Would you rather…?

Another day, another climate talk – Part 2 It’s 3.45 in the morning and I’m awake.  Outside I can hear the rain, the incessant rain. Was it the rain that woke me? Yesterday, on my way home I saw the river had broken its banks again. I’d been visiting a friend who was about to…

No more business as usual – Rethinking economic value for a post-Covid world

“No economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.” –   Manfred Max-Neef, Chilean economist, 1932 -2019 A national conversation has begun which is alarming, yet also familiar. It talks about costs and trade-offs, losses and accounts. It is a conversation about human lives framed in the language of economics. A recent…

Six Steps back to the Land

In Britain, over 20% of us are now considered obese, 40 % of our food is imported (with serious implications for food security and sovereignty), youth unemployment is at 14.4% and social isolation is on the increase. What bright idea might offer a solution to these seemingly unrelated issues? The answer according to Colin Tudge,…

Regarding the Land

“What I stand for is what I stand on.” ― Wendell Berry Several years ago I was invited to work on a ‘Soil and Story’ project for the Soil Association.  It was a wonderful opportunity to do some research into different cultural approaches to soil and earth. Now that I am in the process of…

From Dismal Science to Language of Beauty

Towards a New Story of Economics Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and…

Bridging the divide

“We can’t change anything until we get some fresh ideas, until we begin to see things differently. My goal is to create a therapy of ideas, to try to bring in new ideas so that we can see the same old problems differently.” James Hillman Sometimes it would seem that those of us working for…

Drawing circles

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are things in this world I would like to draw a circle around. Things, or more accurately experiences, that I value so much that I want a special place for them, somewhere safe where they cannot be touched by what we so quaintly refer to as ‘the market’. Experiences such as beauty, love and freedom.