Two weekends ago, my friend Catie and I rose early, hopped in the car, and hit the road. Along the way we picked up two guys who contacted me via a rideshare post on Craigslist. Our destination? The Twenty-Ninth Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures in Stockbridge, Massachussetts. The Schumacher Society’s mission is to promote the building of strong local economies that link people, land, and community. Each of the three guest speakers approached the topic from a unique lens.

Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and The End of Nature, spoke about his work organizing the international day of climate action [see previous post about McKibben's organization, 350.org]. Listen to his talk here.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber discussed public vs. private choices and our roles as citizens vs. consumers. His talk deeply resonated with me. Listen to it here and read a poignant text excerpt of his talk here.

Alisa Gravitz, executive director of Green America, was last to present. By the end of her talk I felt empowered and hopeful that our country can reach an 80-90% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2020. She maintained that we need to induce a shift to a culture of thrift rather than extolling spending on newly manufactured goods. Amen! Thrift and finding use for what might otherwise be treated as waste has been a large part of my life work throughout the past year. Listen here.

Links: Check out Bill McKibben, Benjamin Barber, and Alisa Gravitz’s websites.

“Wal-Mart’s a great deal. As a private consumer you have to like it. But here’s the problem: there are hidden public costs in every private decision you make as a consumer. And when you go to Mason City, Iowa – my family is from there – they’ll say it’s really too bad. Mason city used to have a lovely little down town. Retail shops, mom and pop stores, a movie theater. That’s all gone now. Boarded up. Whatever happened to it? Wal-Mart happened to it. Every time you shop at Wal-Mart, you are condemning another American town between 5,000 and 50,000 to a quick death. You are undermining the social capital of America. You are undoing what Bill [McKibben] was talking about, those habits that we have. Those habits are also the result of how we live. When we live in communities – people love living in New England, in Stockbridge [Mass] and Connecticut, cause there’s wonderful towns. But [such places] exist in part because we’ve kept out the big boys and when we don’t, they go under. Pittsfield [Mass] has been struggling now for 30 years. When I was a kid here in the fifties, Pittsfield was a great place. Vital exactly the way Great Barrington is today. But no more. It’s not just that GE left; they put in the mall. The minute that mall was there the little stores all started closing down, then Pittsfield went under, then people said ‘oh dear, terrible, what happened?’ We made a choice with our public licensing to allow a big box mall up there and that helped destroy Pittsfield, undermined community, and created all the kinds of problems that today we face. So there again is another private consumer choice that makes a lot of sense at the expense of social of consequences. Economists have a wonderful word for that: they’re called externalities. They’re not external, they’re internal to everything that happens in our society. ‘The interstate highway system was a great choice, it did have some externalities.’ Like it destroyed our cities, it destroyed or families, it destroyed our communities, but those are externalities; it’s an economic decision, it made a lot of sense, it was rational. And you can replicate this again and again in looking at the kind of decisions we make as consumers. As consumers we make a whole series of decisions that make all the sense in the world for us in terms of our personal needs, but make no sense in terms of the public cost, the social cost. Warming is social cost of all the private consumer decisions that we make. But it doesn’t get reckoned in to the price. A lot of people say ‘it’s too expensive to deal with warming,’ as if there weren’t social costs built in to warming that are far more expensive. But those aren’t calculated… The economics of living in a country where people see themselves as consumers and not citizens when they make private choices without thinking about the social consequences of those choices is part of what’s wrong and part of what makes it so hard for our congressmen and president to make the wise decisions that, as Bill McKibben says, ’science dictates,’ but which make no sense politically in a world where all the social costs are called externalities and all the things that we pay for have costs that don’t reckon in those externalities; so it makes it seems cheap. Gas obviously seems cheap even now at $2.50 a gallon, amazingly so. But were you to reckon in the externalities fossil fuel would become absolutely uncompetitive with the most expensive forms of alternative energy. But for that we need a metric. A new way of measuring what something really costs. We need citizens and politicians to understand that. And that to me in some ways is a more realistic way to go. So privatization is a very large part of this… So what we need to begin to think about is how we get to a world in which not consumers but citizens are making choices. Where we understand the public consequences, the public costs of our private choices. If I’m looking for one villain behind all this, privatization, the notion that markets do everything; it’s not that markets don’t do a lot of things more efficiently than the state – it’s thats the privatized thinking, the consumerist thinking behind markets is deadly to public goods and pubic interests.” -Benjamin Barber, E.F. Schumacher Lectures, October 2009

On Saturday, October 24, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s [her]story. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis. -350.org

Why 350? Scientists say that 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere is the safe limit for humanity. Right now we’re at 390. And for all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. read more about the science here…

On Saturday afternoon I hopped on my bike and rode to the “Boston Underwater” 350 Celebration.