Schumacher Briefing 4 - The Ecology of Money

	THE ECOLOGY OF MONEY by Richard Douthwaite Published by Green Books on behalf of The Schumacher Society. For prices and to order a Briefing click on the ORDER FORM button above.
In this Schumacher Briefing, Richard Douthwaite argues that just as different insects and animals have different effects on human society and the natural world, money has different effects according to its origins and purposes. Was it created to make profits for a commercial bank, or issued by a government as a form of taxation? Or was it created by its users themselves purely to facilitate their trade? And was it made in the place where it is used, or did local people have to provide goods and services to outsiders to get enough of it to trade among themselves? The Briefing shows that it will be impossible to build a just and sustainable world, unless and until money creation is democratized.
	Richard Douthwaite studied economics at the University of Essex and the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. He set up and managed a boatyard in Jamaica on behalf of the island's fishing co-operatives before spending two years as Government Economist in the British colony of Montserrat. He has lived in Ireland since 1974.
His book, The Growth Illusion: How Economics Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet, was published by Green Books in 1992 and an extended and updated second edition appeared in 1999. His other major book, Short Circuit (Green Books, 1996), gives dozens of examples of currency, banking, energy and food production systems which communities can use to make themselves less dependent on an increasingly unstable world economy. In 1998-9 he was a consultant to an EU-funded project to establish experimental community currencies in Scotland, Ireland, Amsterdam and Madrid.