been successful mainly in times of wider economic recession. Here in Totnes we are lucky to have an established local currency already in place, making us well prepared for the difficult economic times unfolding.

Check it out. Nothing like your own local currency to create a sense of local sufficiency.

EDIT: Here’s a link to local currency they’ve been using in the Berkshires (USA) for a few years. It’s called BerkShares.

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Mauritius in Transition?

7 Mar

Mauritius is a small island nation off the east coast of Africa with a population of 1.3 million. With no exploitable natural resources, the smart money would have bet against Maritius when it became independent of Britain in 1968. The smart money would have been wrong. At the time of independence it had a per capita income of $400; now it’s $6,700 and the country has 87% home owndership, compared to 79% in the USA, home of the meltdown. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited, Mauritius provides “free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for school children, and free health care – including heart surgery – for all.”

They must know something the USofA doesn’t.

& maybe they’re not as deeply mired in the ways of a world that’s gone forever.

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Now's the Time, the Lakeville Story

24 Feb
imperfect beauty

Imperfect Beauty, How Gorgeous!

A Letter from Charlie

The Great Transition is being made as we speak. In Lakeville, Connecticut the Great Transition to sustainability, permacultures, resilience in everything that matters (highest standards of humor, musicality, plenty of mighty trees to admire, excess energy in the local grid, etc,) has been ongoing for over a century!

150 years ago all the trees had been turned to charcoal for local iron making furnaces (and then the first Bessemer steel?), smoke, soot, grey skies everywhere, desolation, fires burning 24-7 in the hills making the last piles of charcoal. Then it went to Pittsburgh and Lakevillians began to make a long, slow, recovery that has culminated in recent decades with the reappearance of all the animals, pileated woodpeckers, too many geese, too many turkeys, too many deer, bear, a moose came through our yard a few weeks after my father died and took a swim in Lakeville’s lake. We have a sawmill in Falls Village, for local timber. My wife Angie calls them Potempkin forests but they are real enough, old growth enough, for those giant pileated woodpeckers.

We just need to tap the streams with “small hydro” put up some old fashioned windmills, use the “factory brook” again, inventory and expand orchards, greenhouses, permaculture some stands of nut trees. We can be an exemplary “transition town” very quickly because we have been in recovery from Western civilization since before the early 1900s.

As it got prettier in mid 20th century Wanda Landowska, the world’s best harpsichordist came to live here. And so did the world’s most productive writer, eventually the world’s most profitable writer, Georges Simenon, spent the 5 happiest years of his life here. We’ve been chock full of well-being pace setters since the 1950s. More recently the reincarnation of Tromboncino gave us a lakeside recital.

And so it goes in Lakeville, once known as Furnace Village, and now an emerging leader of The Great Transition.

If a town of less than 2000 people, most big houses empty most of the year, can do it, then so can your town, neighborhood, or block of a city.

Peace, Charlie

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The Great Transition and the Seven-Fold Way

21 Feb

Q. How do we get there from here?
A. One step at a time. And keep your eyes on the prize.

The New Economic Foundation is calling for and envisioning a new KIND of economy, one based on “stability, sustainability and equality.” Citizen-activists can guide and drive the Great Transition to this new world through a seven-fold way:

•    Great Revaluing
•    Great Redistribution
•    Great Rebalancing
•    Great Localisation
•    Great Reskilling
•    Great Economic Irrigation
•    Great Interdependence (aka InterdepenDANCE)

We start by making “social and environmental value . . . the central goal of policy making”: the Great Revaluing. Both private and public decision making must take full accounting of things we make: “We need to make ‘good’ things cheap and ‘bad’ things very expensive.”

In the Great Redistribution we can fund modest Citizens’ Endowments and Community Endowments through an increased inheritance tax. Working hours and tasks need to changed so as to “create a better balance between paid work and the vital ‘core economy’ of family, friends and community life.” And company shares can be gradually “transferred to employees in a resurgence of mutual and co-operative ownership forms.”

The market sphere “needs to be more tightly drawn and rebalanced alongside the public sphere and the ‘core economy’– our ability to care, teach, learn, empathize, protest and the social networks these capacities create”: the Great Rebalancing. A facilitating state will work with citizens to produce well-being in health and education.

Continue reading →

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The American Economy is Grinding to a Halt

7 Feb

Richard Heinberg is posting drafts from his new book in progress, The End of Growth (New Society Publishers). “The Sound of Air Escaping” explains why the American economy is grinding to a halt, with little chance of continuing forward on its present path. He observes:

During the 1930s, industrialized countries were in the early stages of their shift from an agrarian coal-based rural economy to an electrified, oil-based, urban economy—a shift that required enormous infrastructure investments (in new highways, airports, dams, and power lines) that would ultimately pay off handsomely for a nation on the verge of realizing a consumer utopia. All that was needed to initiate the building of that infrastructure was credit—grease for the wheels of commerce. Government got those wheels rolling by taking on debt, with private companies increasingly taking up the lead after World War II. The expansion that occurred from the 1950s through 2000, as that infrastructure was built out and put to use, easily justified the government pump-priming that initiated the process. Interest payments on the government debt could be paid through growth of the tax base.

Now is different. … both the U.S. and the world as a whole have passed a fundamental crossroads characterized by increasing scarcity of energy and crucial minerals. Because of this, strategies of growth that worked spectacularly well in the mid-to-late 20th century—via various forms of business and technological development—have reached a point of diminishing returns.

He concludes:

If the Keynesian remedy doesn’t cure the ailment but merely extends the suffering (while increasing government debt to truly toxic levels), the medicine of austerity may have such severe side effects that it could kill the patient outright. Both sides—left and right, the socialists and free-marketers—assume and hope to the point of desperation that their prescription will result in a rapid return to continuous economic growth and low unemployment. … that hope is futile.

There is no “silver bullet,” no magic solution that will turn back the clock to an era of abundant resources and easy growth. For now, all that governments can do is buy time through further deficit spending—ideally, using that time to build infrastructure that will continue to function in the coming era of reduced flows of energy and resources. Meanwhile, we must all find ways to come out from under a burden of debt that will otherwise crush us. The inherent contradiction within this prescription is obvious but unavoidable.

The entire chapter is online as MuseLetter #224; you can also download a PDF (214 KB).

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Walk Like an Egyptian: Protest the Fat Cats

4 Feb

Writing in The Nation, Johann Hari spells out this fantasy:

Imagine a parallel universe where the Great Crash of 2008 was followed by a Tea Party of a very different kind. Enraged citizens gather in every city, week after week—to demand the government finally regulate the behavior of corporations and the superrich, and force them to start paying taxes. The protesters shut down the shops and offices of the companies that have most aggressively ripped off the country. The swelling movement is made up of everyone from teenagers to pensioners. They surround branches of the banks that caused this crash and force them to close, with banners saying, You Caused This Crisis. Now YOU Pay.

And he goes on to point out that it has happened:

This may sound like a fantasy—but it has all happened. The name of this parallel universe is Britain. As recently as this past fall, people here were asking the same questions liberal Americans have been glumly contemplating: Why is everyone being so passive? Why are we letting ourselves be ripped off? Why are people staying in their homes watching their flat-screens while our politicians strip away services so they can fatten the superrich even more?

And so a dozen British citizens decided to start protesting against Vodaphone, which had managed to to gull the government into forgiving £5 billion in taxes:

That first protest grabbed a little media attention—and then the next day, in a different city, three other Vodafone stores were shut down in the northern city of Leeds, by unconnected protests. UK Uncut realized this could be replicated across the country. So the group set up a Twitter account and a website, where members announced there would be a national day of protest the following Saturday. They urged anybody who wanted to organize a protest to e-mail them so it could be added to a Google map. Britain’s most prominent tweeters, such as actor Stephen Fry, joined in.

Could this happen in the USofA?

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Peak Oil and Financial Decline

1 Feb

The Nation has posted a video by James Howard Kunstler on Peak Oil and Our Financial Decline:

From the description of the video:

Kunstler suggests that “cheap abundant energy” has facilitated ever-increasing industrialization for centuries. But now that society is in a period of self-destructive capital accumulation, he expects debt to increase as abundance in energy drops. The tremendous amount of accumulated debt, “a by-product of cheap abundant energy,” will mean that in the future governments will be less able to make investments in socially-beneficial programs.

He also criticizes the US environmental movement for shying away from the problem of energy. The movement is unable to talk about walkable neighborhoods, smaller cities or investing in rail or water transit,  an “intellectual failure of the culture to have a coherent conversation from people who ought to be leading” such a conversation.

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