Doughnut Economics: The must-read book that redefines economics for a world in crisis

When Chief Oren Lyons of the Iroquois Onondaga Nation was invited to address students at the University of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, he highlighted this risk. ‘What you call resources we call our relatives,’ he explained. ‘If you can think in terms of relationships, you are going to treat them better, aren’t you? … Get back to the re

Simply thinking like a consumer, it seems, triggers self-regarding behaviour, and divides rather than unites groups who are facing a common scarcity. In the context of twenty-first-century pressures on Earth’s sources and sinks – from fresh water and fish to the oceans and atmosphere – that insight could turn out to have pivotally important implica

Western cultures seeking to oust the cuckoo goal of GDP growth cannot simply put an Andean or Maori worldview in its place, but must find new words and pictures to articulate an equivalent vision. What might the words for that new vision be? A first suggestion: human prosperity in a flourishing web of life. Yes, that is a mouthful to say – and it’s

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson vividly illustrate in their 1980 classic Metaphors We Live By, orientational metaphors such as ‘good is up’ and ‘good is forward’ are deeply embedded in Western culture, shaping the way we think and speak.

Perhaps these are first steps towards the kind of moral and social progress that Mill was imagining as he looked forward to a time when people who were no longer engrossed in the art of getting on would aspire instead to the art of living.

the dominance of the economist’s perspective on the world has only spread, even into the language of public life. In hospitals and clinics worldwide, patients and doctors have been recast as customers and service-providers. In fields and forests on every continent, economists are calculating the monetary value of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem se

as the architect and designer William McDonough has put it, the avid pursuit of resource efficiency is simply not enough. ‘Being less bad is not being good,’ he says. ‘It is being bad, just less so.’19 And, once you think about it, pursuing mission zero is an odd vision for an industrial revolution, as if intentionally stopping on the threshold of

Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose to use is to realise that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it.

If the economy is constantly evolving, how best can we steward its process? Learn to find the ‘leverage points’, said Donella Meadows – those places in a complex system where making a small change in one thing can lead to a big change in everything.