My March Author Newsletter: Coronavirus is an invitation to heal our economy

The newsletter is here.

Here's an excerpt:

Welcome to the coronavirus edition. I hope you are safe and well, and I’ll spare you the advice to wash to hands and socially distance because you’ve heard it. But with the hope of better societies at the back of my mind, I want to talk about the social fissures this pandemic exposes. It’s been great for our global emissions, but we will lose all those gains when industry starts up again. The fact that plunging the world into a catastrophic economic downturn is the best thing in living memory for our short-term emissions ought to be a wake-up call. Pitting our economic system against ecological reality is a lose-lose proposition, leading to mass extinction, starvation, disease, war, xenophobia, etc. Our current rupture in the capitalist economy is an ideal time to start planning for sustainable systems to replace it—not to replace all private enterprise, mind, but to replace a system that values only growth of capital at any cost. Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg offer some alternatives (summed up here in book review form), as does this article from Deutsche Welle. Let's move forward now to a more stable, livable future.

Also my spring term Writing to Sustain Hope class in Portland should go forward, but it might be postponed or moved online. More info. to come.