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Pete Seeger: Unreleased Concert Footage
In June of 2004, Pete Seeger attended the Schumacher Center's three day conference at Bard College "Local Currencies in the 21st Century," bringing with him a group of friends from his community in Beacon NY. He felt a local currency might be the answer to empowering Beacon’s regional economy.
Pete called the gathering of 350 people from 12 countries "the best conference I ever attended."
At the request of the event organizer, Chris Lindstrom, Pete agreed...
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A Parallel Grassroots Political Economy
At a seminar held in the Schumacher Center’s Berkshire Library this fall, Gar Alperovitz provocatively posed the question
"If you don't like Capitalism and you don't like Socialism, what do you want?"
The responses he received indicated both a confidence in solutions initiated by citizens working in their local economies and a distrust of purely political solutions. They also indicated that issues of appropriate scale need to be addressed, though not feared....
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Necessity and Promise
January 13th was the 11th anniversary of Bob Swann's death. Bob was a friend of economist Fritz Schumacher and inspired the Schumacher Center for a New Economics' work on local currencies and the commons. The following was written for his tribute book. It anticipates the BerkShares loan program and the Agrarian Trust.
Join us in remembering Bob.
Stirred by Necessity and Promise
by Susan Witt
Bob Swann always had a project. I first met him at...
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Coming of Age
The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is recognized for its work modeling community-based systems for holding land, issuing currency, and engaging citizens in supporting their regional economies. That work is now growing, reflecting a "coming of age" for a new economics that considers what is just and equitable for all Earth's citizens while caring for our shared ecosystem. 2013 was a great year for the Schumacher Center, with exceptional lecture events, remarkable media...
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Van Jones, Judy Wicks, and Otto Scharmer
A perceptible alchemy linked speaker to speaker, speakers to participants, and participants to each other at Saturday's 33rd Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures in New York City.
Otto Scharmer, Van Jones, and Judy Wicks outlined the emergence of new economic structures that embed social diversity, shared equity, and care for our fragile ecosystems. They described the collective consciousness leading that emergence.
Inspired and visionary, while also rooted in the...
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America Emerging: Culture and Economics
America's task among the nations is to shape a just, equitable, and ecologically responsible economy. The economic is our realm, our element. As Americans, we move in and through the economic confidently and flexibly.
Even when we have achieved financial stability we do not hesitate to recognize a new spirit, a new direction in the economic, and throw caution and convention aside to support it. Or, we sense when our economic decisions have gone awry and we pick up and...
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Lindisfarne: Conversations on Culture, Economics, Society, and Technology
In 1972 William Irwin Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association as an alternative way for the humanities to develop in a scientific and technical civilization. Lindisfarne became an association of scientists, artists, scholars, and contemplatives devoted to the study and realization of a new planetary culture.
Lindisfarne began its activities in Southampton, New York, in 1973, then moved to Manhattan in 1976, and finally in 1979 to Crestone, Colorado. Lindisfarne fellows...
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Endangered: Your Local Economy
Is there an independent bookstore, a local bike shop, or an old-fashioned camera shop in your community? If so, they need saving as urgently as the Piping Plover or Plymouth Red-Bellied Turtle. To preserve these businesses, we need to preserve their habitat—a habitat of small, locally owned enterprises, trading with one another, welcoming customers by name, paying town taxes, providing secure jobs, donating gift certificates to benefit the Little League Team, and serving on...
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Spinning for the Commons
On a shelf in the Library of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics sits a small wooden box with worn leather carrying handle—13 inches by 8 inches by 2 inches. It opens to reveal the parts of an apparatus for spinning cotton. Govindra Deshpande presented this traveling spinning wheel to Bob Swann at the "Tools for Building Sustainable Local Economies" seminar convened at Bard College in 1983 by the E. F. Schumacher Society, the predecessor of the Schumacher Center....
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Seeds of Economic Transformation
New York City’s Left Forum is the largest annual conference of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations, and interested public. This year, the Forum is exploring ways that we can confront climate change and global economic crisis by “mobilizing for economic and ecological transformation” in order to create a more equitable and ecologically resilient world. As Schumacher Society founders Bob Swann and Susan...
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Strategy for World Peace
Judy Wicks 2004 E. F. Schumacher Lecture (http://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/lectures/wicks/judy/good-m...) was about the White Dog Café and the vision and principals that inspired a locally-based business that supported other community businesses, that treated employees fairly, and that sourced materials regionally.
"Let me capsulize the local-living-economy movement for you by contrasting what it is and what it is not, what it does and what it does...
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Lessons from Basque Country
In the 1950s Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, the village priest of Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain, inspired the development of a series of cooperatively owned industries to employ youth in his parish. His vision was that, through ownership by the workers, the wealth created by new industries would be distributed to the workers and to the larger community that nourished and supported them.
In February we visited the region with board members...
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Community Supported Industry
Identifying a Strategy
Building a responsible movement for a new economy will require planning how to create new jobs without increased growth. One approach is a strategy of import-replacement, with more labor intensive, smaller batch production, transported over shorter distances. The goal would be to create more jobs, but not more "stuff," with a smaller carbon footprint overall. This may be an ambitious objective, but it is necessary if we are to transition to an...
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New Economy Emerging
In September of 2011 the European Spirituality in Economics and Society Forum convened "Responsibility in Economics and Business: The Legacy of E. F. Schumacher" in Antwerp, Belgium—one of many events marking the Centennial of Schumacher's birth. We have posted keynote talks by Simon Trace, Barbara Wood, Susan Witt, and Stewart Wallis at our website: centerforneweconomics.org/schumacher
SIMON TRACE, Executive Director of Practical Action, spoke on "...
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A Gift of Intellectual Capital
On Saturday we received a copy of a letter from one of our members to his grandson. The twenty-two year old had just left college to join an Occupy group full time. The grandfather wrote:
"Dear Sam, I think the various Occupy Wall Street groups have been effective in highlighting an unjust condition. I was wondering what actions they might recommend when I received the enclosed booklet in the mail from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. I believe...
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Ensuring a Strong Voice for Change
Our members helped build a voice for economic change.
Past membership support of the E. F. Schumacher Society, a small organization founded in 1980, allowed it to develop a solid theoretical and practical base of work, positioning it to offer positive solutions when the need for change became broadly apparent.
That time has come.
The deepening environmental crisis is now recognized as an economic crisis. Widening social discrepancies are seen as a...
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Initiating Dialogue on Complex Economic Issues
October 28, 2011
Last week, the staff at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics’s New York City office returned to Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street has been based for over a month. We brought a selection of the thirty years of E. F. Schumacher Lecture pamphlets to contribute to the growing OWS library on new economic issues. And we had a chance to speak with participants.
As occupations spread across the country and world, those following...
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Quietly Building Momentum for a New Economy
In June 2011 Gar Alperovitz wrote: “as citizen uprisings from Tunisia to Madison remind us, judgments that serious change cannot take place often miss the quiet buildup of potentially explosive underlying currents…there are reasons to think that new economy efforts have the capacity to gather momentum as time goes on.”
As Occupy Wall Street enters its fifth week, inspiring protests from Charlotte to London and captivating audiences across the world, the...
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Celebrating Centenary/Honoring Legacy
August 16th is the 100th Anniversary of E. F. Schumacher's birth. Together with his family and other organizations around the world (www.ef-schumacher.org), we are celebrating his legacy.
Posted online at centerforneweconomics.org/schumacher are:
1. Our favorite quotes from his 1973 book "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered;"
2. Multiple translations of the universally favorite essay "Buddhist Economics;"
3. Barbara Wood...
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Defining, Demanding & Organizing
In a recent issue of "The Nation" (www.thenation.com), Gar Alperovitz, describes the growing movement for a new economy (see text below). His optimism about the future, generated by this movement and its possibilities, has landed him on talk shows to explain (see truthout.org for example).
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The New-economy movement
A growing group of activists and socially responsible companies are...
