Thursday, March 18, 2021: Rising to the occasion for our collective personal and planetary health: Understanding the Transition towards Business as if People Mattered: Ecologic Economics as if People Mattered: Economic Localization

Countries around the world are fixated on growing their economies – but is growth doing more harm than good? In this episode, Richard Heinberg discusses the history behind how GDP growth came to be used as a measure of success, why GDP can’t continue growing indefinitely, and why it’s time to transition to a better metric – one that better reflects human and ecological well-being.

The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide. Yet it is an almost unavoidable consequence of de-regulatory ‘free trade’ agreements and the billions of dollars in supports and subsidies – many of them hidden – that prop up the global economy.

To raise awareness about this issue, we’ve produced a short film and a fully-referenced factsheet that helps to explain how and why ‘insane trade’ happens:

Why local ownership matters:

In this episode, Local Bites interviews Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance to talk about the multiple social, economic and environmental benefits of local business ownership and community-scaled financial institutions. Mitchell lays out the evidence for why local ownership matters, and provides a thorough debunking of the idea that large, global corporations are more efficient or create more jobs than smaller-scale, community-rooted enterprises. After warning listeners about the growing consolidation of economic power in the hands of fewer and fewer global corporations, Mitchell exposes the policy decisions that have led to such concentrated ownership. She concludes by highlighting several promising initiatives from the growing localization movement, and articulating the key components of a ‘localist policy agenda’.n this extended episode, Local Bites interviews scholar/activist, Ashish Kothari about his book, Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, co-authored by Aseem Shrivastava. During the first half of the interview, Kothari provides a truly sobering account of the social and environmental impacts of globalized development in India, arguing persuasively that the costs far outweigh the benefits, and calling into questions a number of taken-for-granted assumptions about “economic growth”, “progress”, and the so-called inevitability of urbanization.

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