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Sustainable Development is a half-vast approach to vast problems. Its purpose, to make life on this planet sustainable, is a noble disguise for the maintenance of the status quo. When the status quo includes hundreds of millions of acres of degraded to destroyed farmland and leveled rainforest, depleted to exhausted fisheries and aquifers, toxic-choked streams, […]

In February, 55 bookstores with names like Oblong, Whale of a Tale, Innisfree, Odyssey, Yellow Brick Road and Wild Rumpus each received grants of between $2,000 and $15,000 from bestselling author James Patterson. This was the first round of a million dollars in grants to independent bookstores from Patterson, earmarked for a wide variety of […]

Govindra Deshpande presented this traveling spinning wheel to Bob Swann at the "Tools for Building Sustainable Local Economies" seminar convened in 1983 by the E. F. Schumacher Society, the predecessor of the Schumacher Center.

On a gorgeous sunny morning the Kosmos team drove 30 minutes south to meet new economist Susan Witt on the picturesque grounds of the community land trust in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She greeted us at the car and showed us inside the New Economics Institute’s rustic office building to a light-filled room with rows of bookshelves. Susan co-founded the BerkShares local currency program in 2006 and has watched as this experiment in community empowerment has garnered international media attention. Since putting the currency into circulation, the BerkShares website has received more than 7 million hits—an impressive number even before you consider that the institute has a staff of just three. About $2.6M BerkShares are invigorating the financial bloodstream of the Berkshires, Susan’s home region, and the program’s goal is steadfastly being realized. BerkShares provides a model to other progressive communities around the world that want to establish their own more self-sufficient, independent, resilient and sustainable economies.