DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
Established in 1995, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) is an ongoing project of the North Carolina Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), primarily through the Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis (PBA). The site is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Amazing Grace; finding Common Ground to Build a future together
'Amazing Grace' and the End of the Slave Trade
February 22, 2007
Two hundred years ago, the passion and oratory of a man named William Wilberforce drove the British Parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Apted, director of Amazing Grace, talks about the film adaptation of the life of Wilberforce.
Guests:
Michael Apted, director, most recently, of the film Amazing Grace, which opens nationwide on Friday, February 23
Eric Metaxas, most recent book is Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; author of many children's books; humor pieces have appeared in Harper's magazine, and The New York Times
Excerpt: 'Amazing Grace'
We often hear about people who "need no introduction," but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it's William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction — whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity — it's Wilberforce.
What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again — and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.
The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.
The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today — and because of Wilberforce — the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it's impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that's the wild miracle of his achievement, that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.
There's hardly a soul alive today who isn't horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can't fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.
The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn't even mention in publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade — on the buying and selling of human beings — but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to being to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle — brutal and heartbreaking — would take twenty years.
Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and the book you now hold. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce's accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his life-long goal on his deathbed.
Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, "preferred party to mankind." But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner, and we can't even look back to see where we've come from.
Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions — with your voice and mine – shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew — and what you and I know today — that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible — no matter the cost.
How is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen "the monster" and are trying to tell everyone else about it — and no one believes them.
To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the "disease" he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mind-set that supported it is gone.
Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization's view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it's nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment; it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.
In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age twenty-six and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God's reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God's reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers' keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one's neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.
As a political figure, he was uniquely positioned to link these ideas to society itself, to the public sphere, and the public sphere, for the first time in history, was able to receive them. And so Wilberforce may perhaps be said to have performed the wedding ceremony between faith and culture. We had suddenly entered a world in which we would never again ask whether it was our responsibility as a society to help the poor and the suffering. We would only quibble about how, about the details — about whether to use public funds or private, for example. But we would never again question whether it was our responsibility as a society to help those less fortunate. That had been settled. Today we call this having a "social conscience," and we can't imagine any modern, civilized society without one.
Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce's first "great object" was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second "great object," one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill. The issues of child labor and factory conditions, the problems of orphans and widows, of prisoners and the sick — all suddenly had champions in people who wanted to help those less fortunate than themselves. At the center of most of these social ventures was the Clapham Circle, an informal but influential community of like-minded souls outside London who plotted good deeds together, and Wilberforce himself was at the center of Clapham. At one point he was officially linked with sixty-nine separate groups dedicated to social reform of one kind or another.
Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.
Unforeseen to him, the fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America — and transform that nation profoundly and forever. Can we imagine an America without its limitless number of organizations dedicated to curing every social ill? Would such an America be America? We might not wish to credit Wilberforce with inventing America, but it can reasonably be said that the America we know wouldn't exist without Wilberforce.
As a result of the efforts of Wilberforce and Clapham, social "improvement" was so fashionable by the Victorian era that do-gooders and do-goodism had become targets of derision, and they have been so ever since. We have simply forgotten that in the eighteenth century, before Wilberforce and Clapham, the poor and suffering were almost entirely without champions in the public or private sphere. We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God." Even where this view does exist, as in societies and cultures informed by an Eastern, karmic view of the world, we refuse to believe it. We arrogantly seem to insist that everyone on the planet think as we do about society's obligation to the unfortunate, but they don't.
No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed like to the men and women of the nineteenth century, for whom the memory of what he had done was still bright and vivid.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both hailed him as an inspiration and example. Lincoln said every schoolboy knew Wilberforce's name and what he had done. Frederick Douglass gushed that Wilberforce's "faith, persistence, and enduring enthusiasm" had "thawed the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong arm of that government to in mercy put an end to his bondage." Poets and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot sang his praises, as did Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier. Byron called him "the moral Washington of Africa."
The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce's "whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men. Not a moment of his time is lost. He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing ... Oh, that such men as Mr. Wilberforce were more common in this world. So much human blood would not be shed to gratify the malice and revenge of a few wicked, interested men."
The American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison went further yet. "His voice had a silvery cadence," he said of Wilberforce, "his face a benevolently pleasing smile, and his eye a fine intellectual expression. In his conversation he was fluent, yet modest; remarkably exact and elegant in his diction; cautious in forming conclusions; searching in his interrogations; and skillful in weighing testimony. In his manner he combined dignity with simplicity, and childlike affability with becoming gracefulness. How perfectly do those great elements of character harmonize in the same person, to wit — dovelike gentleness and amazing energy — deep humility and adventurous daring! ... These were mingled in the soul of Wilberforce."
An Italian nobleman who saw Wilberforce in his later years wrote: "When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the opening of Parliament, every one contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic: as the Washington of humanity."
We blanch at such encomia today, for indeed, ours is an age deeply suspicious of greatness. Watergate seems to have come down upon us like a portcullis, cutting us off forever from anything approaching such hero worship, especially of political figures. With the certainty of a Captain Queeg, we are forever on the lookout for the worm in the apple, the steroid in the sprinter or slugger. And lurking behind every happy biographical detail we see the skulking figure of Parson Weems and his pious fibs about cherry trees and — of all things — telling the truth.
If ever someone could restore our ability to again see simple goodness, it should be Wilberforce. If we cannot cheer someone who literally brought "freedom to the captives" and bequeathed to the world that infinitely transformative engine we call a social conscience, for whom may we ever cheer? Especially knowing that he has been more forgotten than remembered, and that he himself would have been the first to denigrate his accomplishments — as we can see from his diaries and letters, which show us that he went to the grave sincerely and deeply regretted that he hadn't done much more.
In the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. "Things have come to a pretty pass," he famously thundered, "when one should permit one's religion to invade public life." For this lapidary inanity, the jeers and catcalls and raspberries and howling laughter of history's judgment will echo forever — as they should.
But after all, it is a very pretty pass indeed. And how very glad we are that one man led us to that pretty pass, to that golden doorway, and then guided us through the mountains to a world we hadn't known could exist.
February 22, 2007
Two hundred years ago, the passion and oratory of a man named William Wilberforce drove the British Parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Apted, director of Amazing Grace, talks about the film adaptation of the life of Wilberforce.
Guests:
Michael Apted, director, most recently, of the film Amazing Grace, which opens nationwide on Friday, February 23
Eric Metaxas, most recent book is Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; author of many children's books; humor pieces have appeared in Harper's magazine, and The New York Times
Excerpt: 'Amazing Grace'
We often hear about people who "need no introduction," but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it's William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction — whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity — it's Wilberforce.
What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again — and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.
The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.
The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today — and because of Wilberforce — the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it's impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that's the wild miracle of his achievement, that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.
There's hardly a soul alive today who isn't horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can't fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.
The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn't even mention in publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade — on the buying and selling of human beings — but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to being to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle — brutal and heartbreaking — would take twenty years.
Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and the book you now hold. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce's accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his life-long goal on his deathbed.
Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, "preferred party to mankind." But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner, and we can't even look back to see where we've come from.
Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions — with your voice and mine – shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew — and what you and I know today — that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible — no matter the cost.
How is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen "the monster" and are trying to tell everyone else about it — and no one believes them.
To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the "disease" he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mind-set that supported it is gone.
Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization's view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it's nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment; it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.
In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age twenty-six and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God's reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God's reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers' keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one's neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.
As a political figure, he was uniquely positioned to link these ideas to society itself, to the public sphere, and the public sphere, for the first time in history, was able to receive them. And so Wilberforce may perhaps be said to have performed the wedding ceremony between faith and culture. We had suddenly entered a world in which we would never again ask whether it was our responsibility as a society to help the poor and the suffering. We would only quibble about how, about the details — about whether to use public funds or private, for example. But we would never again question whether it was our responsibility as a society to help those less fortunate. That had been settled. Today we call this having a "social conscience," and we can't imagine any modern, civilized society without one.
Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce's first "great object" was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second "great object," one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill. The issues of child labor and factory conditions, the problems of orphans and widows, of prisoners and the sick — all suddenly had champions in people who wanted to help those less fortunate than themselves. At the center of most of these social ventures was the Clapham Circle, an informal but influential community of like-minded souls outside London who plotted good deeds together, and Wilberforce himself was at the center of Clapham. At one point he was officially linked with sixty-nine separate groups dedicated to social reform of one kind or another.
Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.
Unforeseen to him, the fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America — and transform that nation profoundly and forever. Can we imagine an America without its limitless number of organizations dedicated to curing every social ill? Would such an America be America? We might not wish to credit Wilberforce with inventing America, but it can reasonably be said that the America we know wouldn't exist without Wilberforce.
As a result of the efforts of Wilberforce and Clapham, social "improvement" was so fashionable by the Victorian era that do-gooders and do-goodism had become targets of derision, and they have been so ever since. We have simply forgotten that in the eighteenth century, before Wilberforce and Clapham, the poor and suffering were almost entirely without champions in the public or private sphere. We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God." Even where this view does exist, as in societies and cultures informed by an Eastern, karmic view of the world, we refuse to believe it. We arrogantly seem to insist that everyone on the planet think as we do about society's obligation to the unfortunate, but they don't.
No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed like to the men and women of the nineteenth century, for whom the memory of what he had done was still bright and vivid.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both hailed him as an inspiration and example. Lincoln said every schoolboy knew Wilberforce's name and what he had done. Frederick Douglass gushed that Wilberforce's "faith, persistence, and enduring enthusiasm" had "thawed the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong arm of that government to in mercy put an end to his bondage." Poets and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot sang his praises, as did Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier. Byron called him "the moral Washington of Africa."
The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce's "whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men. Not a moment of his time is lost. He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing ... Oh, that such men as Mr. Wilberforce were more common in this world. So much human blood would not be shed to gratify the malice and revenge of a few wicked, interested men."
The American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison went further yet. "His voice had a silvery cadence," he said of Wilberforce, "his face a benevolently pleasing smile, and his eye a fine intellectual expression. In his conversation he was fluent, yet modest; remarkably exact and elegant in his diction; cautious in forming conclusions; searching in his interrogations; and skillful in weighing testimony. In his manner he combined dignity with simplicity, and childlike affability with becoming gracefulness. How perfectly do those great elements of character harmonize in the same person, to wit — dovelike gentleness and amazing energy — deep humility and adventurous daring! ... These were mingled in the soul of Wilberforce."
An Italian nobleman who saw Wilberforce in his later years wrote: "When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the opening of Parliament, every one contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic: as the Washington of humanity."
We blanch at such encomia today, for indeed, ours is an age deeply suspicious of greatness. Watergate seems to have come down upon us like a portcullis, cutting us off forever from anything approaching such hero worship, especially of political figures. With the certainty of a Captain Queeg, we are forever on the lookout for the worm in the apple, the steroid in the sprinter or slugger. And lurking behind every happy biographical detail we see the skulking figure of Parson Weems and his pious fibs about cherry trees and — of all things — telling the truth.
If ever someone could restore our ability to again see simple goodness, it should be Wilberforce. If we cannot cheer someone who literally brought "freedom to the captives" and bequeathed to the world that infinitely transformative engine we call a social conscience, for whom may we ever cheer? Especially knowing that he has been more forgotten than remembered, and that he himself would have been the first to denigrate his accomplishments — as we can see from his diaries and letters, which show us that he went to the grave sincerely and deeply regretted that he hadn't done much more.
In the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. "Things have come to a pretty pass," he famously thundered, "when one should permit one's religion to invade public life." For this lapidary inanity, the jeers and catcalls and raspberries and howling laughter of history's judgment will echo forever — as they should.
But after all, it is a very pretty pass indeed. And how very glad we are that one man led us to that pretty pass, to that golden doorway, and then guided us through the mountains to a world we hadn't known could exist.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Creative Capitalism; L3C, Low-profit Limited Liability Company
L3C
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is a legal form of business entity in the United States that was created to bridge the gap between non-profit and for-profit investing by providing a structure that facilitates investments in socially beneficial, for-profit ventures while simplifying compliance with Internal Revenue Service rules for "Program Related Investments".
Legislation
Vermont. The pioneer legislation approving the L3C as a legally-recognized form of business entity (House Bill 0775) was approved by the full Vermont House of Representatives on February 27, 2008 and by the Vermont Senate on April 11, 2008. It was signed into law by Governor of Vermont James H. Douglas on April 30, 2008. As of August 10, 2009 Vermont lists about 60 L3Cs in the state database, including a chess camp, theater, alternative energy companies, publishers, food companies and numerous consulting firms. [9]
Michigan. Introduced by Traverse City Republican State Senator Jason Allen on July 24, 2008, Senate Bill 1445 was signed into law on January 16, 2009[10] as an amendment to the Michigan Limited Liability Company Act[11] by Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm. The bill was supported by the Council of Michigan Foundations[12], and the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth[13].
Utah. February 2009 - State Senator Lyle Hillyard (Utah politician) from District 25 introduced the Low-profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 on February 2, 2009. The Act is sponsored in the House by State Representative Kraig Powell of District 54.On March 23, 2009, Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. signed the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 into law. [14]
Wyoming. January 2009 - Wyoming State Representative, Dan Zwonitzer, introduced the L3C bill HB0182. On February 26, 2009 Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed the L3C Legislation into law.
Illinois. August 2009 - Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C bill on August 4, 2009. The law will take effect on January 1, 2010. [2] The law aims to make it easier for social enterprises to attract capital, said Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who sponsored the bill. "Foundations have a growing interest to not only make grants that achieve a social purpose but also use investments to do that," Steans said. Chicago attorney and financial adviser Marc Lane of Marc J. Lane Wealth Group, who helped spearhead the Illinois legislation, said the L3C law could create new jobs by supporting social enterprises that otherwise couldn't exist. It's particularly timely given the credit crunch, he said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C
The L3C: A More Creative Capitalism
By Jim Witkin | January 15th, 2009
During his 2007 Harvard commencement address, Bill Gates, now the world’s best funded philanthropist, called on the graduates to invent “a more creative capitalism” where “we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”
It doesn’t take a Harvard grad (or Harvard dropout like Gates) to understand that traditional market forces mostly work against the notion of a socially beneficial enterprise (one that seeks social returns first and financial second). Existing for-profit corporate structures demand a higher financial return than a social enterprise can usually deliver; while non-profit organizations have limited access to capital and a tax-exempt format that limits a strong profit orientation. If the social enterprise field is to evolve and grow, what’s needed is a hybrid of the two forms, a structure that supports a “low profit corporation.”
Enter the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a new corporate structure designed to attract a wide range of investment sources thereby improving the viability of social ventures. In April 2008, Vermont became the first state to recognize the L3C as a legal corporate structure. Similar legislation is pending in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina. But if the L3C seems like the right choice for your social enterprise, you don’t have to wait! L3Cs formed in Vermont can be used in any state.
Flexible Ownership Attracts a Range of Investors
The goal of the L3C form is to bring together a mix of investment money from a variety of sources. This process starts with investments from Foundations known as Program Related Investments (PRIs). Foundations are required to spend at least five percent of their assets in a given fiscal year in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. They have two basic options for spending their money: they can make grants, where there is no financial return on the money, or they can make program-related investments (PRIs) investing in for-profit ventures and potentially earn a return.
But to qualify as a PRI, the investment must relate to the Foundation’s mission and the risk/reward ratio must exceed that of a standard market-driven investment (ie, the risk must be higher, and the return lower). Surprisingly, the use of PRIs by Foundations is limited even with the potential to earn a small return. Because of burdensome and costly IRS requirements to verify PRIs, many foundations shy away from investing in for-profit ventures due to the uncertainty of whether they would qualify as PRIs.
Unlike the Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), the L3C is explicitly formed to further a socially beneficial mission. The L3C’s operating agreement specifically outlines its PRI-qualified purpose. This should make it much easier for Foundations to make program related investments in social ventures while ensuring their tax-exempt status remains secure.
Like the LLC, the L3C is able to form flexible partnerships where ownership rights can be tailored to meet the requirements of each partner. This flexibility permits a tranched or layered investment and ownership structure. The Foundation’s L3C membership stake provides for a very low rate of return and can be subordinate to the other investors. Because the Foundation can invest through PRIs at less than the market rate while embracing higher risk levels, this lowers the risk to other investors and increases their potential rate of return. So the remaining L3C memberships can then be marketed at risk/return profiles necessary to attract market driven investors.
The end result: the L3C is able to leverage Foundation PRIs to access a wide range of investment dollars through a flexible partnership structure. Additionally, profit and loss flow through the L3C to its members and are taxed according to each investor’s particular tax situation, making it easier for non-profits and for-profits to partner together.
Some examples of L3C entities that have been created or are in the process: carbon trading, alternative energy, food bank processing, social services, social benefit consulting and media, arts funding, job creation programs, economic development, housing for low income and aging populations, medical facilities, environmental remediation, and medical research.
L3C Advocacy
The L3C concept was formed by Robert Lang, CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Inc. Marcus Owens, a tax attorney with Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, wrote the basic law. The Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation has funded the Americans for Community Development whose purpose is to promote the L3C and the adoption of this new corporate form in all fifty states. Mr. Lang and others formed the first L3C, L3C Advisors, for the purpose of helping social ventures structure, organize & finance L3C’s.
The L3C is still in “proof of concept” form, but will be put to the test this year. Because the first L3Cs were formed in 2008, this means 2009 will be the first year that the concept will be tested with the IRS. Hopefully, the IRS will readily accept Foundation investments in L3Cs as valid PRIs. Steve Gunderson, CEO of the Council on Foundations, which supports the L3C approach says “we’re optimistic” that the IRS will also support this approach to PRI investing.
The economic realities of connecting social needs with capital markets is leading to innovations like the L3C form. As the problems that social ventures try to solve get bigger and more widespread, hopefully these types of innovations will keep pace.
Nonprofit Law Blog
L3C - Developments & Resources
http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/home/2009/03/l3c-developments-resources.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/01/the-l3c-a-more-creative-capitalism/
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is a legal form of business entity in the United States that was created to bridge the gap between non-profit and for-profit investing by providing a structure that facilitates investments in socially beneficial, for-profit ventures while simplifying compliance with Internal Revenue Service rules for "Program Related Investments".
Legislation
Vermont. The pioneer legislation approving the L3C as a legally-recognized form of business entity (House Bill 0775) was approved by the full Vermont House of Representatives on February 27, 2008 and by the Vermont Senate on April 11, 2008. It was signed into law by Governor of Vermont James H. Douglas on April 30, 2008. As of August 10, 2009 Vermont lists about 60 L3Cs in the state database, including a chess camp, theater, alternative energy companies, publishers, food companies and numerous consulting firms. [9]
Michigan. Introduced by Traverse City Republican State Senator Jason Allen on July 24, 2008, Senate Bill 1445 was signed into law on January 16, 2009[10] as an amendment to the Michigan Limited Liability Company Act[11] by Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm. The bill was supported by the Council of Michigan Foundations[12], and the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth[13].
Utah. February 2009 - State Senator Lyle Hillyard (Utah politician) from District 25 introduced the Low-profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 on February 2, 2009. The Act is sponsored in the House by State Representative Kraig Powell of District 54.On March 23, 2009, Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. signed the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 into law. [14]
Wyoming. January 2009 - Wyoming State Representative, Dan Zwonitzer, introduced the L3C bill HB0182. On February 26, 2009 Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed the L3C Legislation into law.
Illinois. August 2009 - Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C bill on August 4, 2009. The law will take effect on January 1, 2010. [2] The law aims to make it easier for social enterprises to attract capital, said Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who sponsored the bill. "Foundations have a growing interest to not only make grants that achieve a social purpose but also use investments to do that," Steans said. Chicago attorney and financial adviser Marc Lane of Marc J. Lane Wealth Group, who helped spearhead the Illinois legislation, said the L3C law could create new jobs by supporting social enterprises that otherwise couldn't exist. It's particularly timely given the credit crunch, he said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C
The L3C: A More Creative Capitalism
By Jim Witkin | January 15th, 2009
During his 2007 Harvard commencement address, Bill Gates, now the world’s best funded philanthropist, called on the graduates to invent “a more creative capitalism” where “we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”
It doesn’t take a Harvard grad (or Harvard dropout like Gates) to understand that traditional market forces mostly work against the notion of a socially beneficial enterprise (one that seeks social returns first and financial second). Existing for-profit corporate structures demand a higher financial return than a social enterprise can usually deliver; while non-profit organizations have limited access to capital and a tax-exempt format that limits a strong profit orientation. If the social enterprise field is to evolve and grow, what’s needed is a hybrid of the two forms, a structure that supports a “low profit corporation.”
Enter the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a new corporate structure designed to attract a wide range of investment sources thereby improving the viability of social ventures. In April 2008, Vermont became the first state to recognize the L3C as a legal corporate structure. Similar legislation is pending in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina. But if the L3C seems like the right choice for your social enterprise, you don’t have to wait! L3Cs formed in Vermont can be used in any state.
Flexible Ownership Attracts a Range of Investors
The goal of the L3C form is to bring together a mix of investment money from a variety of sources. This process starts with investments from Foundations known as Program Related Investments (PRIs). Foundations are required to spend at least five percent of their assets in a given fiscal year in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. They have two basic options for spending their money: they can make grants, where there is no financial return on the money, or they can make program-related investments (PRIs) investing in for-profit ventures and potentially earn a return.
But to qualify as a PRI, the investment must relate to the Foundation’s mission and the risk/reward ratio must exceed that of a standard market-driven investment (ie, the risk must be higher, and the return lower). Surprisingly, the use of PRIs by Foundations is limited even with the potential to earn a small return. Because of burdensome and costly IRS requirements to verify PRIs, many foundations shy away from investing in for-profit ventures due to the uncertainty of whether they would qualify as PRIs.
Unlike the Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), the L3C is explicitly formed to further a socially beneficial mission. The L3C’s operating agreement specifically outlines its PRI-qualified purpose. This should make it much easier for Foundations to make program related investments in social ventures while ensuring their tax-exempt status remains secure.
Like the LLC, the L3C is able to form flexible partnerships where ownership rights can be tailored to meet the requirements of each partner. This flexibility permits a tranched or layered investment and ownership structure. The Foundation’s L3C membership stake provides for a very low rate of return and can be subordinate to the other investors. Because the Foundation can invest through PRIs at less than the market rate while embracing higher risk levels, this lowers the risk to other investors and increases their potential rate of return. So the remaining L3C memberships can then be marketed at risk/return profiles necessary to attract market driven investors.
The end result: the L3C is able to leverage Foundation PRIs to access a wide range of investment dollars through a flexible partnership structure. Additionally, profit and loss flow through the L3C to its members and are taxed according to each investor’s particular tax situation, making it easier for non-profits and for-profits to partner together.
Some examples of L3C entities that have been created or are in the process: carbon trading, alternative energy, food bank processing, social services, social benefit consulting and media, arts funding, job creation programs, economic development, housing for low income and aging populations, medical facilities, environmental remediation, and medical research.
L3C Advocacy
The L3C concept was formed by Robert Lang, CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Inc. Marcus Owens, a tax attorney with Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, wrote the basic law. The Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation has funded the Americans for Community Development whose purpose is to promote the L3C and the adoption of this new corporate form in all fifty states. Mr. Lang and others formed the first L3C, L3C Advisors, for the purpose of helping social ventures structure, organize & finance L3C’s.
The L3C is still in “proof of concept” form, but will be put to the test this year. Because the first L3Cs were formed in 2008, this means 2009 will be the first year that the concept will be tested with the IRS. Hopefully, the IRS will readily accept Foundation investments in L3Cs as valid PRIs. Steve Gunderson, CEO of the Council on Foundations, which supports the L3C approach says “we’re optimistic” that the IRS will also support this approach to PRI investing.
The economic realities of connecting social needs with capital markets is leading to innovations like the L3C form. As the problems that social ventures try to solve get bigger and more widespread, hopefully these types of innovations will keep pace.
Nonprofit Law Blog
L3C - Developments & Resources
http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/home/2009/03/l3c-developments-resources.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/01/the-l3c-a-more-creative-capitalism/
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Smart City Radio
Smart City is a weekly, hour-long public radio talk show that takes an in-depth look at urban life, the people, places, ideas and trends shaping cities. Host Carol Coletta talks with national and international public policy experts, elected officials, economists, business leaders, artists, developers, planners and others for a penetrating discussion of urban issues. You can find a list of radio stations that air Smart City here
The guests on today's show offered ideas about building sustainability in areas of economic distress and poverty.
Katy Locker, Dave Egner and Prathima Manohar
Detroit is in the news again with Time Magazine launching a bureau of sorts from the city. But to get a real local's perspective we'll talk with Katy Locker and David Egner of the Hudson Webber Foundation. Hudson Webber provides grants to improve the quality
The guests on today's show offered ideas about building sustainability in areas of economic distress and poverty.
Katy Locker, Dave Egner and Prathima Manohar
Detroit is in the news again with Time Magazine launching a bureau of sorts from the city. But to get a real local's perspective we'll talk with Katy Locker and David Egner of the Hudson Webber Foundation. Hudson Webber provides grants to improve the quality
Speaking of Faith
Winner of a Peabody Award, Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett is public radio's weekly program about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas." We are produced and distributed by American Public Media and currently heard on over 200 public radio stations across the U.S. and globally via the Web and podcast.
Krista takes a narrative, or first-person, approach to religious and philosophical conversation. She draws out the intersection of theology and human experience, of grand religious ideas and real life. A weekly national program since July 2001, Speaking of Faith is not so much about religion per se, but about drawing out compelling and challenging voices of wisdom on the most important subjects of 21st-century life; thereby creating a different kind of in-depth, revealing, illuminating dialogue than can be elicited by traditional journalistic treatments and debates. Topics range from "Einstein and the Mind of God" to "The Spirituality of Parenting" to "Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century."
October 15, 2009
We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship and acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.
Krista takes a narrative, or first-person, approach to religious and philosophical conversation. She draws out the intersection of theology and human experience, of grand religious ideas and real life. A weekly national program since July 2001, Speaking of Faith is not so much about religion per se, but about drawing out compelling and challenging voices of wisdom on the most important subjects of 21st-century life; thereby creating a different kind of in-depth, revealing, illuminating dialogue than can be elicited by traditional journalistic treatments and debates. Topics range from "Einstein and the Mind of God" to "The Spirituality of Parenting" to "Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century."
October 15, 2009
We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship and acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
THE ENERGY-ENVIRONMENT-DEVELOPMENT TRIAD
Concluding talk, Energy Pact Conference, Geneva, March 16-17 2009
By Johan Galtung 23-Mar-09
A very felicitous idea to bring together three major concerns in what could become a political, economic and intellectual pact. Like a poor, creative family in Kerala wanting to boil their rice, having neither electricity nor kerosene nor wood nor matches but a sheet of black paper, a used tire, a piece of window glass and noon sunshine. With the sheet on the ground, the pot with water and rice on it, the used tire around the pot and the glass on top of that for isolation, the rice is boiled in half an hour's time.
Renewable energy from that inexhaustible source, reusing rather than recycling waste, meeting basic needs (for a single person use a bicycle tire, for a nuclear family a car tire, for the extended family a truck tire, for more a bulldozer tire). Triadic thinking. Ugly? Put it all in a nicely decorated box. Primitive-traditional-modern-postmodern? Irrelevant problem.
The basic point is to integrate the three, looking for synergies; all the time mindful of the old Hindu wisdom that if we pursue only one we may not even get that one (for an example read that primer on political economics, John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman). There is holism at work. Sectorial-global approaches--one at the time--are needed, but we have many huge bureaucracies and single-minded academic disciplines. We also need integrated approaches focused on communities, rural and urban, where people live and feel where the shoes are pinching when only one is pursued, and can put their ingenuity to work.
As a matter of fact, "development ministries" might be wise to bring communities from all over the world--no region, no country has any monopoly on wisdom--together for exchange of positive experiences. There are, say, two million of them and more wisdom to draw upon than from 200 states or 2,000 nations.
Energy impacts on environment impacts on development, with conflicts all over. How to create cooperative, harmonious peace?
Take the major CO2 excess (and N2O, CH4). Years ago Japan piped CO2 from factories into greenhouses designed for agriculture next to the factory, speeding up the synthesis, producing oxygen, privileging communities mixing industry and agricultures. Putting CO2 to giant use, serving the whole triad, should be possible.
How much global warming is part of a mega-process after the ice age peaked, say, 10-15,000 years ago, and how much is human-made, is a major controversy. Whatever the percentage we should do our best, but quota-trading is not the approach. It smacks of somebody practicing slavery buying some quotas from those with a slavery deficit. The task is to reduce slavery and carbon emission, not to legitimize with fake markets. Much may be irreversible.
But that works both ways, flooding lowlands here, thawing icecaps and permafrost there (with its problems), liberating land in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia. Who will pay for the move? If the polluter pays then he who pollutes most will pay most, pointing at USA-China. Or we all share. Cooperation.
We have had development with less developed countries (LDCs) now having things found in the more developed countries (MDCs), electricity, computers, highways, etc., but still with huge masses suffering at the bottom of countries at the bottom, exposed to capitalist machines pumping wealth from bottom to top, producing misery at the bottom (125,000 daily deaths, 25,000 from hunger, 100,000 from preventable-curable diseases), and excess liquidity, trading absurd products, at the top.
Result: a double crisis, one permanent another conjunctural, synergizing, feeding each other. Less so, however, in Islamic banks limiting loans to 30 percent of the capital (sharia). The eco-quake crisis hits those financially closer to Ground Zero, Wall street, more than others.
There are remedies for the permanent crisis. Labor-intensive agriculture and small farms are more efficient and softer on the environment. Water can be distilled using parabolic mirrors on sunshine, pumped from oceans to deserts in oil pipelines drying up as the oil madness subsides; and, Khosla's proposal, in cubic containers that can be used LEGO like to build houses. Plants Israel-Palestine, and Israel-Lebanon, might be peace-building.
Health can be served through dense networks of polyclinics and health workers who know enough to know what they do not know, top rate hospitals accessible by fleets of helicopters, generic medicines, hygiene everywhere. Education by internet run by solar energy, monopolized by no region, and alphabetization by students (Castro), and army officers (Saddam), living with the illiterate.
Why does it not happen? The energy costs serving the poor are small, the impact on the environment soft. Simply because:
- it is convenient to have poor people who can be paid poorly; and
- lest they treat us as badly moving upwards as we treated them.
This can best be handled in communities with rich and poor working together, like men and women, and older, middle-aged and children, so important as their habits are shaped for the future. China today uses much public-private-people community cooperation.
But there is another side to this issue: we should learn to lift the bottom without threatening the top, preparing them for the inevitable. Like men in patriarchic Spain when women rise. A winning argument in that case might be that with more ability to enjoy the joy of you partner sex becomes better. Equity = peace.
Renewable energy resources for conversion and storage is not good enough. We need local conversion to cut down transportation pollution. And we need energy equality, exploring a variety of profiles among, say, ten energy resources. High-low on all gives us 1024 profiles for all kinds of local resource endowment.
Military force to control resources creates huge suffering; equality helps. Like cooperation between the biggest consumer, USA, and the potentially biggest producer, Iran, on renewables (hydro: gravity and waves; bio: mass and genetic; thermic: geo and hydro; solar: heat and electric; wind, some carbon, some nuclear).
Make energy--underlying all basic needs--free, like streets and parks, health and education in decent countries, up to a point when the user pays for high speed motor highways etc. From tubes, sockets, free panels, like the Internet should be freely available all over. Give each household a 1m3 contraption on four wheels to roll into the sunshine for heating, then tapping for all purposes.
This would help people overcoming misery considerably. As would a labor-based economy next to the money-based one. If an Euro equals an Euro, why should not an hour lecture on mediation by a professor equal an hour cleaning by a cleaning man or woman? If we all have equal value so do hours of our lives. Easily done on a community basis; like local currencies to stimulate using local nature-production-consumption economic cycles. As would a basic needs-oriented economy like health for oil (Cuba-Venezuela).
Markets can make miracles, but a cure-all they are not, nor are them self-regulating. The three classical production factors land-labor-capital can also read nature-humans-capital. Economists have canonized capital equating economic growth with capital growth. How about Nature growth - meaning increased complexity based on diversity and symbiosis? How about Human growth beyond basic needs for survival-wellness-freedom-identity? The spiritual dimension, creating, transcending, not limited to optimization by those prisoners of prisoner's games, the economists. Thinking New!
We need a Capital-ism not going amok. But we also need a broader economics, with Nature-ism and Human-ism. As we see today.
__________________________
Concluding talk, Energy Pact Conference, Geneva, March 16-17 2009.
http://www.transcend.org/tms/article_detail.php?article_id=995
By Johan Galtung 23-Mar-09
A very felicitous idea to bring together three major concerns in what could become a political, economic and intellectual pact. Like a poor, creative family in Kerala wanting to boil their rice, having neither electricity nor kerosene nor wood nor matches but a sheet of black paper, a used tire, a piece of window glass and noon sunshine. With the sheet on the ground, the pot with water and rice on it, the used tire around the pot and the glass on top of that for isolation, the rice is boiled in half an hour's time.
Renewable energy from that inexhaustible source, reusing rather than recycling waste, meeting basic needs (for a single person use a bicycle tire, for a nuclear family a car tire, for the extended family a truck tire, for more a bulldozer tire). Triadic thinking. Ugly? Put it all in a nicely decorated box. Primitive-traditional-modern-postmodern? Irrelevant problem.
The basic point is to integrate the three, looking for synergies; all the time mindful of the old Hindu wisdom that if we pursue only one we may not even get that one (for an example read that primer on political economics, John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman). There is holism at work. Sectorial-global approaches--one at the time--are needed, but we have many huge bureaucracies and single-minded academic disciplines. We also need integrated approaches focused on communities, rural and urban, where people live and feel where the shoes are pinching when only one is pursued, and can put their ingenuity to work.
As a matter of fact, "development ministries" might be wise to bring communities from all over the world--no region, no country has any monopoly on wisdom--together for exchange of positive experiences. There are, say, two million of them and more wisdom to draw upon than from 200 states or 2,000 nations.
Energy impacts on environment impacts on development, with conflicts all over. How to create cooperative, harmonious peace?
Take the major CO2 excess (and N2O, CH4). Years ago Japan piped CO2 from factories into greenhouses designed for agriculture next to the factory, speeding up the synthesis, producing oxygen, privileging communities mixing industry and agricultures. Putting CO2 to giant use, serving the whole triad, should be possible.
How much global warming is part of a mega-process after the ice age peaked, say, 10-15,000 years ago, and how much is human-made, is a major controversy. Whatever the percentage we should do our best, but quota-trading is not the approach. It smacks of somebody practicing slavery buying some quotas from those with a slavery deficit. The task is to reduce slavery and carbon emission, not to legitimize with fake markets. Much may be irreversible.
But that works both ways, flooding lowlands here, thawing icecaps and permafrost there (with its problems), liberating land in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia. Who will pay for the move? If the polluter pays then he who pollutes most will pay most, pointing at USA-China. Or we all share. Cooperation.
We have had development with less developed countries (LDCs) now having things found in the more developed countries (MDCs), electricity, computers, highways, etc., but still with huge masses suffering at the bottom of countries at the bottom, exposed to capitalist machines pumping wealth from bottom to top, producing misery at the bottom (125,000 daily deaths, 25,000 from hunger, 100,000 from preventable-curable diseases), and excess liquidity, trading absurd products, at the top.
Result: a double crisis, one permanent another conjunctural, synergizing, feeding each other. Less so, however, in Islamic banks limiting loans to 30 percent of the capital (sharia). The eco-quake crisis hits those financially closer to Ground Zero, Wall street, more than others.
There are remedies for the permanent crisis. Labor-intensive agriculture and small farms are more efficient and softer on the environment. Water can be distilled using parabolic mirrors on sunshine, pumped from oceans to deserts in oil pipelines drying up as the oil madness subsides; and, Khosla's proposal, in cubic containers that can be used LEGO like to build houses. Plants Israel-Palestine, and Israel-Lebanon, might be peace-building.
Health can be served through dense networks of polyclinics and health workers who know enough to know what they do not know, top rate hospitals accessible by fleets of helicopters, generic medicines, hygiene everywhere. Education by internet run by solar energy, monopolized by no region, and alphabetization by students (Castro), and army officers (Saddam), living with the illiterate.
Why does it not happen? The energy costs serving the poor are small, the impact on the environment soft. Simply because:
- it is convenient to have poor people who can be paid poorly; and
- lest they treat us as badly moving upwards as we treated them.
This can best be handled in communities with rich and poor working together, like men and women, and older, middle-aged and children, so important as their habits are shaped for the future. China today uses much public-private-people community cooperation.
But there is another side to this issue: we should learn to lift the bottom without threatening the top, preparing them for the inevitable. Like men in patriarchic Spain when women rise. A winning argument in that case might be that with more ability to enjoy the joy of you partner sex becomes better. Equity = peace.
Renewable energy resources for conversion and storage is not good enough. We need local conversion to cut down transportation pollution. And we need energy equality, exploring a variety of profiles among, say, ten energy resources. High-low on all gives us 1024 profiles for all kinds of local resource endowment.
Military force to control resources creates huge suffering; equality helps. Like cooperation between the biggest consumer, USA, and the potentially biggest producer, Iran, on renewables (hydro: gravity and waves; bio: mass and genetic; thermic: geo and hydro; solar: heat and electric; wind, some carbon, some nuclear).
Make energy--underlying all basic needs--free, like streets and parks, health and education in decent countries, up to a point when the user pays for high speed motor highways etc. From tubes, sockets, free panels, like the Internet should be freely available all over. Give each household a 1m3 contraption on four wheels to roll into the sunshine for heating, then tapping for all purposes.
This would help people overcoming misery considerably. As would a labor-based economy next to the money-based one. If an Euro equals an Euro, why should not an hour lecture on mediation by a professor equal an hour cleaning by a cleaning man or woman? If we all have equal value so do hours of our lives. Easily done on a community basis; like local currencies to stimulate using local nature-production-consumption economic cycles. As would a basic needs-oriented economy like health for oil (Cuba-Venezuela).
Markets can make miracles, but a cure-all they are not, nor are them self-regulating. The three classical production factors land-labor-capital can also read nature-humans-capital. Economists have canonized capital equating economic growth with capital growth. How about Nature growth - meaning increased complexity based on diversity and symbiosis? How about Human growth beyond basic needs for survival-wellness-freedom-identity? The spiritual dimension, creating, transcending, not limited to optimization by those prisoners of prisoner's games, the economists. Thinking New!
We need a Capital-ism not going amok. But we also need a broader economics, with Nature-ism and Human-ism. As we see today.
__________________________
Concluding talk, Energy Pact Conference, Geneva, March 16-17 2009.
http://www.transcend.org/tms/article_detail.php?article_id=995
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Challenging Existing Social Conditions; Social Justice is the foundation of a Green Future
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
~Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and influential theorist of education
Justice in the Context of Environmental Sustainability
Kyle D. Brown, Ph.D.
Mainstream environmental designers, academic institutions, politicians, and non-governmental and governmental organizations have embraced the concept of environmental sustainability. Confusion may abound over a precise definition of the term as various organizations and interests adopt it for their own use, but as Scott Campbell (1996) declared over 10 years ago in an article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, “In the battle of big public ideas, sustainability has won: the task of the coming years is simply to work out the details and to narrow the gap between its theory and practice” (p.310).
One of the details still being worked out is the specific relationship of environmental sustainability to social justice. It is well recognized that social inequities are often compounded by unsustainable systems. These systems adversely impact marginalized communities through pollution, resource consumption, and environmental exploitation. Continue article here.
http://www.informedesign.com/_news/nov_v05r-p.pdf
"Many impoverished people, living in racially segregated neighborhoods, express adherence to mainstream American mores; hard work, family loyalties and individual achievement are part of their cultural repertory. Nevertheless, the translation of values into action is shaped by the tangible milieu that encircles them. So, incidentally, is the ability of affluent families to actualize values into behavior."
~M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly
The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality
Excerpted from The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) website. Full article can be found here.
Michael B. Teitz, Public Policy Institute of California and University of California, Berkeley
Karen Chapple
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Over the past 40 years, poverty among the inhabitants of U.S. inner cities has remained stubbornly resistant to public policy prescriptions. Especially for African Americans and Latinos, the gap between their economic well-being and that of the mainstream has widened despite persistent and repeated efforts to address the problem. At the same time, a continuing stream of research has sought to explain urban poverty, with a wide variety of explanations put forward as the basis for policy. This paper reviews that research, organizing it according to eight major explanations or hypotheses: structural shifts in the economy, inadequate human capital, racial and gender discrimination, adverse cultural and behavioral factors, racial and income segregation, impacts of migration, lack of endogenous growth, and adverse consequences of public policy. We conclude that all of the explanations may be relevant to urban poverty but that their significance and the degree to which they are well supported varies substantially.
Hypotheses on Urban Poverty
Whatever the debate about its nature and causes, almost all observers would agree that inner-city poverty is multidimensional, extraordinarily complex, and difficult to understand. Various disciplines and policy frameworks give rise to very different notions of poverty and of its sources. To economists, it is an issue of labor markets, productivity, incentives, human capital, and choice. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to emphasize social status and relations, behavior, and culture. For social psychologists, the issues may include self-image, group membership, and attitudes. For political scientists, the questions may focus on group power and access to collective resources. City planners and urbanists see the effects of urban structure, isolation, and transportation access. No single conceptual framework can incorporate or reconcile these conflicting and complementary perceptions, but, equally, a characterization that simply lists each disciplinary perspective would not do justice to the wealth of existing, cross-disciplinary insights.
In brief, the eight hypotheses on inner-city poverty are:
Inner-city poverty is the result of profound structural economic shifts that have eroded the competitive position of the central cities in the industrial sectors that historically provided employment for the working poor, especially minorities. Thus demand for their labor has declined disastrously.
Inner-city poverty is a reflection of the inadequate human capital of the labor force, which results in lower productivity and inability to compete for employment in emerging sectors that pay adequate wages.
Inner-city poverty results from the persistence of racial and gender discrimination in employment, which prevents the population from achieving its full potential in the labor market.
Inner-city poverty is the product of the complex interaction of culture and behavior, which has produced a population that is isolated, self-referential, and detached from the formal economy and labor market.
Inner-city poverty is the outcome of a long, historical process of segregating poor and minority populations in U.S. cities that resulted in a spatial mismatch between workers and jobs when employment decentralized.
Inner-city poverty results from migration processes that simultaneously remove the middle-class and successful members of the community, thereby reducing social capital, while bringing in new, poorer populations whose competition in the labor market drives down wages and employment chances of residents.
Conclusions
Complex social phenomena rarely have simple causes, despite the assertions of those who claim to have answers to social problems. It is perhaps disappointing not to be able to point to one argument about inner-city poverty and say that it dominates all others. Yet one of the real benefits of social science is that it forces us to consider complexity. That may be unwelcome to advocates of particular policy prescriptions, but it is often the rock on which those prescriptions founder. There is still much that we do not know about the nature and causes of deep urban poverty in the United States, but this review suggests that much is known and that it is not a simple issue. There is substantial, if uneven, evidence that elements of all eight hypotheses contribute to inner-city poverty in a significant way. What we do not know is the relative importance of each hypothesis. Furthermore, at this stage in the development of social science, there is no way to know. Thus if we want to say something about their relative weight, we must rely on experience, intuition, and judgment.
From the evidence of the hypotheses, some things do stand out. The inner-city poor do lack human capital to a profound degree in comparison with other groups. They are segregated and detached from the labor market. Demand for their skills at manual labor has declined. They face discrimination in employment and housing. They live in a social milieu that reinforces detachment from the mainstream economy, though how much that milieu results in a different set of values and behaviors is subject to much debate. Similarly, segregation has separated the inner-city poor physically from employment opportunities, but there is no clear agreement about the impact of that separation. Their communities have weakened in the past four decades, but whether this is due to outmigration by the middle class or has resulted in that migration has not been determined.
They face competition from new immigrants, but these immigrants also create employment opportunities. Their communities do not generate new businesses, but whether that deficit is crucial for employment opportunity is not known. Finally, they have disproportionately experienced negative effects from public policy, but whether this has made the critical difference is probably not measurable.
Can we assess the relative causal strength of each of the eight hypotheses? In a cross-disciplinary context, an assessment can only be done judgmentally. Nonetheless, it looks as though conventional wisdom, in this instance, may be correct. We would assign the greatest weight to the first two hypotheses: industrial transformation and human capital. Without employment opportunities and adequate human capital, there is little prospect that the situation of the inner-city poor will improve. Following these two causes, our assessment is that the evidence shows that segregation, the spatial mismatch, and employment discrimination are very significant factors. In general, we are inclined to give less weight to migration and cultural behavior as explanations. However, the role of the social system within which the inner-city poor live remains open to debate. Whether it constitutes an iron cage or a rational adaptation to a harsh environment, and whether (and how) it must change before poverty can be alleviated, are now in the realm of ideology, though good ethnographic research is revealing the weaknesses of some underclass arguments.
The question of endogenous growth in low-income communities appears to be important, but it is sadly deficient in rigorous research. Finally, we see public policy as a contributing but not a dominant factor that, in principle, can be alleviated.
Even more debatable are the policy measures that might reduce urban poverty. To suggest policy approaches is not the purpose of this article. Our sense is that policy advances are possible in most of the areas discussed, though the industrial transformation that destroyed the employment bases of inner cities is effectively irreversible and efforts to transform people’s behavior without changing their material circumstances are probably futile. However, it must be stressed that, the fact that inner-city poverty is demonstrably complex and resistant to change does not imply that equally complex policy responses are the only way to proceed. Such responses are likely to collapse under their own weight, either during the legislative process or in their implementation. Given that poverty is remarkably complex suggests that it requires a sophisticated response strategy that takes into account its complexity but relies on multiple and simple elements for implementation.
If the War on Poverty was not won, perhaps that is because, like all wars, victory requires a strategy that combines a deep understanding of the environment within which the war is waged and the willpower, resources, and weapons to do the job.
Authors
Michael B. Teitz is director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His major areas of work have been housing, especially rent control, and regional and local economic development.
Karen Chapple is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the job-search strategies of low-income women and the geography of low-wage labor markets.
http://www.huduser.org/Periodicals/CITYSCPE/VOL3NUM3/article3.pdf
~Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and influential theorist of education
Justice in the Context of Environmental Sustainability
Kyle D. Brown, Ph.D.
Mainstream environmental designers, academic institutions, politicians, and non-governmental and governmental organizations have embraced the concept of environmental sustainability. Confusion may abound over a precise definition of the term as various organizations and interests adopt it for their own use, but as Scott Campbell (1996) declared over 10 years ago in an article in the Journal of the American Planning Association, “In the battle of big public ideas, sustainability has won: the task of the coming years is simply to work out the details and to narrow the gap between its theory and practice” (p.310).
One of the details still being worked out is the specific relationship of environmental sustainability to social justice. It is well recognized that social inequities are often compounded by unsustainable systems. These systems adversely impact marginalized communities through pollution, resource consumption, and environmental exploitation. Continue article here.
http://www.informedesign.com/_news/nov_v05r-p.pdf
"Many impoverished people, living in racially segregated neighborhoods, express adherence to mainstream American mores; hard work, family loyalties and individual achievement are part of their cultural repertory. Nevertheless, the translation of values into action is shaped by the tangible milieu that encircles them. So, incidentally, is the ability of affluent families to actualize values into behavior."
~M. Patricia Fernandez Kelly
The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality
Excerpted from The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD's) Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) website. Full article can be found here.
Michael B. Teitz, Public Policy Institute of California and University of California, Berkeley
Karen Chapple
University of California, Berkeley
Abstract
Over the past 40 years, poverty among the inhabitants of U.S. inner cities has remained stubbornly resistant to public policy prescriptions. Especially for African Americans and Latinos, the gap between their economic well-being and that of the mainstream has widened despite persistent and repeated efforts to address the problem. At the same time, a continuing stream of research has sought to explain urban poverty, with a wide variety of explanations put forward as the basis for policy. This paper reviews that research, organizing it according to eight major explanations or hypotheses: structural shifts in the economy, inadequate human capital, racial and gender discrimination, adverse cultural and behavioral factors, racial and income segregation, impacts of migration, lack of endogenous growth, and adverse consequences of public policy. We conclude that all of the explanations may be relevant to urban poverty but that their significance and the degree to which they are well supported varies substantially.
Hypotheses on Urban Poverty
Whatever the debate about its nature and causes, almost all observers would agree that inner-city poverty is multidimensional, extraordinarily complex, and difficult to understand. Various disciplines and policy frameworks give rise to very different notions of poverty and of its sources. To economists, it is an issue of labor markets, productivity, incentives, human capital, and choice. Sociologists and anthropologists tend to emphasize social status and relations, behavior, and culture. For social psychologists, the issues may include self-image, group membership, and attitudes. For political scientists, the questions may focus on group power and access to collective resources. City planners and urbanists see the effects of urban structure, isolation, and transportation access. No single conceptual framework can incorporate or reconcile these conflicting and complementary perceptions, but, equally, a characterization that simply lists each disciplinary perspective would not do justice to the wealth of existing, cross-disciplinary insights.
In brief, the eight hypotheses on inner-city poverty are:
Inner-city poverty is the result of profound structural economic shifts that have eroded the competitive position of the central cities in the industrial sectors that historically provided employment for the working poor, especially minorities. Thus demand for their labor has declined disastrously.
Inner-city poverty is a reflection of the inadequate human capital of the labor force, which results in lower productivity and inability to compete for employment in emerging sectors that pay adequate wages.
Inner-city poverty results from the persistence of racial and gender discrimination in employment, which prevents the population from achieving its full potential in the labor market.
Inner-city poverty is the product of the complex interaction of culture and behavior, which has produced a population that is isolated, self-referential, and detached from the formal economy and labor market.
Inner-city poverty is the outcome of a long, historical process of segregating poor and minority populations in U.S. cities that resulted in a spatial mismatch between workers and jobs when employment decentralized.
Inner-city poverty results from migration processes that simultaneously remove the middle-class and successful members of the community, thereby reducing social capital, while bringing in new, poorer populations whose competition in the labor market drives down wages and employment chances of residents.
Conclusions
Complex social phenomena rarely have simple causes, despite the assertions of those who claim to have answers to social problems. It is perhaps disappointing not to be able to point to one argument about inner-city poverty and say that it dominates all others. Yet one of the real benefits of social science is that it forces us to consider complexity. That may be unwelcome to advocates of particular policy prescriptions, but it is often the rock on which those prescriptions founder. There is still much that we do not know about the nature and causes of deep urban poverty in the United States, but this review suggests that much is known and that it is not a simple issue. There is substantial, if uneven, evidence that elements of all eight hypotheses contribute to inner-city poverty in a significant way. What we do not know is the relative importance of each hypothesis. Furthermore, at this stage in the development of social science, there is no way to know. Thus if we want to say something about their relative weight, we must rely on experience, intuition, and judgment.
From the evidence of the hypotheses, some things do stand out. The inner-city poor do lack human capital to a profound degree in comparison with other groups. They are segregated and detached from the labor market. Demand for their skills at manual labor has declined. They face discrimination in employment and housing. They live in a social milieu that reinforces detachment from the mainstream economy, though how much that milieu results in a different set of values and behaviors is subject to much debate. Similarly, segregation has separated the inner-city poor physically from employment opportunities, but there is no clear agreement about the impact of that separation. Their communities have weakened in the past four decades, but whether this is due to outmigration by the middle class or has resulted in that migration has not been determined.
They face competition from new immigrants, but these immigrants also create employment opportunities. Their communities do not generate new businesses, but whether that deficit is crucial for employment opportunity is not known. Finally, they have disproportionately experienced negative effects from public policy, but whether this has made the critical difference is probably not measurable.
Can we assess the relative causal strength of each of the eight hypotheses? In a cross-disciplinary context, an assessment can only be done judgmentally. Nonetheless, it looks as though conventional wisdom, in this instance, may be correct. We would assign the greatest weight to the first two hypotheses: industrial transformation and human capital. Without employment opportunities and adequate human capital, there is little prospect that the situation of the inner-city poor will improve. Following these two causes, our assessment is that the evidence shows that segregation, the spatial mismatch, and employment discrimination are very significant factors. In general, we are inclined to give less weight to migration and cultural behavior as explanations. However, the role of the social system within which the inner-city poor live remains open to debate. Whether it constitutes an iron cage or a rational adaptation to a harsh environment, and whether (and how) it must change before poverty can be alleviated, are now in the realm of ideology, though good ethnographic research is revealing the weaknesses of some underclass arguments.
The question of endogenous growth in low-income communities appears to be important, but it is sadly deficient in rigorous research. Finally, we see public policy as a contributing but not a dominant factor that, in principle, can be alleviated.
Even more debatable are the policy measures that might reduce urban poverty. To suggest policy approaches is not the purpose of this article. Our sense is that policy advances are possible in most of the areas discussed, though the industrial transformation that destroyed the employment bases of inner cities is effectively irreversible and efforts to transform people’s behavior without changing their material circumstances are probably futile. However, it must be stressed that, the fact that inner-city poverty is demonstrably complex and resistant to change does not imply that equally complex policy responses are the only way to proceed. Such responses are likely to collapse under their own weight, either during the legislative process or in their implementation. Given that poverty is remarkably complex suggests that it requires a sophisticated response strategy that takes into account its complexity but relies on multiple and simple elements for implementation.
If the War on Poverty was not won, perhaps that is because, like all wars, victory requires a strategy that combines a deep understanding of the environment within which the war is waged and the willpower, resources, and weapons to do the job.
Authors
Michael B. Teitz is director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His major areas of work have been housing, especially rent control, and regional and local economic development.
Karen Chapple is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the job-search strategies of low-income women and the geography of low-wage labor markets.
http://www.huduser.org/Periodicals/CITYSCPE/VOL3NUM3/article3.pdf
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