Not actually static, just not moving too fast
Please take note that I do not take and make the time to update this website frequently. There is just too much interesting stuff to do!
Urban Edibles goes crowdfunding
Do you live in a city environment? Urban Edibles is creating an online tool to help you easily determine which edible plants best fit your home, lifestyle and wildest dreams. The goal: successful and happy urban farmers growing great food in windowsills, across rooftops & on balconies. Are you interested in using this tool? You can support us as we develop it >> view the video (in HD) right here and find out more on http://goo.gl/q2bmL
Looking for website developer
We – Eefje, Sophia and Marten, joined under Urban Edibles – are a young start-up with an exciting proposition in the field of urban farming. For the realisation of our cunning plans, we are looking for someone who shares our dreams and has considerable website programming skills.
Read on if you think this may apply to you or someone you know. (>> click below picture)
Currency Typology
For a paper I'm writing for the Lyon International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies (Feb '11), I'm devising a typology to meaningfully order different currencies by. In my talks on this topic, the one question that always comes back and that previously gave me trouble answering adequately, was: why should we bother? I found that this typology helped me deal with that question, since there are different answers for each of the quadrants I pictured. I'm very interested to hear what you think of it.
[click on the picture for a larger version]
Money and Growth
At the ERSCP-EMSU conference in October 2010 (somehow that acronym bellows "Aretha Franklin!" and makes my head start to nod and shoulders start to sway) I gave a workshop on Money and Growth. It was well received, so I wanted to share it with you.
[Click to go to the Money and Growth Prezi]
It starts with why we need to be talking about money with regards to sustainability. In a nutshell: our financial system both accelerates our use of resources and exhaust of 'waste' and it is incompatible with an economy that doesn't grow. So besides pushing humanity further on the road to overstretching our pressure on the earth, it will also leave us with absolutely no money to do anything about it by the time we finally realise we've gone too far.
In the workshop we took the example of the Gelre, a regional and sophisticated zero-interest currency in The Netherlands, to brainstorm about what such a zero-interest currency would mean for the socio-economic fabric of society. How would we invest? What would happen to prices? What is the use of regionalisation when we've finally managed to establish a supra-national currency? The story has only just begun.
Gesell – The Natural Economic Order [1920]
![Silvio Gesell - Natural Economic Order [1920]](http://duurzaamheidsdiensten.nl/images/cover_gesell.JPG)
Download [Silvio Gesell - The Natural Economic Order, 1920] pdf, 1.9 MB
In my reading journey on monetary sustainability, I have come to accept that the most insightful work that has been written on the subject comes from the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Books such as Galbraith's Money: whence it came and where it went and Keynes' A Treatise on Money. These books were all written in a time when the monetary systems that now dominate the financial world were still young, in development and therefore questioned.
(click 'continue reading' below the picture to read more)
Van Rompuy fails to impress
According to the news, EU President Van Rompuy has called all countries to expend great effort to elevate the EU economic growth percentage to an annual average of 2, whereas it is 0.8 in 2009 (provisional figure). He claims that 2 percent is a requirement if we are to maintain the "European way of life".
Sadly, this thinking apparently still continues in the high echelons of politics, where an actual understanding of macroeconomics, growth and finances seems less widely dispersed than the willingness to flaunt numbers and give a call to action.
(click 'continue reading' below the picture to read more)
Super Sustainable Man
Super Sustainable Man is a new tv show by Antenne TV portraying pioneers in sustainability in the Rotterdam Area ... and me! This episode is about Climate Change and I have a small part in it describing my research for the Rathenau Institute. If you get impatient, you can find me at 7m40s and again at 15m25s. (nb: the show is in Dutch.)
Introduction
SustainabilityServices helps you get a grip on sustainability. Beyond the world of balances, contracts and payrolls, your company has an impact. Your employees are people for whom there is more to life than just work. The product you proudly produce has many side effects not accounted for, both positive and negative. A changing world demands changing habits.
To know what you must do to make your business more sustainable, you first have to know who you are. In which environments do you operate? What is your impact? How do you share this with all your employees? Your corporate identity is an essential ingredient for an effective and genuine sustainability policy. SustainabilityServices helps you establish your corporate identity and allows you to connect sustainability with your core business.