Earning, financial security and climate change

A few years ago I looked up from my well paid research job and thought “if I really believe that the world is facing serious limits, is this the work I should be doing?”  The answer to my question was essentially, ‘No.” And as I thought about it more, I realised there were a number of reasons why I should take the plunge and leave my well paid, regular job and start working in the alternative economy. 

First, high incomes lead to high consumption. People with high incomes can travel and consume whatever they like.  They tend to have large houses and all the things that go with it.  With spare money, one ends up investing – even if only be doing it via the bank.  The best I could do would be to give money away and so, in the end, I decided the best course of action was to do the giving by giving my time and skills.

Second, I realised that we have a kind of weird belief in our economic system which really only exists in our collective mind and a few computers that are controlled by us.  On top of that, like any Ponzi scheme, the system requires endless growth and is simply not sustainable.  If the money system collapses, it will cause all sorts of problems if we don’t have other ways of exchanging our skills and goods.

If you think about it, this is pretty weird because, as Charles Eisenstein points out in Sacred Economics, we will still have all the skills and means of production that we do now.  We will only have lost our means of exchange.   Strong community underlies the operation of things like time banks, generosity and reciprocity, which provide different but effective ways to effect that exchange that we need to survive and even flourish.

Third, we are reaching environmental limits and our climate is changing as the planet heats up.  There will be shortages of all sorts of things. It seems very likely that people will be unable to live the kinds of lives they have been used to.  I’m a social scientist and it is clear to me that we can go one of two ways when this happens.  We can pull together and do what is best for all of us, or we can fall apart and become violent and competitive, so a few of us get more.  We have seen both of these things happen in countries where environmental limits have come into play.   I’d rather the former happened at my place and I want to do everything in my power to make that more likely.  Building community, and helping people get to know each other, and conversant with alternative means of trade and exchange, is my way of doing that.