I also like the question of what I/we can do.
What is a real prerequisite is a "burning business issue".
Seems that those critters pop up in our suburban neighborhood for
decades and have always brought people together with ensuing action.
Two examples:
---In the early nineties of the last century a movement of sorts started
springing up around our neighborhood based on gardening, not burning
clippings, recycling bio-stuff. One aspect was to get a first class, low
noise emission, non polluting shredder. Turns out they cost about 2000
dollars. A small "coop" of 9 neighbors formed to buy one. One neighbor
provided space in his garage for storage. This machine was and is a hit
till this day. When it breaks down, rarely, the person using it at that
time takes care of fixing it and splitting the cost by 9 and collecting
the expenses from the others.
This gadget in a strange way, created a lot of social interaction:
chats, stories, come look what I did with my shreddered stuff, oh here I
got this grand plant/want one for your garden, homemade jam from garden
berries and fruit started to be given as gifts... people visited each
other, differently abled and older neighbors got a hand.
And none of us could have easily afforded an expensive machine like
that. We all became, economically speaking, richer.
---Four years ago the city of Berlin changed the rules for sweeping
sidewalks in the winter, making homeowners personally responsible for
damages even if they had engaged a professional service. People in our
neighborhood got together and started discussing on how we could band
up... well, we did buy, coop-style, a 3000 dollar gas-engine driven
snow-plough (very small! the sidewalks here are barely 1 to 1,5 m wide).
Eight families joined, one neighbor offered garage space (the others
exempted him from contributing gasoline for the gadget). We decided to
make no rules regarding the usage but just to experiment. This was a
great success. The sidewalks need to be cleared by 7am. Seems that
people were anxious to get out that early, often joined by kids before
they went off for school. And it turned out that the machine caused
addiction (it is beautifully painted a bright red), folks would not just
do their own sidewalk but once they started it just sweept all 9
sections (the ninth family with a blind neighbor who originally
hesitated joined later). The 5 liter gas container is filled up by
neighbors in rotation.
This gadget brough the 9 adjoining families together in an additionally
intensive way which led to an annual summer gathering of all 50 families
in the two streets that make up our neighborhood, a yearly open-our
gardens for the neighbors, a loosely knit "could you mind my kid for an
hour while I go shopping" activity...
Economically, this has made all of us richer, too.
What does this have to do with banks, alternatives to money, opening
space for more community, getting out into the fresh air, having fun
with the neighbors, kids roaming through all our gardens ("can I use the
swing", "we need an egg"....)???
Its very simple not always easy and a grand learning experience.
Greetings from Berlin
mmp
On 23.04.2013 02:56, Raffi Aftandelian wrote:
Kerry,
Thanks for sharing those other links to Eisenstein. I'm also enjoying listening
to his earlier book, Ascent of Humanity (which of course is freely available as
an e-book and as audio).
As for what we can do-
I think that is a great question.
Part of it for me is simply learning to live in a more interconnected way.
To paraphrase Thic Nhat Hanh-
i am the unjustly foreclosed upon worker
andthe "bankster."
Also, I think it
is about starting to apply some of the ideas in the book (none of which, as
Eisenstein acknowledges, are new anyway) like Gift Circles.
Incidentally, Eisenstein references Alpha Lo as someone who is active with Gift
Circles, and I had the good fortune of meeting him at the San Francisco 2008
WOSonOS...
One thing I've resolved to do is hold a monthly gift circle where I live. I
held my birthday last month as a gift circle- and it was wonderful! It took
some courage to do a birthday a little differently...but it was really
beautiful.
Will that change the world? i don't know. Will it make the world more just?
good question.
For me, holding the gift circle was about opening a little space.
That said- for a gift circle to truly be powerful, we must really
need each other. And our lives are often set up so that we are pretty darn
separate. As eisentein posits, since we don't reallyneed each other, community
doesn't really happen.
that said, i see value in gathering in a circle like this....
Part of the positive story I hear in Sacred Economics is that this "Age of Separation" is
ending whether we like it or not- the process of the shift, though, can be rather bumpy...So, this
old system- including this financial system with "banksters," he seems to suggest will
just collapse.
my two kopecks/rials/drams,
greetings from this southwest corner of continental obamastan,
raffi
p.s. i've also enjoyed this three hour chris hedges interview given on cspan
early last yearhttp://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/303072-1 I'v shared it with
a lot of people (especially those who were seriously contemplating voting for
Obama in the '12 election) While I share a lot of the criticism and can look
past the critical/negative tone, I think the worldview he is operating from is
a limiting one.
Dear Listers
Thanks Raffi for introducing SACRED ECONOMICS.
If we can find a way to get rid of money by reinventing the way we exist,
the banksters will disappear along with all the greedy and selfish people
who have accumulated the world's riches on the backs of others through the
shibboleth of globalisation. There is something disastrously wrong when
the three richest people have more wealth than the poorest 48 countries in
the world. How did 0.5% of the population amass 38% of the world's wealth
when 68% of the population have only 4.2%?
How can capitalism, which depends on consumption economics to create more
and more growth, continue when the earth's resources are finite and the
environment is ravaged to produce yet more wealth for the few. In our
hearts we know the old system is bankrupt and corrupt, so something must
change. Eisenstein's book is one attempt to look at what the transition
might involve.
For some years I have believed there is another way we can move away from
production and consumption of quantity by focusing on quality, making and
doing things that last and allow people to feel good without using more and
more precious resources.
Do you have any thoughts?
More specifically, does Open Space have a role to play here? How do we get
from Bruce opening space from his park bench in deep winter to transforming
the world?
Peace
Kerry
Edinburgh
******
"The truism that we reap only what we sow only goes back as far as
agriculture. Before then, we could reap without sowing: nature
was fundamentally provident. For the hunter-gatherer,
the providence of nature requires little labor or planning, but only
an understanding of nature’s patterns. Primitive survival is a
matter of intimacy and not control.."
-- Charles Eisenstein, Ascent of Humanity
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