Seven Reasons for Hope in Our Troubled World

Some 75th Anniversary Reflections

By Guy Dauncey

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will

Listen here: Sam Cooke

To the left of me, to the right of me, in front and behind, I see people giving up on the belief that we can change the world. 

Saying awful things about humanity, fearing awful things about the climate crisis, feeling awful things about the future. Feeling panic. Feeling trapped. Good people, kind people, thoughtful people, drowning under all the bad news. Just can’t see a way forward. Concluding that it’s all too late.

It’s an easy case to make. Just combine Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, the ever-worsening climate catastrophe, the collapse of nature, the multi-billion profits being made by oil companies and other selfish ruthless corporations, the struggles of ordinary folk to pay their bills, the smugness of the billionaires as they avoid paying their taxes. Throw in the struggles of the migrating refugees, the food crisis that has put hunger back in people’s bellies, the attacks on democracy by ignorant people who think they understand it all. It doesn’t take much to feel discouraged.

Yet here I am, at my 75th birthday, still believing with all my heart, soul and mind that the moral arc of the Universe bends towards justice, towards reconciliation with nature, towards kindness with our fellow humans, and yes, towards wisdom. I love this world so much, and the amazing life it gives us. This doesn’t come from the thoughts in my head. It comes from life itself, that beats within me. So let me share seven reasons why I continue to feel positive, no matter how bad things are. 

1: The Achievements of our Ancestors

I love history. I hope that when I reach the end in that big white bed I’ll still be enjoying it. My hope doesn’t come from the myriad awful things our ancestors have done. It comes from the amazing things: 

  • From their persistent commitment to kindness, which has allowed most children to grow up knowing love, and being able to pass it on. 
  • From their commitment to cooperation, which has kept alive the practice of mutual care and its modern expression in a million non-profits, in the welfare state, in non-dogmatic religious congregations, and in the many institutions of the emerging cooperative economy. 
  • From their commitment to political struggle, and their determination to challenge the power and privilege of elites, forcing open the doors of democracy and social justice. 
  • From their commitment to human rights, mobilizing through endless meetings to win rights for workers, for women, for Jews, for Blacks, for immigrants, for gay people, for people with disabilities, for children. 
  • From their commitment to confront and oppose the thousand cruelties and injustices that have been imposed on people by colonialism, racism, caste, fascism, and Nazism.
  • From their commitment to free enquiry. By discarding superstitions and throwing wide open the doors of science they have enabled us to begin learning the secrets of the Universe. If you doubt this, then give up your cellphone, your TV, your car, your washing machine, your antibiotics, your anaesthetics, your overseas holidays, your freedom from oppression by nonsense and superstition.

Our ancestors worked so hard to achieve so much, and most people’s lives today are so much the better for it, in spite of our many challenges. If you doubt this, pick up a history book. If we turn our backs on their achievements, we are saying in effect that their efforts and their sacrifices don’t matter.

2: The Many Glorious Movements for Social Change

My second source of hope – and pride  – comes from the work that engages so many people in the many glorious movements for social change. If you are not in one of these movements, you may not know they are happening. Your despair, perhaps even your cynicism, may be grounded in not-knowing. 

If you are in one of these movements, on the other hand, whether it is the movement for gun control, for climate action, for women’s rights, for democracy, for prison and criminal law reform, for animal rights, for the protection of nature, for affordable housing, for Indigenous rights, for Black Lives Matter, for a living wage, for the education of girls, for #MeToo, for LGBTQIA+ rights, for disability rights, for global justice, for the success of a progressive political party, or any one of fifty other causes, you know how determined their members are. 

If you are watching your favorite sports team play and they are behind in the final period, you can be optimistic or pessimistic, for you have no control over the outcome. If you are a player, these thoughts are irrelevant. You have only two choices – to be determined or to be defeated, and if it’s the latter, your coach will hopefully replace you. If you are a player, you do whatever you can, however small your resources. 

Every day, we wake up to learn about some new awful thing that has happened in the world. And yes, I know how much grief, death and disaster the climate catastrophe will continue to deliver. My defense against depression or anxiety is action. I don’t need to do everything. I just need to know that I am doing whatever I can, through my work in the West Coast Climate Action Network, my new book, and other activities. 

3: Cooperation and Kindness

My third source of hope comes from knowing that most people want to live by values of cooperation and kindness, not by selfish values of status and self-importance. In 2015, when the Common Cause Foundation in Britain surveyed people, 74% said they wanted to live by compassionate values, regardless of age, gender, religion, or political preference, while 26% preferred status values. For 300,000 years or more, our hunter-gatherer ancestors emphasized mutual kindness and cooperation, going out of their way to suppress selfishness and self-importance. It’s in our blood, and our genes. We can do it again.

A team from Harvard created an Intergenerational Goods Game which came up with a similar result. When they put people in groups and gave them resources they could share across future generations, 68% chose to sacrifice profit so that future generations could benefit, while 32% took the profit, ignoring future generations. Most people want to live with kindness and cooperation. Even when they feel hopeless, deep down they have compassion for other people, and hopefully for nature too.

I share Bernie Sanders’ belief, whose book It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism I am currently reading, that, “very deep in the souls of most people is a desire to be a part of their community, and to contribute to its well-being.” Clearly, things can go askew when people face severe adversity, as they did in Germany in 1933, when six million people were unemployed and people flocked to the Nazi party, setting off one of humanity’s worst self-inflicted disasters. If we allow the billionaires and their political buddies to have their selfish ways for much longer, the impulse towards fascism will become stronger, which is why we need to achieve the things that will neutralize the impulse: economic democracy and rights, full employment, decent wages for all, and the economic security that comes with a proper welfare state.

4: An Inspiring Cohesive Vision

My fourth source of hope lies in my belief that somewhere out there, somewhere in the pregnancy of the future, is a luminous call that will inspire us to unite in a huge citizens movement, proclaiming: 

We need a new economy!

We need a new social contract!

We need a new ecological civilization!

We need to make this happen – NOW!”

I work in the realms of social, economic and environmental change, and I have no trouble listing policies and changes that could unite millions. To express this hope, I have just finished writing The Economics of Kindness: 247 Ways to End the Economics of Selfishness and Build an Economy that Works for All, for which I am now seeking an agent, or a publisher. Around the world, millions of people are busy building a new economy that expresses kindness and cooperation. It’s only a matter of time before our work coalesces into a cohesive vision that is not capitalist, and not socialist in the negative way most people think of socialism, but cooperative. The market economy itself is cooperative, if you strip it of the abuses excused in its name by greedy corporations and individuals. For kindness to win, we must resist the tendency to self-importance wherever it shows up, since it is the gateway drug to domination and abuse. 

5: The Power of Compassionate Agency

My fifth source of hope is personal. It is the knowledge that I have agency – that I can choose to make things happen. I have used it to work with others to start several non-profits, most recently the West Coast Climate Action Network. This is, admittedly, a two-edged sword, for a million bullies and thuggish CEOs have similar agency. In addition to agency we need compassion, so that we use our agency to heal wounds, not to cause them. 

The creativity of compassionate agency can be very powerful. The people of Finland, when they faced being swallowed by Russia in 1899, formed the Pellervo Society, dedicated to spreading cooperative enterprise. By 1909 they had formed 1,800 cooperatives, and Finland today is the most cooperative economy in the world. In India, in 1974, when villagers in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas saw that their forest was about to be logged, they linked arms around the trees, launching the Chipkomovement, and winning control of their forests from the hands of distant bureaucrats. In Europe, in 2022, Greenpeace dropped boulders onto the floor of English Channel to stop industrial trawlers from destroying all with their metal-toothed nets in their selfish quest for profit. The only limits to compassionate agency are limits of courage and imagination.

6: Science, Spirit, and Syntropy

My sixth source of hope is scientific. The Universe is almost fourteen billion years old. During that time, something inspired sparkles of stardust to form molecules, molecules to form organisms, and organisms to create an explosion of living beauty. Evolution has generated a steadily increasing organizational complexity within life. Most scientists, who hold that the universe is a strictly material phenomenon, believe that this all happened by chance. When you ask them about consciousness, however, which is the origin of agency, they twiddle their thumbs and look at the floor. 

I believe that there is more than entropy at work in the Universe. I believe there is a balancing principle called syntropy – a cooperative, self-organizational tendency that operates through consciousness, which I believe to be pervasive throughout all being. It is syntropy which generates the drive to create order and to seek new possibilities, which causes atoms to cooperate to become molecules, couples to put in the effort to make their marriages work, and humans to devote their lives to ensuring that the climate crisis does not become a global catastrophe. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but it is also cooperative in soothe and paw. The tension between the two will probably continue forever. Which side do you want to be on? Seen through the eyes of syntropy, the felt urgency of the need for radical change has its origin in this ancient cosmic impulse. This means that my faith that good things are possible is as ancient as the Universe itself.

7: Surrender

My seventh source of hope is spiritual. When I was three our mother became very ill, and with my two sisters we were packed off to various institutions, where we spent three  months discovering the joys of full parental abandonment. At the age of eight I was packed off to a boarding school, where my nickname was ‘mouse’, because I spoke so little. I was shy, frightened, and inwardly traumatized. There followed five years of being bullied at a second boarding school, awakening my sympathy for everyone on the wrong side of abuse, and years of feeling myself to be not really worthy, not somehow as I ought to be. 

Fast forward to my late twenties, and a new wave of abandonment-grief when the woman I was living with left me very suddenly. In my grief, once I had determined that suicide was a selfish action, and not being drawn to drugs or drink, I had but one option – to surrender entirely, to let the grief wash through me as I lay collapsed on the floor, asking the Universe for help. That was when I discovered that the bottom is solid, that Life itself wants you to live. After five months, with help from friends, I picked myself up, enrolled in a program of psychosynthesis therapy, and came out the other end with my negativity banished, scattered to the winds by one powerful thought that arrived during therapy, that, “If God – the Universe – The Great Spirit – believes I am worthy,” which I believe it does, “who the f**k do I think I am to think I know better?” I have been consistently happy ever since.

I know from personal experience that the Universe is not just a material thing. It is imbued with spirit. It wants us to speak kindly to our wounds, to find healing, to enjoy the wild celebratory reality of this astonishing thing called Life. So when I say ‘surrender’, I also mean happy surrender to beauty, to Nature, and to the astonishing gift of being alive. 

*

Like all activists for social change, I experience many disappointments. I also know that a chance event can destroy your life in a moment. Just ask the 51,000 people of Eastern Turkey and Syria, who kissed each other goodnight on February 6th and woke up suddenly at 4:17am to be crushed to death, either then or several awful days later. I survived a car crash in 1973 which killed two of my friends. That was luck. 

I also acknowledge that I lucked out in the ovarian lottery. I was born into a white, privileged, well-educated English family whose lands had not been stolen (except from my Scottish ancestors in the Highland Clearances), and whose people had not been enslaved, abused, or forced into residential schools. It was my ancestors, or their fellow citizens, who did the stealing, enslaving and abusing. I also understand the challenges of depression and other forms of mental illness, which can make living such a hard, uphill task. I have also been fortunate in that when I asked the Universe to send me a partner with whom I could share my life’s journey and fulfil my life’s purpose, the Universe responded in a very hands-on tangible manner, using the Findhorn Foundation as an intermediary. That was 33 happy years ago. I am fortunate too that we live without the burden of unmanageable debt, and that we live on the right side of the housing crisis (thanks to a gay aunt), so we don’t have to be stressed by unaffordable rent and fears of eviction.

The hope that supports me is bigger than death. It will persist long after I am gone. I believe that it comes from Life itself, and the Universe that created Life. It knows the promise that lies ahead, and things of which we have no inkling. It knows that if we can say yes to kindness and to helping each other and Nature, and no to self-importance, domination and abuse, many wonderful things will come to pass. 

It is we, in this life, who have the agency, the opportunity and the responsibility to make these things happen. 

*

Guy Dauncey is an author, organizer and futurist, based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. He works to develop a positive vision of a sustainable future, and to translate that vision into action. His website is www.thepracticalutopian.ca

Seven ways to tackle inflation without raising interest rates

Corporate Knights Magazine, January 2023:

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Raising interest rates is a cruel cudgel that hurts the most vulnerable. There are other responses that governments and central banks should consider.

https://www.corporateknights.com/category-finance/seven-ways-to-tackle-inflation-without-raising-interest-rates/

Can We Solve the Farm Housing Problem?

First Published in Planning West (PIBC), Summer 2022

By Guy Dauncey PIBC (Hon); Rob Buchan Ph.D., FCIP, RPP; Jack Anderson MCIP, RPP; Heather Pritchard; Kent Mullinix Ph.D. August 2022

There’s a global food catastrophe coming our way, and we’re not ready for it. It’s being caused by a disastrous combination of climate-induced deluges, droughts and heat waves; the war in Ukraine; supply-chain disruptions; and food export bans by leaders who are worried about popular insurrections if they can’t feed their people. Meanwhile, farmers’ profit margins are being squeezed by the rising cost of fuel, fertilizer and animal feed.

Continue reading Can We Solve the Farm Housing Problem?

Looking Back to the Beginning of the Universe

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

By Guy Dauncey, August 2022

While we have been quietly growing our tomatoes, kayaking on the ocean, and working at our jobs, a team of the planet’s most brilliant people have been sending a telescope one and a half million kilometres into space.

Continue reading Looking Back to the Beginning of the Universe

The Coastal Community Credit Union Election – Who to Vote For?

I am a member of the Coastal Community Credit Union (CCCU), and there’s currently an election happening in which six people are running to fill three vacant seats. 

Under the right leadership, a credit union can make a big difference, so a credit union election is also a climate election, a local food and farming election, a green economy election, and so much more.

Who should I vote for? What questions should I be asking? What should I be thinking about? The deadline for voting is next Tuesday, March 29th, so I’ve left this rather late. Sneak peak – these are my recommended candidates:

A credit union is a financial cooperative that is owned and governed by its members. When they play an active role in choosing their Directors, amazing things can happen, as Vancity demonstrates (543,000 members, 55 branches, 2,675 employees). During 2021: 

Continue reading The Coastal Community Credit Union Election – Who to Vote For?

Hawai’i Kōnea: A Story from the Future  

Honolulu, January 16th, 2193

Click here to download this as a printable PDF:

It’s sunset, at the end of another beautiful day in Honolulu. The high tide is arguing with the seawall, which was raised another metre last year to protect the Capitol Building – but what’s new? They’re still not on good terms with each other.

My name is Ben Danner-Pualani, and tomorrow I will give the biggest speech of my life in front of all my peers. They say it will be broadcast to every schoolchild. I’m 87, and for my sins I have been granted the pomposity of being a Senator, so I’ve seen a bit, but this has the butterflies crawling all over my poor weak heart, under my great grandfather’s ancient robe.

Continue reading Hawai’i Kōnea: A Story from the Future  

Can you help me raise $25,000 for the West Coast Climate Action Network?

Dear Friends,

Throughout this year, I have been working hard to establish the West Coast Climate Action Network (WE-CAN), the biggest initiative I have ever founded. www.westcoastclimateaction.ca


The climate emergency is relentlessly real, and through WE-CAN we are supporting all of BC’s 350+ climate action groups and organizations, amplifying their messages and encouraging people to sign onto their calls for climate action.

Continue reading Can you help me raise $25,000 for the West Coast Climate Action Network?

Central Concerns

In his book, Value(s): Building a Better World for All, former governor of The Bank of England  Mark Carney,  looks at value beyond dollars and demands your attention.  Review by Guy Dauncey. First published in The MINT Magazine, September 2021.

When the world’s best-known central banker writes a new book, we should sit up and pay attention, especially since Mark Carney is one of the few central bankers who really gets the climate crisis.

It’s a quite personal book; his writing reveals a deep commitment to ethical values, and service to the wider community. He makes me feel that I know him, and we’d get along well over a pint of beer. He often shares stories from his time at the Bank of England, and as chair of the Financial Stability Board, which was set up after the 2008 financial crash, resulting in over 100 reforms. Will they work? Time will tell.

Continue reading Central Concerns

Transforming Education – Ten Big Steps

By Guy Dauncey

For those who understand, it’s crystal clear. Our educational traditions need to be transformed from infancy to old age, to give us the skills and understanding to tackle our huge civilizational challenges: the climate crisis; the biodiversity crisis; the crisis of injustice, inequality, dominating corporations and destructive economics; and the crisis of purpose, trust and deluded populism. They intertwine, creating a tangled knot that generates cynicism, anger and despair.

The authoritarian rote learning that causes so many to dislike school and cease learning once they graduate needs to be replaced with learning that nurtures creativity, curiosity and joy, as Ken Robinson explains in the world’s most popular TED Lecture, with 69 million views. I have organized my thoughts into ten headings, and I conclude by asking how we can make change happen.

Continue reading Transforming Education – Ten Big Steps

Hamlet’s Ode to the 21st Century

To grow, or not to grow: that is the question,

Whether ’tis nobler on Earth to suffer

The filth and waste of outrageous production

Or to take arms against a toxic sea of troubles,

Continue reading Hamlet’s Ode to the 21st Century

Fifty Ways to Bring More Urgency to BC’s Climate Action Plans

For a printable PDF of this paper, click Download

“We are facing a disaster of unspoken suffering for enormous amounts of people, so please, treat the climate crisis like the acute crisis it is, and give us a future.” – Greta Thunberg

For years, Guy Dauncey has tirelessly warned of the urgency of tackling the climate crisis and provided practical ways to achieve reductions in our emissions.  While the crisis has only worsened, the window of opportunity to shift direction has shortened.  Here is a blueprint for concrete action.  Read it and act! – David Suzuki

Continue reading Fifty Ways to Bring More Urgency to BC’s Climate Action Plans

Twelve Tips to Write a Great Blog

by Guy Dauncey

Have you ever been invited to write a blog, and felt intimidated? Well don’t. Here’s some advice to get you going. I wrote this for the Yellow Point Ecological Society, which is why it is full of nature references, but the advice applies to all good blogging. 

Continue reading Twelve Tips to Write a Great Blog

Who are We? Where are we Going? Some Reflections in this COVID-19 Time

123rf.com Image: Ian Iankovskii

by Guy Dauncey

First published in The Green Gazette, June 2020

Who are we? And where are we going on this tiny planet of ours, this bright sparkle of life in a Universe so ridiculously vast? It’s a question worth exploring, if you have five minutes in your busy COVID day.

Almost all scientists assume that the Universe is a solidly material realm, consisting of packages of atoms that have, by the happenstance of chance, turned themselves into polar bears and poets. We may have come from stardust, but we have no inherent direction or purpose. Where are we going? You might as well ask what a stone wants for breakfast.

Continue reading Who are We? Where are we Going? Some Reflections in this COVID-19 Time

What would it take to Build a Truly Resilient Local Food System?

My 37′ presentation to FarmFolk CityFolk’s AGM:

A New Ecological Civilization based on the Economics of Kindness

300 years ago, the Enlightenment generated an inspiring vision of scientific, technological and economic progress. What was once global ‘progress’, however, has become a climate, ecological, economic and now pandemic disaster. 

We need new inspiration.

When we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic we can’t afford

to go back to business-as-usual.

We need to build ourselves a new ecological civilization

in which we live, work and play in harmony with Nature,

with respect for all beings,

in an economy based on the economics of kindness.

Here is Guy Dauncey’s presentation during EarthFest April 2020.
https://youtu.be/ZS6n-pzanpE

When Climate Met COVID

By Guy Dauncey

We face not one but three simultaneous inter-connected crises: the COVID-19 Emergency, the Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, and the Crisis of Capitalism. We urgently need connected constructive responses. 

When you recall the movie When Harry Met Sally, your horny mind probably goes straight the scene in the delicatessen, and “I’ll have what she’s having”. Setting that aside, it took Harry and Sally a long time before they realized that they were natural partners. In my version of the story, Harry is the climate and biodiversity action movement and Sally is the COVID-19 community response movement. For each, the movement includes a wide mix of people, organizations, scientists, health workers, artists, businesses, banks and governments who have realized the urgency of their respective crises. Ideally I need a third character to represent the new economics movement, but since there was no suggestion of polyamory in the movie, I’ll settle for tradition. It would make for a great sequel, however. 

Continue reading When Climate Met COVID

Report from Davos, 2030

The Mint Magazine despatches Guy Dauncey to Switzerland, a decade into the future, to report on the global summit.

It was pouring when we arrived in Davos. The local news channels were full of complaints about how useless the artificial snow-machines were in the rain. Everyone knew the continuing climate crisis was to blame. Their glum expressions said it all.

When the invitation arrived for The Mint to send a journalist I volunteered because I wanted to see how my Tesla Raven Model 5 would manage the 1,000 km, 12-hour journey on just one recharge, ride-sharing with three others. Success. We arrived with 154 km still in the battery.

How can I describe the mood among the delegates? The world had entered the final year of the 2020s, and the steady reduction in global emissions along with the full-on engagement by China and India made many people feel optimistic. But the ongoing litany of disasters, including the massive flooding in Holland and the forest fires in the Amazon, made most still feel fearful.

Continue reading Report from Davos, 2030

15 Questions on Emergency Food and Farming Planning for British Columbia

by Guy Dauncey, March 27th 2020 Updated March 30th.

Our food chain in BC is hugely dependent on imports, making it extremely vulnerable. On Vancouver Island, 95% of our food arrives on the ferry. 

BC has tens of thousands of acres of farmland that are lying fallow, or growing hay for horses that serve no agricultural purpose. In the Cowichan Valley Regional District there are 17,700 hectares of land in the Agricultural Land Reserve, of which in 2010 only 10,840 hectares were in agricultural production, and only 2,120 hectares were set up for irrigation.

The COVID-19 pandemic is growing in its reach every day. Now is the time to be planning for worst-case scenarios, including:

Continue reading 15 Questions on Emergency Food and Farming Planning for British Columbia

50 Ways to Stay SANE During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Strong, Active, Neighbourly and Energetic (SANE)

By Guy Dauncey

How can we stay strong during this crisis? With love, careful planning, and care for others – and total lockdown.

The end of the tunnel may be a long way off, but if we treat it with the utmost seriousness, keep our social distance, wash our hands regularly, and look out for each other, we can stop the spread of the virus and reach the light at the end. When we emerge, huge numbers of people will hopefully want a more caring, cooperative approach to life, and a new kind of economy, based less on greed, selfishness and the destruction of Nature, and more on the economics of kindness. 

Continue reading 50 Ways to Stay SANE During the Coronavirus Pandemic

100% Climate and Nature Friendly by 2025

by Guy Dauncey

The pandemic has seized our attention, and so it should – but the climate and ecological emergencies haven’t paused out of sympathy, thinking “Let’s give the humans a break.” That’s not the way Nature works.

We can’t afford to relax our climate and environmental concerns just because we’ve got other concerns. We have to do both. And being stuck at home gives us an opportunity to do some serious planning. Serious, as in “Let’s make our family 100% climate and ecologically friendly within five years.”

Continue reading 100% Climate and Nature Friendly by 2025

Climate Emergency: A 26-Week Transition Program for Canada

CE March 2020

This is a work of imagination.

But the urgency of the crisis is real,

the need for the suggested programs is real,

and the data included in these proposals is real.

3rd Edition. March 2020

A printable 40-page PDF of this paper is available here:

PDF Climate Emergency

A video of Guy Dauncey presenting a brief summary of this paper is here.

“This is a practical, down to earth concrete step by step transition strategy for the Canadian government to get real about the climate emergency. A must read for all Canadians to make a difference and communicate to their elected officials new policies and programs that will make a difference now.” – Professor Ann Dale, Trudeau Fellow Alumna, Canada Research Chair, Royal Roads University

“This is vital reading. It maps out an evidence-based route ahead; to open real conversations around what we actually need to do in these testing times. It should be read by politicians and policymakers, local and regional councillors, business front-runners, university and health service delivery managers, indeed everyone who wants to explore how we can collectively build the new zero carbon world we so urgently need.” – Paul Allen, Project Coordinator, Zero Carbon Britain project at the Centre for Alternative Technology

“Visionary and thorough, Dauncey’s 26 week Transition Program deserves close scrutiny in Canada and beyond. His passion for a clean economy shines.” – Raffi Cavoukian, C.M., O.B.C., singer, founder of Raffi Foundation For Child Honouring

Continue reading Climate Emergency: A 26-Week Transition Program for Canada

Message from The Universe: Do it NOW, with Urgency

A new ecological civilization, it whispers ever so softly

By Guy Dauncey

There comes a time in the evolution of every civilization when the Universe sends us a new message. Slowly, it works its way through the multiple layers of a long-established culture. It is buffeted by resistance and repulsed by rulers, but in spite of this it finds its voice in the songs of poets, the impulses of teenagers, and the dreams of millions.

Continue reading Message from The Universe: Do it NOW, with Urgency

Syntropy: A New Story

syntropy-a-new-story-1-638

This is most of the final Chapter 34 of my novel Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible. The book is set in Vancouver in the year 2032, by when it has become the world’s greenest city, alongside Portland and Copenhagen. Patrick Wu, a 24-year-old Chinese Canadian, is visiting a future world brimming with innovation and hope, where the climate crisis is being tackled, the solar revolution is underway and a new cooperative economy is taking shape. But enormous danger still lurks. The final chapter consists of this Dinner Party. All of the philosophers and scientists mentioned in the text are real, except Satyanendra Mukherjee, who wrote the First and Second Laws of Syntropy.

This is a long read. It’s about syntropy, entropy, religion, the question of whether the Universe has purpose, the omnipresence of consciousness, its relationship to quantum theory, the relationship between the inner and the outer realms, the nature of free will, the shortcomings of the standard model of physics, deep history, and why this is relevant to the multiple crises we face today.

Guy Dauncey is an author, speaker and ecotopian futurist who works to develop a positive vision of a sustainable future, and to translate that vision into action. He lives on Vancouver Island.

Continue reading Syntropy: A New Story

Ten Green New Deals – How Do They Compare?

Ten GNDs

By Guy Dauncey, Revised September 29th 2019

Guy Dauncey is founder of the BC Sustainable Energy Association, co-founder of the Victoria Car Share Cooperative, and the author or co-author of ten books, including The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming and Journey to the Future: A Better World Is Possible. He is currently completing The Economics of Kindness: A Ten-Year Transition to a Green Cooperative Economy. He lives in Yellow Point, on Vancouver Island, Canada. His website is www.thepracticalutopian.ca.

I premise my analysis on five statements:

  • The climate emergency is real.
  • The ecological emergency is real.
  • The inequality, household debt and affordable housing crises are real.
  • A new global financial crisis is lurking, caused by excessive corporate and private debt and banking deregulation.
  • We need a ten-year mobilization to achieve a rapid transition to a green cooperative economy that is human-friendly, community-friendly, climate-friendly and nature-friendly, leaving self-interested capitalism behind us.

Continue reading Ten Green New Deals – How Do They Compare?

The Climate and Ecological Emergencies – What Can We Do?

Emergency

By Guy Dauncey

There are massive forest fires in Siberia. Greenland’s melting is accelerating. Record heatwaves are roasting Europe. The world’s insects are dying off. The scary news keeps accumulating.

We are living on the edge of an emergency that is just getting started, and climate is only the half of it. There’s also an ecological emergency. How are we to respond? It’s easy to slip into complacency, or to be overcome by fear, followed by a sense of impotence. You know the crises are real, but the children are coming to visit, there’s a holiday to plan, and don’t get me started on the problems we’re having at work.

The first step to end complacency and neutralize fear is to put the crisis on your weekly to-do list:

  • Weed the garden
  • Visit your friend in hospital
  • Sign the kids up for karate/soccer/piano/dancing lessons
  • Do something to tackle the climate and ecological crises

Continue reading The Climate and Ecological Emergencies – What Can We Do?

Agro-Business vs. Agro-Ecology

Choice

by Guy Dauncey

In September 2018, the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) published a report on An agro-ecological Europe by 2050: Multifunctional Agriculture for Healthy Eating, in which the authors found that a fully agro-ecological Europe could sustainably feed 530 million Europeans by 2050.

In his fascinating new book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food, Timothy Wise, who is senior research at the Small Planet Institute, comes to very similar conclusions for countries like Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia.

I have captured the possibility of an agro-ecological future and compared it to the current reality in these two diagrams. They are too big to display, so click on each phrase below to see the full diagrams:

AGRO-BUSINESS                            AGRO-ECOLOGY

Agro-Choice

Five Ways to Achieve Ecologically Sustainable Finance

Sustainable Finance

by Guy Dauncey

First published in The Mint – Fresh Thinking in Economics, June 2019

How can we turn around the world’s financial institutions so that their creation of money serves to construct a new ecological civilization, rather than destroy our current civilization through the financing of ecological and climate catastrophe? It’s a massive problem that needs multiple solutions.

Before we turn our attention to some possible solutions, we need some context. Global GDP in 2018 was $87.5 trillion. Global debt, created by the world’s financial institutions, was $247 trillion, growing by $14 trillion a year. Between 2005 and 2016 the debt increased by 73%, split between governments ($63 trillion), non-financial corporations ($68 trillion) and private households ($44 trillion).

Continue reading Five Ways to Achieve Ecologically Sustainable Finance

The Tears of Cassandra

Cassandra 2

by Guy Dauncey

June 2019. The summer days bring exquisite shades of green. The bees are out, the ants rush around, and the wind rustles quietly in the tops of the trees. A fresh-baked rhubarb sponge cake sits on the kitchen counter. Life is sensuous, beautiful, and quite frankly, exquisite. Tiny mauve butterflies flit in and out of the flowers.

And then Cassandra arrives, she of the noble Greek ancestry, admired by the god Apollo, she with the golden locks and the long white flowing dress, reading from her list of warnings:

“One million species facing extinction, UN Report finds.”

“Plummeting insect numbers threaten collapse of nature.”

“By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s the oceans.”

“Do you need more?” she asks, then continues. Her eyes carry sorrow. Continue reading The Tears of Cassandra

Reading, Riting, Rithmetic – and Regeneration

Reading

For 200 years, students have been urged to learn the 3 R’s of reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic. In recent years, thinkers of various political persuasions have proposed adding a fourth R including running, relationships, religion, race, rithms (for algorithms), respect, road safety, ritalin, rifle-shooting, revolvers and (appropriately) resuscitation.

There is another 4th R that is even more essential if we are to survive the 21st century. It is the knowledge of ecology, of how our planet works, and how to regenerate healthy ecosystems from the atmosphere and the rainforests to the microbiomes in our own guts.

Profound ecological ignorance

Continue reading Reading, Riting, Rithmetic – and Regeneration

Climate Action in BC: The November Offensive

Climate Action

Will you join me? I need lots of people to join the November Offensive, so that together, we can make a difference.

This summer’s forest fires and smoke-filled skies have left many of us asking, “What will it take to end the climate dithering and start DOING something to tackle the growing emergency?”

The IPCC has just reminded us of the urgency of the crisis, and the need to reduce emissions globally by 45% by 2030 if we are to limit the warming to 1.5C.

The BC NDP government is getting ready to launch its climate plan at the end of November, somehow combining climate action sufficient to meet its stated goal of a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 with its recent climate-disastrous decision to approve the big LNG Canada project.

The timing is critical to impress our New Democrat and Green MLAs of the need for urgent action to speed the transition to 100% renewable energy and protect the forests.

When the government floated its ‘Intention Papers’ in August, my response was that they were really timid, far from what was needed. Our government must, must do better. Continue reading Climate Action in BC: The November Offensive

Our 2018 Local Elections on Southern Vancouver Island: The Winners

 

Winnersby Guy Dauncey

Saturday October 20th was Election Day, and we had such great results! Of the 55 candidates who I recommended for your support, 38 were elected and 17 were not. In Courtenay and Comox progressive candidates were also elected, pushing out old-school conservatives.

This was my pitch for these candidates: I want Vancouver Island to become a place where people are really committed to living in harmony with nature.

I want our towns and cities to be full of safe bike lanes, wonderful green spaces, urban farms, affordable housing for all, great public transit, wonderful pedestrian environments, and to have permanently ended homelessness. Continue reading Our 2018 Local Elections on Southern Vancouver Island: The Winners

The Seven Phases of Climate Awareness

Climate Awareness

by Guy Dauncey

Which Phase Are You In?

Phase 1: Complete Unawareness. 

It’s simply not on your radar. You know more about Taylor Swift or Beyoncé than you do about climate change, or whatever it’s called.

Phase 2: What is This – is it Real?

I keep hearing about it, but it’s all so confusing. One person says one thing, someone else says another. So I’m reading blogs, articles, and even some books. trying to fathom it all out.

Phase 3: OMG, this is Awful. It looks like a Real Catastrophe.

Massive sea level rise? Huge droughts, storms and downpours? Freshwater running out? This is terrible. I read that the word most scientists use to describe the future if we don’t tackle the climate crisis is ‘catastrophic‘. Continue reading The Seven Phases of Climate Awareness

A Practical Plan for Affordable Housing in the Cowichan Valley

Home Everyone

by Guy Dauncey

What does it mean to be so worried, because you really can’t afford the rent? To have to surrender your hope of ever owning a home? To face the end of a rental lease and know that there is NOTHING out there that you can afford? To stare homelessness in the face?

Many of us are comfortably housed, but many are not. The autumn rains have arrived, and the harvest crops are being gathered in. Everyone seems to be getting on with their lives. And yet for many people, the smiles and kindnesses that make life worth living mask a level of stress and worry that should have no place in our community.

How can there be such a housing crisis?

How can it be that in this Cowichan Valley that we love so much, there is such a housing crisis? How can democracy, the housing market, and local government have failed us so completely?

Continue reading A Practical Plan for Affordable Housing in the Cowichan Valley

Brett Kavanaugh’s Better Angels

Halos

Like so many, I watched the Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh, transfixed. A lot of us do things in our teenage years that we later cringe at and regret. It’s how we handle our regrets later that matters, once the stupidities are done. What struck me first was how belligerent and defensive he was, and, how whiney.

What struck me next  is how he could if he had wished have adopted a much easier approach, and won the hearts of all Americans, of whatever political stripe. Since he seems unwilling to do that, I am willing to do it for him: Continue reading Brett Kavanaugh’s Better Angels

Let Us Advance Up The Ladder of Democracy

Ladder

by Guy Dauncey

Democracy is a very recent social invention. Most people don’t like it when the societies they live in are blatantly unfair, with privileges and glory for the rich and hard labour and exploitation for the poor. In consequence, starting a thousand years ago, people in nations all over the world have gradually prised power out of the hands of their ruling elites and established democracies.

It has been incredible hard work. In 1794, Thomas Hardy, a London shoemaker, was charged with high treason for proposing one person, one vote. His sentence, had he been found guilty, would have been to be hanged by the neck, cut down while still conscious, disemboweled, beheaded, and his body to have been cut up into quarters. Fortunately, a Grand Jury of nine respectable citizens, after debating the matter for nine days, found him ‘Not Guilty’. The London crowd went crazy, dragging him through the streets in triumph.

Continue reading Let Us Advance Up The Ladder of Democracy

Trump and Trudeau: Spot the Difference

Trump & Trudeau

Trudeau: ‘No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there’

Trump: “We’ve got underneath us more oil than anybody … and I want to use it.”

I have very little to add to this. Emotionally, culturally, empathetically, educationally and behaviourally, Trump and Trudeau are as different as different can be. Trump is a bully, a braggard and a boor. Trudeau is a refined classical decoration on the carpet of civilization. Trump is a dirty stain.

Yet when it comes to energy and oil, their brains and their political instincts think alike. Trump is a proud climate denier. His “Grab them by the oil-wells” thoughts are at least consistent with his larger outlook, which is nationalist and mercantilist, as if the eighteenth century had never ended.

Continue reading Trump and Trudeau: Spot the Difference

Protecting the Coastal Douglas Fir Forest: Seven Practical Solutions

 

stock-photo-sun-rays-600x400

It cools us in the summer, it warms our hearts all year,

It provides a home for owls and flowers, for herons, cedars, fir.

It shapes the landscape, painting peace, away from the urban rush,

It protects our water all year round, surrendering it clear and fresh.

In Japanese, the word shinrin means forest and yoku means bath, so shinrin-yoku means ‘forest bath’: being immersed in the forest with all our senses. Listening to its quietness, seeing the variety of trees, mosses, lichens and rocks, tasting the air as you breathe in deeply, touching the rough Douglas fir and the smooth red arbutus, going barefoot across the earth, dipping your feet in a forest stream, lying down to gaze up at its beauty. Such bathing brings healing to the body, heart, mind and soul. Continue reading Protecting the Coastal Douglas Fir Forest: Seven Practical Solutions

BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need

Timid Response

August 20, 2018

I wish I didn’t have to write this. I count myself a friend of the NDP/Green Alliance, and I had high hopes for the government’s new climate action plans. [1]  

BC’s Ministry of Environment has published a series of Clean Growth Intentions Papers, with a deadline for public feedback of August 24th, in the heart of this fire and smoke-filled summer. In my head, I can see that they have been framed in a very positive way, emphasizing the multiple economic benefits of engaging in climate action, reframed as clean growth.

But the policies floated contain little that is new. They are really timid. And by downplaying the climate crisis almost to a state of mental non-existence, they have written the urgency out of the picture. In my heart, I feel as if they have been written by a holiday season policy-drone operating on auto-pilot. Hard words, but that’s what I feel.

Continue reading BC’s Climate Intentions Papers: A Timid Response – and the Twelve Solutions We Really Need

By Rewriting our Past, We can Rewrite our Future

Mint 2

Once upon a time, there was a revolution. I have never read about it in any history book, yet it was the ancestor of all revolutions, from the earliest slave revolts to the French and Russian revolutions, the gay rights movement and the #Metoo movement.

By not knowing about it, and not understanding its consequences, our interpretation of history is missing a critical dimension as we struggle to free ourselves from the tentacles of neoliberalism and build a new economy that is friendly to humans and nature, not just to bankers and greed. In the light of this revolution, our understanding of thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Marx, Owen, Kropotkin, Nietzsche, Polanyi, Keynes, Hayek, Rand and Ostrom is changed.

We may never know when it happened, but a quarter million years ago is a good possibility. To understand its origins, however, we have to go back six million years, to when we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos. Even today, we share 99% of our genes, and the same impulses to mother, to play, to help each other, to use social skills, to hunt together, to form tribes, to fight, to bully and to dominate.

Through it all, the non-alphas resented being dominated

Continue reading By Rewriting our Past, We can Rewrite our Future

Tiny Homes Villages

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Artwork by Richard Sheppard,  www.theartistontheroad.com

All I want is a village somewhere,

far away from the housing scare,

With friends and family,

Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly?

Little homes where we all can live,

A lovely garden so we all can eat,

Shared hearts, shared love, shared hopes,

Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly.

In May 2018 the average price of a home in BC was $750,000. In Victoria, the average price of a condo was $500,000.

Continue reading Tiny Homes Villages

Canada’s Choice

CanaDAS CHOICE 2

by Guy Dauncey

$4.5 Billion Dollars to Subsidize Fossil Fuels? Here’s a Much Better Idea

$4.5 billion of Canada’s money, to buy a bitumen pipeline? Some suggest that it could rise as high as $12 billion, including future construction and legal costs.

So what if the money was invested in solutions to the climate crisis, instead making things worse by being invested in the primary cause, which is our use of fossil fuels? When Canada signed the Paris Climate Agreement most people presumed that it was being signed honestly, not as an act of laugh-behind-your-hand hypocrisy.

Thirty to Fifty Times More Jobs

That much money could leverage enough electricity to replace most of Alberta’s coal and gas-fired electricity, and generate between 30 and 50 times as many jobs. It could also power 18 million electric vehicles for 25 years. Continue reading Canada’s Choice

Farm Villages – The Way of the Future

 

Farm-VillagesSubmission to the Agricultural Land Reserve Minister’s Advisory Committee by Guy Dauncey and Rob Buchan. Deadline for letters and submissions Monday April 30th 2018.

https://engage.gov.bc.ca/agriculturallandreserve/

For an illustrated slideshow on this proposal, see https://www.slideshare.net/GuyDauncey/farm-villages

Introduction

Throughout the world, in every culture, farmers have lived and raised their children in small farm villages.

Here on Vancouver Island, 95% of our food is imported every day on the ferries. At the same time, good farmland sits empty or grows hay, while younger people who want to get onto the land to grow food are unable to do so because of the incredibly high price of land.

Continue reading Farm Villages – The Way of the Future

Let’s Make Every Business a Social Purpose Business

 

Social-PurposeBy Guy Dauncey, March 2018

If we are to live in a fair, just, ecologically sustainable world, many things in our economy will need to change, from the way banks create money to the way environmental losses and gains are accounted for and measured.

Let’s start with the businesses that grow the food, manufacture the products and provide the services we all depend on and enjoy.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a successful economy without its businesses. The Soviet Union tried, and Cuba is still trying, but neither has had much success. It’s hard to have success when the spirit of enterprise is not allowed to flourish. Continue reading Let’s Make Every Business a Social Purpose Business

The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy

They say we are self-interested, we’re always out to win.
Always individualistic, though it used to be a sin.
They say we need free markets, the better to compete,
and the economy will flourish if we only think of greed.

This is Economics 101, the way it’s taught today. Not a word about nature, community, caring, sharing, or cooperation.

During the mid 19th century, advances in science, democracy, education, literacy, public healthcare, labour unions, technological breakthroughs, banking, and the power of fossil fuels to generate rapid economic growth certainly made it seem that after ten thousand years of economic stagnation the competitive pursuit of profit was improving life for all. In the 1760s it took eighteen hours of human labour to transform a pound of cotton into cloth. By the 1860s it took one and a half hours. Today, it probably takes five seconds.

Continue reading The Birth of a New Cooperative Economy

Let Us Create An EcoRenaissance

by Guy Dauncey, February 2nd, 2018

If you want to see what this EcoRenaissance looks like on the ground, click HERE.

Until a thing has a name, it doesn’t really exist

I can feel this future. I have written a novel about it. I love its colour and vibrancy, its harmony with Nature. But what is its name?

One of the realities of the spoken language is that until a thing has a name, it doesn’t really exist. When we want to create something, we name it.

The feeling that comes to mind is one of Renaissance – the birth of a new vision, the promise of a new future. The Renaissance that was seeded in the 13th century and blossomed into glory in the 15th and sixteenth centuries filled people’s hearts, souls and minds with art, imagination and ideas. It took inspiration from the rediscovered science, art and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. It made souls take flight, washing away the dull dogmatism and cruel muddy feudalism of a world where nothing much changed except by disease, disorder and death.

Continue reading Let Us Create An EcoRenaissance

To Dam, or Not to Dam? An Ode to the Peace River

Peace

To dam, or not to dam: that is the question,

whether tis nobler to suffer

the loss of farmland and First Nations rights by powerful flooding,

or, by solar, wind and conservation, geothermal too,

to craft another path to the energy we’ll need

and save the land for growing food and flowing water,

under the peaceful sky.

 – Guy Dauncey, January 2018

Mammoths on East Hastings Street: A Vision from the Future

Mammoths Sculpture

Mammoths on Hastings Street, by Hae Jin An, Emily Carr School of Art

This is an extract from Chapter 12 ‘The Heart of Poverty’ in Guy Dauncey’s ecotopian novel Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible, set in Vancouver in June 2032.

*

‘The Land that Ugly Forgot’

Back on the trail, I passed a sign that told me that Fourth Avenue was closed to cars every Sunday, and open only to cyclists, rollerbladers, runners and strollers.[1] I rode north over the Cambie Street Bridge, crossing the waters of Vancouver’s False Creek. To see the banners of colored silk fluttering from the streetlights and the central median ablaze with rhododendrons and flowers set my soul ablaze. A banner at the end of the bridge proclaimed ‘The Land that Ugly Forgot’ and welcomed me to the downtown.

I cycled to Wei-Ping’s office on Water Street in Gastown and found a space to park Carl’s bike in a bike-rack designed like a red dragon. I had a while before my meeting, so I walked to the Waterfront station and turned up Seymour, enjoying the wide sidewalks, ample bike-lanes and colorful food carts. Several buildings were covered with ferns and flowering plants tumbled down their walls, as if a rainforest had taken up residence in the city. [2] At a crosswalk, instead of saying WALK it said DANCE, and there was music that made it impossible not to—not just me but others too, laughing and smiling at each other. [3]

Continue reading Mammoths on East Hastings Street: A Vision from the Future

Canada’s Housing Crisis: A Permanent, 100-Year Solution

100-Years

Guy Dauncey is the author of Journey to the Future: A Better World is Possible and nine other books. He is an Honorary Member of the Planning Institute of BC and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

June 2017. This is an updated and expanded version of Canada’s Housing Crisis: 22 Solutions, originally published on The Practical Utopian in December 2016.

A PDF Version of this essay can be downloaded here: Canada’s Housing Crisis – Guy Dauncey.

Executive Summary

Canada’s housing crisis is far more severe than most people realize. The fundamental problem is an excess of money pouring into the housing market from various sources, combined with an abdication of responsibility by all levels of government for the past 30 years.

There are many on-the-ground solutions, demonstrating positive ways to build affordable housing. And there are seven new housing-related taxes that could raise the funds needed for a massive expansion of affordable housing.

The fundamental cause of the problem is the excess of funds flowing into the market, and until this is solved house prices will continue to rise, and most other solutions will seem like never-ending sandbagging.

The money supply problem can be solved. The money can be obtained to restore safe, sustainable, socially designed affordable housing as a fundamental human right.

And by establishing an Affordable Housing Social Justice Connector, a permanent, hundred-year solution can be put in place that will guarantee that Canada need never confront a housing crisis again. Continue reading Canada’s Housing Crisis: A Permanent, 100-Year Solution

A Hundred and Six Names: The New Economy We Need So Much

106 Names

Names-3

This is an expanded Appendix 1 to my essay A New Cooperative Economy.

Until something has a name, it hardly exists. So what shall we call the new economy that we need so much? These are all proposed names that I have harvested from my reading. If you know of another, let me know, and I will add it. Updated to 106 names on December 27th 2021.

So which do you prefer? I apologize that this website is not sophisticated enough to allow for scoring. Click MORE to see the list… Continue reading A Hundred and Six Names: The New Economy We Need So Much

When Santa Lost His Reindeer

Santa

To download this as a printable book for reading to children, scratch your hoof here:

 santas-reindeer

It was a week before Christmas, and Santa was busy polishing his boots in the big Winter House, up at the North Pole. It was a pleasant evening, and he was feeling good about life.

“My, don’t these boots look good!” he said to himself as he sat in front of the big log fire, admiring his reflection in the polish. “That should make a show when I’m ready to do my rounds!”

Most of the presents were neatly stacked in the Store House ready for delivery, and the reindeer were asleep in the barn, resting up before the big journey.

All except one, that is – Binky.

Binky was a mischievous young reindeer who was full of energy and ideas – way too many ideas for a young reindeer.

Continue reading When Santa Lost His Reindeer

Seven ways governments can reach their COP15 goals to save the oceans

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Negotiators at COP15 in Montreal agreed to protect biodiversity in our oceans. Where do governments begin?

https://www.corporateknights.com/category-climate/seven-ways-to-save-oceans-biodiversity/

Six ways to end Canada’s affordable housing crisis

From Corporate Knights magazine

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Let’s end exclusive zoning, empower non-profit developers, and use the right balance of carrots and sticks to make housing affordable

Click here to read the full story

Six ways to produce rapid affordable housing

From Corporate Knights magazine:ways to produce rapid affordable housing

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: Solving Canada’s housing crisis will take time. So, what can governments do to lessen the burden for those suffering now? Click here to read the full story

Seven ways to end the climate crisis

From Corporate Knights Magazine

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: We need all hands on deck to solve humanity’s greatest crisis. Click here to read the full story.

Seven ways to reduce economic inequality

From Corporate Knights Magazine

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: A high level of inequality weakens public trust, causes resentment and threatens democracy. How can we reduce it?  Click here for the full story.

Seven ways to include nature in our economic choices

From Corporate Knights Magazine:

Guy Dauncey’s Big Solutions: The COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal has ambitious goals. Here’s how we could embed these goals into our economies. Click here for the full story