“Ethical Markets is delighted to post this from our distinguished Advisory Board member, evolution biologist Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, who teaches in the MBA program at Chaminade University, Hawaii. We agree with Elisabet, all this is eminently doable!
Only theory-induced blindness and other cognitive biases and vested interests are still blocking such transitions to sustainability everywhere, as we document in our forthcoming e-textbook “MAPPING THE GLOBAL GREENTRANSITION, 2009-2020“!
~Hazel Henderson, Editor.”
Let this Epidemic Inspire a Thriving Hawai’ian Economy
By Elisabet Sahtouris
Day by day I watch in awe as one tiny new virus strain brings down the whole global economy, and at the same time brings enormous good will in raising the aloha spirit of of caring and sharing in people ordered into isolation from one another. Hawai’i is in so cooperative a mood it is willingly shutting down one of its two major sources of income, tourism, and may ultimately be letting go the other, the military, should peace break out. Remember that the first World War ended with a flu epidemic that so reduced Germany’s fighting power that it surrendered.
This very collapse and threat of further collapse could be Hawai’I’s most shining time. What if, realizing the severe threat to our food supply, along with the reduced capacity of unemployed people to buy needed food, our state government offered unemployed workers the paid opportunity to become food growers on all appropriate public lands, dedicating them to growing our self sufficiency in healthy food!
Imagine our most experienced and knowledgeable food growers put in charge of the training and implementation of growing non-toxic food forests and diversified fields with an array of wonderful crops, along with clean ocean farming of seaplants and shellfish needing no feed inputs? Imagine the new farmers wearing positive message masks as they work at required distances from each other. We have all the knowledge to grow food as it should be grown, and our climate and soils support a vast variety of food. Unemployed people now in tourism and the military could also go into food processing and other ventures growing hemp and bamboo to meet a wide variety of other needs from paper to clothing to homes.
Too expensive, you say? Not at all! The state could at any time issue the kind of scrip currency used during the Great Depression as well as earlier to boost or revive economies. Such a currency, perhaps called alohas, would be good only in Hawai’i but could be made interchangeable with dollars if desired and as trust in it grows. The state government issuing it must announce that taxes can be paid in it, and require local landlords and businesses to accept it. Paying the workers in this scrip would immediately bring the local economy to life, and on the path to the island sustainability we need so badly, as other enterprises follow the food production example. The only cost to the government would be the scrip’s printing, though it could easily be a simple digital accounting system as most money is anyway now. No pain; all gain!
Information on such tried and tested alternative currencies solutions abound. And as Rumi said so eloquently:
Why do we stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
________________________
Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD is an evolution biologist and futurist, teaching in Chaminade U’s MBA program