Why there needs to be an educational revolution to accompany the political revolution
Currently I am working on an essay, and researching the literature on "sustainability" in preparation. And in all likelihood you could put most of that literature into the paper shredder, and delete most of its electronic files, and in the end you would be endangering neither the planetary ecosystems nor the people who live within them one bit.
Why?
Most of the literature on "sustainability" accepts as a given the axioms of neoclassical economics. It suggests that the "carbon neutral" future will be just like the present, except with an additional layer of bureaucracy and a few more electric cars and solar panels/ wind farms. Buy a photovoltaic panel or two and some carbon offsets, and you're good to go! The literature discusses "behavioral incentives" without the least reference to the behavioral incentives which control actors in everyday life. You know, the ones which tell you you need to "do business" if you are to pay the rent and loans and bills? The ones which tell you you must participate in market economics rather than saving the planet (which is what you'd rather be doing)?
What is wrong with neoclassical economics then?
1) People are defined as "utility maximizers." We are to spend our lives as consumers according to someone's formula of "utility maximization." There's a song about this:
2) People are imagined to be "rational actors" measurable through rational choice theory. Except, of course, that they're not any such things, which is why the urban and mass-media landscapes are blanketed by advertising. Blanket advertising is because people have to be coerced into being the consumers the system's guardians want them to be, and the economist stands by and blesses it all with the name of "rationality."
3) The neoclassical economists have an ideal picture of humanity defined by the "perfect market." The problem with this whole idea is especially apparent in light of deep consideration of the planetary threat of climate change. Upon further examination we may come up with the idea that we'd be better off with imperfect markets. Think, for instance, of the extent to which planet Earth has been sacrificed to create markets everywhere. Global networks of transportation fueled by vast quantities of coal, oil, natural gas, wilderness turned into uniform fields for monocrop agriculture poisoned by pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, oceans turned into dumping grounds, forests chopped down for wood and paper, and so on. Now think of the sacrifices humanity has made to participate in a social reality dominated by markets -- much of the working class droning away at repetitive factory labor, bottom 1/3 of humanity completely locked out of the system, narcissists competing for status in an employment hierarchy.
Okay, now this stuff has infiltrated the rest of the academy. It's not just confined to departments of economics. Case in point: Michael Grubb's (2014) Planetary Economics: Energy, Climate Change, and the Three Domains of Sustainable Development. I'm just engaging this one because it's got all of the popular buzzwords; there are dozens like it on your college library's stacks and in its electronic files.
To be sure, Grubb considers other fields of economic inquiry than neoclassical economics, but neoclassical economics is the one that matters to Grubb. His "three pillars" are: 1) standards and engagement for smarter choices (here are the "behavioral incentives"), 2) markets and prices for cleaner products and processes (here are the public relations pitches for "green business"), and 3) strategic investment for innovation and infrastructure (which will turn out in the end to be investment to maximize profits).
In the end, all these "sustainability" analyses do is nurture the fantasy that capitalist business, nudged by proper fiscal policy, can solve the environment problem all by itself when the real purpose of capitalist business is to gobble up the planet and spit it back out in a nice cellophane-wrapped package to be sold for profit. Next year I will have a paper in publication in a journal called Knowledge Cultures, titled "Climate Change Mitigation in Fantasy and Reality," which will offer a further exploration of this fantasy.
So what, in my opinion, should replace neoclassical economics? Two ideas:
a) World-ecology -- world-ecology starts from the idea that one finds in Marx's Capital, that capitalist political economy tends to create people who care mainly about the world for its market value, and suggests that what we really ought to care about is the integrity of our outer environmental and inner human natures. One place to start with world-ecology would be the writings of Jason W. Moore --
and
b) Institutional economics, which starts with the thought of Thorstein Veblen and continues through John Kenneth Galbraith and beyond. Institutionalism takes a significantly anthropological take on human beings.
Generally what we need is an educational system, and eventually a whole world, centered not upon mechanics, but rather upon ecology. But the first step has to be to undo the hegemonic role of neoclassical economics in deciding what people are to make of their lives.
Perhaps we could create a college of our own in which ideas of neoclassical economics have been significantly debunked. The primary text for doing this debunking would be Kees van der Pijl's A Survey of Global Political Economy, which describes neoclassical economics as fundamentally "axiomatic" (i.e. something you must take on faith if you wish to participate). Or perhaps we could start a "political revolution" think tank which would sponsor services (the word "businesses" has been tainted; what I have in mind is more like Food Not Bombs) and candidates who renounce neoclassical economic thinking.
Your ideas?
Comments
I sometimes try to imagine...
a game like "Civilization" that ran according to neo-liberal and ultra-capitalist economics. The only way I can imagine it working is if you set an arbitrary time limit (One Lifetime at max) and end the game at that point. Otherwise, the long term damage to the economy would never work for a long-term victory.
Yeah, I do see this kind of mentality in games. It's the players who flip the table as soon as they start to lose, and brag about winning for the rest of time. Nobody likes playing with them, and if they weren't the jerks who owned the board, we wouldn't.
I do not pretend I know what I do not know.
Thanks for this.
The history of our future. Or the future of our history.
Lots of stuff to think about.
Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.
Thanks for the post, and a couple of sources you might like...
First of all, thank you for your post, and your recognition that "modern economics" is a bunch of hooey, because it is. The measures are wrong--we don't "price" externalities (e.g. pollution) in our modern models, and we don't separate "finance capitalism" (buying and selling of credit instruments) from "market capitalism" (buying and selling products and services). In fact, modern economics ignores the role of banks entirely--or misrepresents it, in the form of the "loanable funds theory" where by deposits in banks are presumed to be the source of funds leant to borrowers. It's nuts. Banks make loans on their computers, and they make themselves whole everyday at the Fed, via overnight lending facilities.
If you are not familiar with Modern Monetary theory, you need to be, because it's gaining traction. UMKC is leading this, (University of Missouri at Kansas City), and the Levy Institute is also involved. Their website is here. As a sidebar, Stephanie Kelton, the Chair of their Economics Department, was named by Bernie Sanders as the Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority on the Senate Budget Committee. So Bernie gets it, and this is one of the things I like best about Bernie.
I've been reading Naked Capitalism for a long time (and everybody should, if only for their daily links, first thing in the morning and another batch at 2pm, but you might like their economics-focused news as well). As for sustainability, I'm going to suggest your read James Michael Greer, who they regularly promote.
I've been reading his blog for years now, and I think he's a thoughtful and bright essayist on the questions of sustainability. He's not an optimist, but he has the science behind him. I know that the title of his blog seems scary, but I think the writing sustains it. I haven't read the books, but I should.
If I'm citing resources you've already checked, I apologize for the redundancy. If not, I hope you check them out. And I'd encourage c99 readers to look at them as well. You might like them. Again, thanks for your sustainability work, and yes, the economics currently being promoted is simply dumb and wrong.
Thank you for the lengthy reply.
There was a fellow over at the Daily Clinton named "priceman" who was big on Modern Monetary Theory. I appreciate the particular fight that the MMT people are engaged in -- battling the Peterson Foundation economics which dominates the Obama administration, and uncovering the lengthy list of crimes said administration refuses to investigate. It was good to see MMT people on Sanders' team at a point when all of the pundits were asking Sanders "how are you going to pay for those programs?" Never mind the real-life way they're deficit-financing now. I'm definitely with you all on those battles.
I, however, don't see how the MMT people get beyond "well-regulated capitalism" in any explanation they might have of how we might mitigate climate change -- the whole faddish "carbon tax" thing looks to me like just another excuse when something far more revolutionary will be necessary. Why not just have government go in and remake the whole civilization? We don't want to be caught waiting for the next climate disaster.
In the remake, we should consider as the gold standard something like Anitra Nelson's "Carbon Emissions: Prices and Values." We need to get away from the society which chases "value" (as defined by Karl Marx) and toward the society which prizes happiness.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Thanks for your kind comments
Thanks for your kind comments, and because I'm an idiot with passwords it took me a minute to read your link. It's a good article, and the germane point is Use Values versus Exchange Values. The article is framed from a Marxist viewpoint, which is fine by me. The big issue discussed, but not solved, in the article: the proper pricing of carbon--to which I'd add leaked Methane from fracking, which is evidently 100 times worse. These are all "externalitity costs", which modern economics has no ability to "price". None.
Given our dire situation, and since we're not messing with a Marxian economomy, we need to address this via Capitalism and Government, IMO. Those appear to be the only tools we have. Capitalism does markets (and cheats like crazy when they can). Government enforces rules they make, (unless they don't). The Eurozone actually doesn't really HAVE a democratic government these days, and Americans have Citizens United, as our dumb-fuckery. What is a concerned citizen to think or do? IMO, an agreement upon Carbon pricing at least formalizes the notion that Capitalism has external costs...which we all know...and it provokes research into the proper pricing of externalities. That would be an improvement for Capitalism, if somebody figures out a methodology for that.
Modern Economics can't help us--this whole Harvard Business School "Shareholder Value" model has been torn to shreds, so again I'll refer back to Modern Monetary Theory. It's basically simple: in a country that issues it's own currency (like the US) when there is under employment and slack demand, the government can deficit spend to put people to work until we reach full employment, at which time, inflation might incur. There has to be a financial regulatory side as well--which I think Bernie did a nice job of outlining--but I'm not going into that right now. Thanks again for your post.
Thanks for responding IowanX!
Just some general points:
Not quite sure what you have in mind in terms of "Marxian economy." There are two famous passages describing Marx's idea of a communist economy from the Critique of the Gotha Program. Here's the first:
So that's Marx's idea of an emergent communism, and then the advanced communism will presumably look like this:
Now, Marx's idea of revolution was that the revolution was to be a global revolution, rather than a revolution "in one country," which after his death turned out disastrously. A global revolution is a rather daunting task, though we are probably closer to it now than we have ever been, thanks to the Internet.
Continuing:
Here's the rub: there's no "proper price" for anything. If we're unlucky, climate change will make the tropics uninhabitable by 2036, and large portions of the upper latitudes will become unsuitable for agriculture some time thereafter. Is there a "proper price" for that? No. The ecological economics people think that we can assess the "cost" for everything and call it a "price," whereas in real life (what nerds call "meatspace") a "price" is an agreement between a buyer and a seller to exchange a product. The destruction of Earth's ecosystems, therefore, has no product, and thus no price.
Of course, what will happen in meatspace is that people will pay higher energy prices. The rich will be able to afford it, and the poor will suffer, and not much else will change. Let me suggest an alternative plan: everyone gets a free solar panel. The government opens a motor vehicle manufacturing plant. Everyone turns in their old motor vehicles by a certain date and gets new, electric, ones. At some point the government turns off the gasoline spigots. Problem solved, with none of this nonsense about "price signals."
And another intriguing question: how do you know there will be anything like capitalism around by 2036? The capitalists like to pretend that they have something normal going on, people are exchanging stuff for money and so on, but what they say and do becomes less meaningful from year to year. So, for instance, there was a news story floating around in 2013 about how the derivatives market was worth $1.2 quadrillion dollars. Oh, sure, this is a notional value, but we really aren't talking about something real when we throw about figures like $1.2 quadrillion. If the whole thing collapsed, would the bailout continue to be credible?
At any rate, the point of all this is that they really are just making stuff up, and so, yeah, let's take control of government and put people back to work and all. Only let's not mess with half-measures. Climate change will destroy civilization if we are not careful.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Many "economists" do not live in the real world
Even as regards the existing system. It is absurdly obvious that the "efficient market hypothesis" is false when it comes to the operation of the stock market, yet that theory held sway for a very long time. Even now it still has proponents long after that theory's originator (Fama) renounced it.
I like it. Capitalism's external costs should include
the MIC reimbursing and resettling all war refugees, plus tax on the environmental costs of war.
Ha! Wouldn't it be sweet for war to end because PTB realize we can't afford it?
Check out Billy blog
In the caucus99% blog roll He's MMT and used to have weekly quizes to see if you've been paying attention.
Yep. He has a weekend quiz up:
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/
"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn
There were Free Universities in the late 60's
all around the country, literally along side public and pvt universities, that developed out of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley ex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpeninsula_Free_University. And political education was taught in the AA community by the Black Panthers.
Thomas Jefferson started the Univ of Virginia
The tradition of free 2 year universities goes back to the founding of the USA.
FDR 9-23-33, "If we cannot do this one way, we will do it another way. But do it we will.
Not speaking of traditional colleges that were tuition free but
classes taught outside that system where "anyone who paid the nominal membership fee ($10) could offer a course in anything—marxism, pacifism, candle making, computers, encounter, dance, literature, walking in the woods, whatever......... It had no campus; classes were taught in homes and storefronts."
[and in parks and coffee shops]
Is Coursera based on a similar model?
By computer take free classes. Some co$t for certificates, if those have any relevant meaning. As a knowledge base they have instructional courses on most topics (not sure about candlemaking).
I have zero econ instruction. Except personally learning the hard way. My sense of any carbon tax is that it has the potential to be a shadow trading market and someone is still making money. I could be way off. I took an online forestry course, and read papers discussing the potential pricing for an entire ecosystem. Based on potential sustainable extraction/replacement. Monocultures always lost.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
A properly enforced carbon tax would work
The only small problems would be getting such legislation through a congress dominated by Rethugs and DINOs, and then getting it enforced in spite of obstruction by the aforementioned.
Congress and state Legislatures
are now dragging anchors. This is an awful government system for the times.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I remember my Econ professor explaining
"economic profit." He said that if making a product overseas and shipping it here was cheaper than just making it here, then that was the most profitable way. I said, "But that's wasteful!" He said that all that mattered was profit. This was back in the early 70s. That's when I decided that economics was bullshit. It only considers what it wants to consider, which is pretty shortsighted IMO.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"
The problem with capitalism and the environment
is that capitalism has to profit or it will wither and die. And the only way to make a profit is to take more than you give. We have taken so much from the earth and given so little back. A profit-driven society [which is what we have] cannot save the earth.
The only way to save the earth is to give every entity what it needs to thrive and take from it what it can afford to give.
And that is pure Karl Marx.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
What You Do vs Know...
This is the problem with our times. The only thing that the Establishment wants out of people, you know the human capital, is to do.
You don't need to know anything but what you "do".
The problem is that doing is not the same as knowing. Doing is a linear project. I do this, then I do this then I do that, then I win.
Knowing is,"What is winning?"
Or what is it that I'm doing that works?
Everything is a cookie cutter response, so much so that people gloss over when you give them a conceptual answer.
It's my life as a dog trainer (practical behaviorist/practical affective neuroscientist). So frustrating. I'm looking forward to the comments and the discussion, I thought I'd start here.
I hope you know what I'm saying, Cassio... Will be happy to clarify in subsequent comments. I believe it's a HUGE deal.
Time for dinner...
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
I followed you OT
first about canines, then about everything. So let more discussions begin.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
The Koch brothers and other billionaires are buying universities
This presents a huge problem, obviously, when it comes to education. Colleges and universities are starving for cash, as state support withers away, with tax cuts for those billionaires forcing them to dump higher ed.
Rather convenient, eh?
So, billionaires, most of whom are right-libertarian in outlook, buy up chair after chair, wing after wing, and reshape higher ed in their own image, to go along with their private sector reshaping. To produce good little consumers and capitalist wannabes. Used to be that our colleges and universities could at least mitigate for a little of that, though they purged most actual leftists with the rise of neoliberalism even before the rise of the Randian billionaires the following decade.
So what Cassiodorus rightly calls for isn't going to be at all easy. Because capitalist forces have wised up to the threat from intellectuals in new ways. They're buying their infrastructure and repurposing it.
Oh, and if anyone thinks the Internet will save us all, try this little experiment: Pick one of those news aggregation apps, like Flipboard. Pick "socialism" as a topic. And then note the percentage of rabidly anti-socialist articles that just so happen to pop up . . . . . most of them from right-wing hack sites like mises.org and reason, etc. etc. This is done by Google and Apple as well with their apps.
One would think that most of the articles under a subject you've chosen would be, if not celebratory, at least wouldn't go out of their way to trash the subject. Like, if you choose "travel," you're not likely to get mostly "I hate travel" articles, etc.
To make a long story short: What Cassiodorus wants to do is commendable, and I support him 100%. As a fellow traveler in the Green Left, especially. But this is a very tough road to hoe. And it should be done with organic stuff only.
;>)
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
-- Albert Camus
University cost-cutting, other than loading up on administrators
with major budgetary constraints imposed by austerity spending, has killed off many areas of scientific inquiry. Unless funded by industry, again constraining what gets studied. Bad for the country, bad for the world.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
But it's very good for capitalists and their lackeys.
They don't want free universities, or free universities with the freedom to study the widest possible range of subjects, untethered from capitalist commodification.
They want billionaires to be seen as our saviors, the Elon Musks of this world, for example, who will commodify and profit from all of the new research they partially fund.
So while they grow in public esteem, the public is actually screwed. Because what should be knowledge for all, freely available to all, for everyone's benefit, will be, of course, knowledge owned by a tiny lucky few, for their benefit, and no one else's.
Capitalism, for a host of reasons, must die. It's killing the planet, and our intellectual horizons.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
-- Albert Camus
How about communal universities?
As long as we're trying to embody the change we wish to see in the world... just sayin'....
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
That's a great idea.
What would that entail? Is this something you've thought about in depth?
Again, sounds very interesting.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
-- Albert Camus
Communes sometimes offer education.
Of course, the problem with communes has been that they have generally been incapable of following their utopian ideals. The act of setting up a commune doesn't really change very much about the social imaginary of the greater society which birthed the commune. The successful communes are the ones which have a successful relationship with the outside -- e.g. Twin Oaks (twinoaks.org). Note that even that is at risk:
http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2014/12/communes-still-thrivedec...
At any rate, your standard corporate university (public or private, it doesn't really matter) consists of a bunch of buildings, a swirl of money, and three populations:
1) Students, who won't be staying there long and whose power to combat the daily injustice of university life is compromised by the fact that they have to take classes and beg for grades from professors
2) Professors, who are eternally locked in the struggle for tenure or some other sort of power, or (if they are adjuncts) are eternally locked in the struggle for mere survival, and who can be each others' worst enemies at times
3) Administration, which is largely there to feed the greed which operates at the top of the hierarchy.
This whole structure would fall apart, both private and public, if it weren't for the demand for credentials among the student population and the public at large. Credentials are a zero-sum game as far as the greater society is concerned. They're tickets to a managerial class which ought to include far more people (nearly everyone) than it does, only the further problem is that increased access to credentials does not mean a bigger managerial class. The MD, for instance, is especially valuable because only so few are issued. We'd do better to organize medicine like they do in Cuba, by distributing its skills more evenly among the population. Liberal arts credentials are for sure a zero-sum game -- why get a BA at a liberal arts university when all it really means is a bunch of student loan debt that you'll never be able to pay off? All you're really doing with a BA in History is fattening the portfolios of college administrators.
Once the credentials are devalued to the point of worthlessness, many of America's college structures will be abandoned for lack of funds. We will then need to learn in order to keep society going in the era of abrupt climate change. So why not model our learning institutions on the model of a "union of free producers" one sees in a couple of places in Marx's "Capital"? So, yeah, I'm just throwing stuff out because, honestly, I don't have a lot. I live in the matrix like most of the folks here; for now I keep an eye out my mom, who is 79, and I make a living as one of those adjuncts I mentioned above.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Have you read Communal Luxury, by Kristin Ross?
Really great book about the Paris Commune, though it's too short by half.
Communal Luxury
Though short, it is loaded with references to further reading. She focuses primarily on people like William Morris, Petyr Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus. Though Marx is in there, among many others.
The ideal was that kind of education that leaves no one behind and is intensely broad and holistic in approach. Not one that separates us further, into useful, specialized tiers for billionaires. But one that unites us as a community, cross trains, teaches all to all, federated with other communities. That would be my ideal too.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
-- Albert Camus
This might be useful
I wrote a series a while back which might be relevant... http://unpretentiouscomplexity.blogspot.com/2015/03/econoctopus-deep-and-insidious.html
Yes they believe the environment can solve its problems
and if it doesn't, we can go to Mars. "Trashed one planet, lets try another one."
I believe we are witnessing the failure of capitalism. A time will come when the street people and homeless begin to outnumber those who have homes while thousands of empty spaces exist in houses and condos. When zombie houses and condos are not seen as homes but as investments then a neighbourhood becomes an investment portfolio for foreign billionaires. When condominiums become hotels through Air B&B without paying the taxes of a hotel, where do the people who live and work in the city go to find a place? How will the city (Vancouver, BC Canada for example) function if there are no homes for the workers who run the place?
To thine own self be true.
Yup, When One Market Fails, Another Opens Up. It's a Law of
Economics or something else completely natural.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Also happening in smaller cities like Ithaca, NY
where there is much construction of urban housing in condos and apartments. With rents starting above what many workers can afford. So new construction is for the wealthy, and the workers are priced out, and have to search for affordable housing farther away from the workplace. And here, limited transport possibilities. I live 5 miles away, I think there are two bus (two stops in, two stops out) passes 0.5 miles from my house every weekday. So not useful.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Permaculture has worked out sustainability pretty well
It's a fairly complete theoretical system, with a lot of people making serious (grassroots) efforts to implement as much of it as possible. I don't think the academic economists have much contact with or interest in the real world.
In some respects perhaps.
In others, not so much. It would be nice if permaculture could find me a sustainable job, or a way of paying sustainable rent.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
With no funds but ideas
I would like to set my property into permaculture. 20 acres of trees (Hillside water recharge for the valley), limited logging has been done in the past. I have trees with lumber value (oaks cleared for the house site and driveway were lumbered out and milled for trim here), but I want no more roads (or limited access) for removal, Winter removal by horse? Dunno.
I would also like to plant new species to hope to fast-adapt to climate change and do replacement with lumber of nut species that could increase productivity (carbon sequester) and add value with two-product potential. A dream.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
Some sources for minimal money
badgersett.com has been breeding nut trees & bushes for our climate, etc.: hybrid hazelnuts are furthest developed, and are crosses of European (larger, not hardy, not resistant to our viruses), & two native species for maximum genetic range. A thousand-year planting, potentially, and a protein crop as productive as soybeans, but better. Pecan-hickory & chestnut (roughly equivalent to corn in productivity & calories) hybrids too. Lots of information available there. They sell them as tubelings, seedlings in tubes.
jlhudsonseeds.net has a lot of seeds, including trees, bushes, medicinal & dye plant seeds.
chelseagreen.com has a lot of books you might like - Farming the Woods, etc.
sustainablity vs profit
And the powers that be declare profit! In a corporate world profit is the goal.
I have a BS and MS in agronomy and was on my way to a research career in 1970. The problem is it's corporations that fund research. My interest has always been in sustainability, but that's not where research dollars go. It is the same story with energy. They don't want you to have a self sustaining solar H2 plant in your yard. So I went into teaching and homesteaded on the side instead of hustling money from Montsanto, etc to do research they were willing to fund.
On a personal level it worked out well, but globally we're in a mess. Just take Climate Change. Any thinking person knows we need to leave it in the ground, but the drive for more corporate profit from the energy sector ignores what is best for people and the planet.
We could have a sustainable planet, but I'm afraid it's too little too late. Kinda like Bernie's campaign they will ignore, sideline, distort, and dismiss the calls to change our ways. It is past time for a revolution. Do what you can. Bucky said think global and act local.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Well maybe you can get some of those nice corporate dollars --
if you included some axioms of neoclassical economics in your research? Sure, your idea of "sustainability" wouldn't have much to do with the physical world anymore, but... j/k
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Former NYC major David Dinkins sums it uo
While most are probably glued to MTP I am watching my local Sunday morning news show and today's guest is former NYC mayor Dinkins ...
When asked about why he endorsed and supported HRC over PBO in 2008 he got quite defensive and pointed out he ultimately endorsed Obama. He was pushed to explain why he originally supported HRC and after some reticence he said FRIENDSHIP AND LOYALTY.
and, for me, that explains why we see so much hate towards Bernie.
It has nothing to do with issues, absolutely nothing to do with who was the better choice for the country ... It was and continues to be ALL ABOUT FRIENDSHIP AND ESPECIALLY LOYALTY. The the people outside the party inner circle be damned
Orwell was an optimist