Fellow Kossacks:
I haven't been posting a lot lately. Back when I was a regular poster, some commenters said I should write a book. Well, I have. In fact, I wrote two, both of them just out this week.
(It's not often that a person gets to use that phrase--"two books in one week." And I won't ever be able to use it again, if I can help it.)
If you know and like my work, please do give some thought to talking up these books among your circle of friends and e-mail correspondents. In this almost-post-literate age, word of mouth counts for a lot. More on each below the fold.
In The Other Road to Serfdom and the Path to Sustainable Democracy
my aim was to offer a coherent vision of a progressive and hopeful alternative to the neoconservative economic and political theory that is driving our civilization off an ecological, social, moral and economic cliff. More than that (and I know it all sounds incredibly ambitious but hey, you gotta try): I wanted to help articulate the foundations of an an economy that meets the needs of the 99%--and that just might help save civilization from ecological and political collapse.
"The Other Road to Serfdom..." is published by the University Press of New England, and while it's a peer-reviewed book (that should impress academics), I aimed to make it an entirely accessible and readable assault on the "infinite planet," thermodynamically ignorant foundations of neoconservative economic thinking and practice. It begins by taking on Friedrich Hayek’s argument in “The Other Road to Serfdom” that any attempt at setting limits to free markets through planning is a slippery slope to totalitarian rule. I argue that because economic growth leads to a need for international resource regimes to regulate our collective ecological footprint, if centrally controlled economies are "the Road to Serfdom," then free markets run on infinite planet principles are just the other road to serfdom. The alternative is ecological economics, an emergent school of economic thought that is grounded in the laws of physics (and nature).
In the book I sketch this alternative vision and apply it to current political and economic concerns: the financial collapse, terrorism, population growth, hunger, the energy and oil industry’s social control, and the deeply rooted dissatisfactions felt by conservative “values” voters who have been encouraged to see smaller government and freer markets as the universal antidote to social ills that have in fact been wrought by cheap energy and an infinite-growth mentality.
It's got nice blurbs from Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and Bill McKibben.
The other book, co-authored with Elizabeth Courtney and published jointly by Thistle Hill Publications and the Vermont Natural Resources Council, tells the story of the last fifty years of the Vermont environmental movement, portraying it as the state’s response to the revolutionary economic and social changes that came with the arrival of the Interstate highway and the perpetual-growth hydrocarbon economy in the late 1950s. Greening Vermont: The Search for a Sustainable State asks and answers the question, "why didn't Vermont come to look like everywhere else?" Copiously illustrated with high-quality color photographs, and containing numerous sidebars on relevant background and short profiles of some of the key actors in the story, the book presents the work of the Vermont environmental movement as unfinished--no economy reliant on fossil fuels is sustainable--but as offering policies and strategies (and some lessons in failure) that will have application elsewhere. In a way, the history told here illustrates the practical (partial) application of the principles outlined in “The Other Road to Serfdom.” The final chapter points to the future work of the environmental movement in tackling problems that haven’t previously been considered part of the agenda for many environmental organizations: the problems that will come with climate change, with food insecurity and ecological refugees, with the withdrawal symptoms of a society addicted to oil. The problems are sobering, but I think the story of the Vermont environmental movement offers some grounds for hope.
Either book can be ordered through your local bookstore. More information on each (and a chance to buy it online, if you’re so inclined) can be found at the respective links above.