So, what happens now? A huge majority of people – 97% of participants – have said a clear and commanding “NO” to heavy industry anywhere near the Cable Bay Trail.
Continue reading What’s Next for Cable Bay?Palgrave MacMillan, August 2026
Chapter 1: The Great Mistake
Our world needs more kindness. People need more kindness. Nature needs more kindness. But we need it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles begin.
We have been told a thousand times that the free-market economy is the best possible kind of economy, but for so many people, and for nature, it’s just not working. Surely, there must be a better way. Our capitalist economy has been built on the primacy of selfishness. What is the alternative? In this book, I hope to convince you that it’s the economics of kindness, which we can use to achieve massive transformative change and build a new ecological civilization. And it’s not just an idea. It’s a very real thing.
But first, we must address the question that’s causing so much anxiety: why are things in such a mess? We’ve got the rising cost of living, the housing crisis, and the ridiculous increase in inequality alongside the tax-avoiding billionaires. We’ve got increasing loneliness. We’ve got refugees, and desperate immigrants. In America, we’ve got oligarchy, kleptocracy, and billionaires who believe they are entitled to rule the world. And all the while, with ominous drumbeats of warning, we’ve got the climate crisis, the collapse of biodiversity, and the reality that we are overshooting Earth’s ecological boundaries. And the horrible ongoing wars. And just when we need calm decisive action, we’ve got social media chaos, increasing anxiety, anger, and hate.
When young Canadians aged 16 to 25 were surveyed in 2022, almost three quarters said they felt frightened about the future. So enough! It is time for change. Time for determined hope. Time for moral ambition, as the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman puts it in his clarion call to action In the pages of this book you will find a solid analysis of how we got into this mess, and a practical guide for not just how we can get out of it, but for how we can build an economy based on cooperation and kindness, as the foundation for a new ecological civilization.
But first, how to make sense of things? A thousand philosophers have offered a thousand answers, but our troubles seem only to get worse. The year 2073 beckons, if you’ve seen Asif Kapadia’s dark movie: democracy obliterated, minorities silenced, dissenters arrested, social media co-opted. The billionaires are having a field day, but billions are struggling, growing angrier and more resentful by the day. Some become extremists who want to tear it all down. A violent coup against democracy that would have been unthinkable ten years ago is now a present possibility in some countries. We need to peel back the myriad symptoms of dysfunction, and discover what’s driving them.
More …. in the book!
Follow Guy’s work on Substack: https://theeconomicsofkindness.substack.com
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:
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.
by Guy Dauncey
$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.
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
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.
Guy Dauncey, April 2017
This essay was submitted to The Next Systems Project Essay Contest, in which it won second place. “We received hundreds of submissions from 30 different states and 26 countries, proving that many around the world not only believe system change is necessary, but have thought long and hard about what a new system should look like and how we might get there.” http://thenextsystem.org/announcing-the-winners-in-our-essay-competition/
http://thenextsystem.org/…/2017/04/Dauncey_AtLargeSecond.pdf
You can download the essay as a PDF here. A New Cooperative Economy
*
Our task is to fashion a political vision and a political narrative that is a compelling answer to neo-liberalism and the ideology of competition, free markets, and the primacy of capital. We need a political economy of cooperation, solidarity, of mutual benefit. – John Restakis, Civil Power and the Partner State, 2016
Our modern economy is in crisis. Can we build an alternative economy as our ancestors did in the transition from feudalism to capitalism? It’s a question that takes us deep into our values, culture, history, politics—and visions of the future.
by Guy Dauncey
When the future teenager walks down the future Main Street in future Smalltown BC, be it Williams Lake, Smithers, Houston, Creston or Kimberley, which of these thoughts might she or he be thinking?
“I can’t wait to get out of this place—it’s so, like, basic.”
or
“This place is so cool. I wish there was work, so that I could stay.”
or
“This place is so über-cool. My friends in the city are so jealous that I get to live, work and play here.”
British Columbia has many communities that built their economies around traditional resources that are now either collapsing or going into decline. Unless there’s a strong impulse for community economic renewal, there’s a risk that working people will leave and young people will follow, never to return.
Is it really true that if we don’t build more pipelines and allow more exports of coal, oil and gas, that Canada’s economy will be in danger and unemployment will rise?
That’s certainly what we are frequently told, both by the Conservative federal government and by several provincial governments, either directly or by implied assumption.
There is alternative, however. The climate crisis is inescapably real. It threatens everyone’s future, and it is being caused by carbon emissions from the same fossil fuels that our governments want to expand.
So what would it look like if there were an organized plan to phase out fossil fuels and embrace 100% renewable energy in Canada? That’s certainly what the climate crisis calls for. Continue reading Almost Twice as Many Green Jobs if Canada Phases out Fossil Fuels
The Practical Utopian 