I have been hearing more of my environmentalist friends mention that the monetary and banking systems are driving a metacrisis, where nearly everything is getting worse, nearly everywhere. Like me, they have come to realise that by incentivising endless commodification, debt, and growth, an expansionist monetary system is at the root of so much of what’s going wrong. But most of them are at a loss for what to do about it. Why? Because it’s big, vague, and hard to understand. In my case, it took years of study to feel that I could speak clearly on the subject – finally taking to the TEDx stage in 2011. In the years since then, I met many environmentalists who were so overwhelmed by the topic that they went back to what was familiar to them: fighting plastics, pushing for stricter deforestation laws, or calling for lower carbon footprints. All are important. But if we ignore the expansionist monetary system that drives such harms, amongst others, our situation will only get worse. That’s why it is important that more of us do the ‘hard yards’ in learning about the nature of current monetary systems, what the alternatives are, and how to enable them. That is important, whatever our current assessment on the pace of societal disruption and collapse; although a breaking of old systems can create space for the alternatives.
The mainstream still needs to wake up to money
Today, when I look at leading green groups like WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, I see that they are still focusing on what we did 20 years ago when I was head of the ‘markets and economic governance’ team at WWF-UK. For instance, they continue to criticise bank loans to oil or mining companies, but rarely mention how money itself is created.
Continue reading “Here’s how we get serious about the awful monetary system”