Upstream - Ecological Feminism with Nadia Johanisova

Episode Date: March 23, 2016

In this interview we hear from Nadia Johanisova, an Ecological Economist, Professor of Environmental Studies in the Czech Republic, and the person who translated E. F. Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" - as well as several other new economic classics - into Czech. We talked about what it was like to live and work under a communist regime and what changed when the Iron Curtain fell and neo-liberalism crept into Czechoslovakia. Nadia also talked about the book she wrote titled Living in the Cracks, A Look at Rural Social Enterprises in Britain and the Czech Republic and her most recent project mapping the new economy in the Czech Republic to strengthen this emerging system and increase solidarity among new economic actors. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

We are currently fundraising for this project, so if you like what you hear, please visit www.economicsfortransition.org to make a donation. Thank you. Hello and welcome. You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. My name is Della Duncan, and today I'm speaking with Nadia Juhanesova, who's part of the Department of Environmental Studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. Welcome, Nadia. Hi. Nadia, let's just start with, will you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to do the work that you do? Yes, I started out as an environmentalist and ecologist sometime in the 80s when my country was still under communist rule. I was always interested in the environment, but once the Iron Curtain came down, I was very happy, of course, and I was looking forward to doing some things for the environment and so on,

but suddenly I seemed to see a new ideology encroaching, which was there coming in instead of the communist ideology, and it was a kind of free market ideology, you could say, and I was quite baffled by it because I didn't know much about all this and I didn't know how to react. At that time I was leading an NGO because we then could already start our own independent voluntary organizations and I was working there actually professionally an environmental center. And there was a lot of projects coming in that we were struggling against,

such as new golf courses or new sort of Disneyland projects and all that suddenly coming in. And I saw there was this sort of some kind of the economic system. It wasn't really what I had thought would happen. I had been much more optimistic. I was in my early 30s at that time. And so what happened to me actually was in 1993, I got a chance to go to a place called Schumacher College in South England, which is where we are doing our interview actually at the moment. And I had a chance to listen to, to go to a course, to listen to people like Kavanda Nashiva and others, Hazel Henderson, actually the American economist. And suddenly I saw you could talk back to the economists and that there's something called ecological

economics, new economics, all these things. So that really changed my thinking a lot. And I started to learn more about these things and I translated a book called Schumacher's Small is Beautiful into Czech and eventually I started teaching ecological economics new economics social ecological economics rather we might call it at this university in Brno where I've been for the last 10 years or so and I'm trying to get people to sort of be able to criticize the mainstream economic system and look at alternatives springing from the ground and try to try to think about them in an economic way or try themselves maybe to to start new

projects and essentially the idea is to not to be sort of not to is to be able to look critically at a mainstream economic ideology, which started sometime in the Enlightenment and which at this point is no longer functional. So I guess that would be it in a nutshell. Yeah, it does seem that there's often this idea that there's only three types of economic systems, communist, socialist, or capitalist, and that that's it. And then when you look at history or economics books, it kind of feels like that's it. But actually, what you're saying is there's so many other ways that we can organize our economic system. You mentioned ecological economics, new economics. Essentially, there have been, always have been, other ways that people have done their provisioning, that people have organized their life, their relationship with nature.

But they are sort of in the shadow. They still exist. There are many reciprocal ways of sharing sharing ways there are community projects and a lot of it is in what we call the third world but maybe should be called the global south or the majority world for example there was a paper i read recently from the Philippines, which sort of mapped for several years in a Filipino community, the ways that people actually make their living and their livelihoods. And capitalism was somewhere on the margins in that group. And there were both traditional ways of sharing, of growing your own and so on, and also more equitable ways of arranging economic relationships there were cooperatives for example and so on so there is a whole there is a whole

universe of other ways of sort of being in contact in my country actually under communism people were quite adept at sewing their own clothes and doing a lot of things which which now is sort of growing their own food which still is happening not not the sewing of their clothes so much but growing our own food is still happening in allotments for example or in people's own gardens but it is it is seen as a sort of something that's come over from communism so the one of the challenges we face is to reframe these activities as something belonging to the future, because obviously it's much less environmentally detrimental

to have a localized economy, to have a mixed economy with growing out of the local community and so on. So, can you talk a little bit more about what it was like under communism? What both economics were like, but also what the relationship with the environment was like? What was kind of the attitude or the sense? Well, essentially, it wasn't so different from capitalism in the sense that both regimes had a growth ethos. There was an emphasis on industrialization, on industrial production. production. The difference was that the state, the government played a much greater role. The market was very subjugated, but the environment was being destroyed just the same, more by production than by consumption, you might say. So people couldn't really, in my country, couldn't really say what they think about it.

We couldn't start our own organizations. We couldn't really, there wasn't freedom of press and so on. What happens now is, so there was no democracy. What happens now is democracy again is endangered by big corporations, by the politicians blending into the economic elite. In this sense I mean the rich guys essentially. Of course it's a much better environment for voicing your thoughts because you can't be dragged off into the jail or something.

because you can't be dragged off into the jail or something. So there is an environment of democratic discourse, but what I call economic democracy is eroding, which means essentially that assets are being concentrated into ever fewer hands. This can mean land, it can mean workspaces, it can mean money in the sense of capital, financial capital. So one of the things we discuss in our classes is how to sort of enhance economic democracy, how to get more people be able to produce their own stuff, and how to somehow control the big corporations.

There's an international agreement called the Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, which, if it would happen, an agreement between the US and the EU about free trade or rather about taking away the so-called non-tariff barriers to trade, which actually means sort of destroying environmental and social regulations. So that is something we are campaigning against in my country as well. Yeah, that definitely is a big issue in the whole world. And what's the general sentiment around TTIP? Well, essentially, most people don't know about it because the media, as a main media, as usual, are failing. There is a movement against it,

but I'm not sure how influential this movement is. I've tried to write against it, but some of our EU councillors, members of the parliament, are for it. It always depends on the ideology you espouse. And the unreflected capitalist ideology, of course, doesn't see some things. As I said, they remain in the shadow. So it's quite sad, really. But I guess the opposition is growing.

It is growing. So you are seeing signs of signs of that yeah and i don't know if it's enough yeah stop it and what's the what's the latest update as to where it is in terms of enactment is there it's changing it's changing quite rapidly i'm not i'm not able to follow it in in detail but i know that it's going slower than they thought. The original idea was it would be signed sometime in 2014, which it hasn't, obviously. And I think they're not finding it as easy as they thought they would to enact. Wow, yeah, definitely a big issue right now. Wow, yeah, definitely a big issue right now.

So you mentioned that you translated Small is Beautiful, you have Schumacher's Small is Beautiful. Yes, I translated into Czech, yeah. So what are some of the key insights or lessons that you still carry with you from that book? Well, actually, since that time many students have read it as its compulsory reading in my courses but what is the what is the main insight from Schumacher I guess it's the main insight which I'm trying to instill into people to think about to stop thinking about silence science and

economics as value free you know the most famous chapter in Schumacher small is beautiful called Buddhist economics essentially says that if mainstream economics had other assumptions than it does it would be completely different. And the assumptions that mainstream economics has at this moment is that production should grow forever, that people have wants which are expanding and which are really insatiable, and that anything that happens to the environment really is an externality which can't really be counted very well.

So what I try to encourage students to do is to look at, for example, a newspaper article. Many articles, for example, in my country say people have to move after work. They have to go somewhere where they will find a job. So I try to tell them and look into a psychology textbook, not only into an economics textbook, and you will find out that it can be very disrupting for children to move all the time. It can be disruptive for families. And now put these things together

and to realize that we are not guided by immutable economic laws. The truth is that we construct these laws based on our values or we construct these institutions like money even, the way money is created, put into circulation. It's the way we as humans have created it and we can change this so this is one level that i that i sort of use in my teaching just to deconstruct um to deconstruct texts or thinking that they have come to accept as normal, believing in progress as the advance of the West, never thinking that we can learn from other countries

who have not gone down our route, and linking sort of the mainstream economic ideas to what is happening on the ground, the destruction of the environment, the fact that oil will not last forever, and sort of looking at things ecologically in the sense of finding links to not just having this sort of stovepipe mentality, links to what is happening elsewhere. I've been thinking a lot recently, for example, about the war in Syria, because my own daughter is trying to help refugees on the Greek border right now. As a matter of fact, she's a volunteer there, trying to help

the people survive. There's 14,000 people there without any place to live and nothing to eat and so on. So I've been reading this book about the syrian war and it turns out that the very radical groups the islamist groups are really being funded by islamic states like saudi arabia which are really being funded by oil and by these fossil fuels right so so you sort of it's interesting to look at connections and to think about the world in a connected way and to try to keep your own counsel on things, not to believe everything that you read because it pretends to be value-free science. So that's one level. And the second level in my teaching is trying to get people to realize that the change begins with them, and that there are alternatives,

although it's very hard sometimes not to feel disempowered looking at the powers that be, sort of. But I teach about cooperative structures in economics, for example, try to show why they are better than, let's say, share-owned companies. We have some new projects around, such as community-supported agriculture, community gardens, all sorts of sharing arrangements between people, co-housing. And so our students are sort of starting their own i know cooperative buying groups of food in bulk and things like that community schools which are not sort of which are essentially

supported by the parents themselves who can even teach there and so on so it's a kind of different mentality not the state so much not although i think it's important to guard us against the corporations not the market and corporations big corporations but thinking small which is another idea of schumacher's trying to because small scale is i think is better than big scale quite often in economics and trying to sort of grow grow your own economy on the ground where where you are as one one Scottish thinker Alistair McIntosh says dig where you stand so try to also recognize that where you stand there there are some traditions they may be buried quite deep and maybe in the US I guess in some

places but anyway where I live we still can look back to to villages where where people were able to sort of grow their own stuff and not produce any waste and so there is there is something to return to and you can sort of do it in a in a different way so it's it's a question of lifestyle but it's also a question of building building new institutions, new structures, because you're much more powerful if you join together as a group. So it's not the state, not the market and corporations, but the local community and the joining up of local communities, something growing from the bottom up,

and also reframing what you already know that your grandmother had hence it's not something which belongs to the past or to socialism or to communism that was in our case but something that belongs to the future that could be interesting for young people

every year we organize these open space events for whoever comes really for four days every year. And one of the friends who came there last year, they're teachers from the Agricultural University in Prague. And they started a group called Cool Land. And they say, we want to show people that land is cool. Of course, it's a big problem now to start to grow your own as a farmer because land is getting expensive even in our country. And so one way is sort of setting up some kind of land trust

or some kind of community land trust to get land out of the market so that it can be used for really meaningful purposes rather than for upmarket people building their summer homes there or something one of the good points about about communism or socialism as we called it state capitalism maybe you could call it which we had until 1989 was that our land is unfenced because it belonged to the state which which actually is probably better than having all the land in private hands and even now when a lot of the land is in private hands it's not fenced so you can walk around on the land and a lot of the land is owned by small municipalities by municipalities i think that's another another sort of thing

ownership you know that would be a long discussion but essentially ownership by small villages which we have in our country which can use the land for the benefit of the people. It's also a kind of land trust we don't have in our legal system trust as an institution developed very well, but we have the community, the municipality owning land and then they can use it for the benefit of the people rather than just using it as an asset to get more money out of it. Will you explain what a community land trust is?

Well, community land trust is actually something that started in the u.s inspired by by gandhi or by his follower vinod bhava and the idea is to just take land out of the market in the sense of group of people democratically controlling some land and using it maybe for affordable housing with those using this housing, having it on a, I don't know, 1990-year lease or something like that. And the whole principle is deeper. Sort of land in common was something that still exists a lot in countries of the global south. Essentially, it's using land for the benefit of the local people

but sustainably so there's a big emphasis in this principle of community land trust or community own land on on equitability and on sustainability there has been an article there was an article in the 60s by harden gary harden called the tragedy of the Commons, which sort of imagined people to be just economic rational maximizers, and he assumed that if land were owned in common, it would always be overgrazed and so on. But, of course, you have to safeguard, you have to have some kind of rules about this kind of thing, but he was wrong, actually.

A lot of communally owned land is safeguarded by intricate social social rules and in the case of the community land trust there are explicit rules which sort of safeguard the land for the benefit of the future then i say they take the land out of the market so that it their price don't doesn't go up all the time, which is actually what's happening to land all over the world, right? I think it was Mark Twain who said, by land they have stopped producing it, which I suppose he meant ironically. With the finite planet and being built over all the time, land is gaining in value, in

price, and this means that a lot of people can't really reach land so one of the ways to do this is to put some land in trust and offer it to those who want to farm it for the for the local benefit for the local community for example under communism was was it like a land trust in the way that if somebody wanted to build a house, they didn't have to buy the land, but they had to get permission to build the house on the land owned by the government? Yes, under communism, land was the only, I mean, the state was practically, with some very small exceptions, the only landowner. practically, with some very small exceptions, the only landowner. Otherwise there were the

so-called agricultural cooperatives, which however were forced cooperatives, they were not authentic cooperatives, where the owners were actually the original owners of the land but they had no right to do much with it. So essentially all the flats, if you rented So essentially, all the flats, if you rented a flat, you rented it from the state. If you used some land, it was owned by the state. So you could buy a small, you could own the land where your house is built on. That was true. But you couldn't own, like, big swaths of land. The market with land was circumscribed.

Like it is actually, I'm not sure if that wasn't such a bad idea. Maybe it was a good idea. Many countries in Africa or in China, for example, there is a feeling that land should not be sold, that it can be leased maybe from the state, but it should not be sold because it is something, it isn't really a commodity, likel polani said carl polani very interesting thinker uh living in the early half of the 20th century uh carl polani said that

land is not a commodity money shouldn't be seen as a commodity and labor shouldn't be seen as a commodity actually but that would be a longer story, I guess. Yeah, we need to take land, money, and labor out of the market. Yeah, exactly. That's what he said. Or out of the market, out of the capitalist market. So it sounds like there's a definite difference between communism, where the state owns the land and people lease it from the state, and then capitalism, where people own the land, or not people, but individuals.

So it's private land. Or corporations. Or corporations, absolutely. And then this other thing that we're talking about, land trust, is where it's owned by the community. It's owned by the people. It's not the state. It's not private. And then people lease the land from that.

And the land stays affordable in perpetuity and but people can still use the land to live on and to grow yeah and in countries like like the czech republic the place of the land trust can be played by municipalities especially in small municipalities the feedback democratic feedback better. I lived in a small village for some time, which had its own pub, and the village can own its own, maybe, source of heating, for example. The wood chip plants are now being built by villages in the Czech Republic. So it can be some kind of institution, whatever you may call it, which is sort of controlled by the local people. That's an important aspect of economic democracy. Yeah, and not just economic democracy,

when you argue that if you don't have economic democracy, you don't have democracy at all. Yeah, I think that erodes even political democracy if you don't have economic democracy. If people, political democracy if you don't have economic democracy. If there is a big concentration of economic assets in fewer hands, then these big players will always be influencing the environment. And if people can't really produce things on their own, if they don't have access to capitals, maybe non-market capitals, in the sense that they they're taking out the market, as we said, then they can be quite helpless. Democracy isn't only about going to the elections once in every four years. Yeah, absolutely.

And how that impacts us, right? We feel like we're in a democratic state, like let's say in the United States or in the Czech Republic, but then when we go to work, we're not, you know, we don't have economic democracy. If we work in a place where we have a boss and we don't have any say or, you know, in what we buy, we don't have any say in anything. Yeah, exactly. That's why I try to propagate the idea of the cooperative structure, even for institutions like producer institutions where everybody is an owner, everybody has a say, so it's democratically governed. So I agree with you there that economic democracy in the workplace

is very important. Absolutely. And it also seems to me that leadership is an issue here because being in a cooperative or having a community land trust or a common property, there's kind of a myth that if there's no leader and everyone's just supposed to take care of themselves, then it won't be taken care of. But just because something is communally owned and operated, such as a co-op, leadership is a part of that. Of course, except it's elected, right? So definitely, I think people have an ability to self-organize. And actually, the cooperative cooperative principles one of the seven cooperative principles is education so people need to be educated about being able to be be all of

them leaders in the sense that they can sort of take take their destiny into their own hands yeah so how do your students react to what you teach them? Are they, because this is sometimes going against things that they've been reading or hearing about their whole lives. And this is at the college level. So what's kind of the reaction to it? Well, we have students who are quite thoughtful students. The problem is the environment. So they can see that the environment is really going to hell in a handcart. And I try to say one of the reasons is the economic system. So then they've sort of intuited this by now. So it's easy for them.

I mean, it's not easy for them, but at least for some of them to see this. And another thing which is helpful is I can tell them about actual, when I speak about the other aspect that I was saying one aspect is to critique the the mainstream which political ecology calls the hatchet and the other aspect is the seed political ecology is in a very interesting field we could speak about as well the seed to plant something new so we have a we have a grant project which has been running for it's running now for the third year with my colleagues we have been mapping and doing interviews with people who work in community gardens community supported agriculture schemes we have small municipal projects as well

there's an awful lot of very interesting things going on on the ground. There's a forest cooperative, for example, with municipalities pooling their forests, in our country municipalities own forests, and share them in a, they manage them in a cooperative way. There's a consumer cooperative, for example, quite a big one with over 100 stores, shops, small shops, which sources food products locally, a lot of their products locally, in order to support their members who live in the region. So when you sort of look and look for the other economies, so even in our country, you can find a lot of examples of something like that working on the ground. So this is quite exciting for for the students and they often then feel a wish to join this kind of thing and the ones they do they start thinking a bit differently but i think the important thing is to link it up also with the

critique of the mainstream so that's what i'm trying to do and also it brings hope right if they if they only look at the kind of the negative aspect then it can be quite demoralizing but they're seeing kind of the hopeful examples yeah yeah as i said even uh political ecology which is a branch of thinking it's not really a field in itself but it's a way of looking at environmental problems so it has two aspects the hatchet, sort of to cut down the wrong ideas, and the seed, which is to start to build something new, to grow something new. So those are two tools in political ecology? Two tools, well, according to this guy called Robbins, who wrote this textbook, Political Ecology.

It's his way of looking at it, that if you look at the papers and everything that are produced in this field, quite often it's a radical sort of saying no to the mainstream ideology of the economy is only the money economy or that development actually means going to further consumption and industrialization and so on. But you also have to look at what is already happening on the ground because by science, as I said, is not neutral and by actually sort of looking at what is happening, telling people about it, you are helping it to grow and to be visible and to be legitimate.

Some people like the geographers J.K., Gibson, Graham speak about performativity in the sense that science scholarship has a big task to play depending on what questions it asks what it focuses on these are the things that it then makes more real to others through telling them about it again that it's not objective you know and that that it's it's it is value-based just like you're saying yeah so if you're actually if you're a scientist especially in the social science sciences you have to think about your own values and admit your own values to yourself and then you're much more honest actually about your research as well absolutely and then what but you mentioned all these great projects going on in the czech republic are they

connected because sometimes you know it's it when you look from a from kind of a macro level and you can see all the connections and you know that you know all these are maybe part of the new economy or the solidarity economy or the ecological economy but do the actual people know that they're connected because isn't like you mentioned it's important for local economies to be connected with other local economies so is there that movement happening as well uh there there is and there isn't some of the some of the groups have been organizing in their own field for example we have now 150 forest kindergartens which is sort of children just living in a yurt and most of the time being outside and they have a very good organization lobbying organization on their own behalf. But I don't think there is an overarching organization.

There are some hopeful developments. For example, the local food groups are organizing very well, thanks to a few people who also have a radical worldview. So that is happening on a national scale. They espouse the idea of food sovereignty, for example, which is another very important good seed. But in our interviews, in the research we did, we did about 50 interviews, and seven focus groups of these four

were with actually people from these initiatives. Not all these people are very critical of the mainstream they may just be feeling that that they may even be right wing in the sense that they believe very much in individual enterprise and they may feel that we want to be like the west so in the in the interviews we do it transpires that these people may be motivated in very very different ways but they converge to a certain way of doing things so it's it's not so simple like all of them can see that capitalism is bad because a lot of them still think capitalism is good socialism was was bad which it was but they don't see what these two systems had in common, that they were both destroying nature and both concentrating assets. Gilbert K. Chesterton, the detective story writer,

actually said this back in the 20s or 30s. He says capitalism and communism are really the same in many ways. They don't really see this. But there are new groups. The younger people, the ones in their 20s, there's anarchists in the Czech Republic, there's people who are already quite radical. The newest thing now in Prague is

some young people have squatted a derelict building in Prague and they want to turn it into a community centre with, again, stepping out of the market logic a derelict building in Prague and they want to turn it into a community center with sort of again stepping out of the market logic and doing concerts there doing events people sort of volunteering and this is a new new development as well I mean like in Barcelona you have maybe 100 or 200 political squads as they call it but in Prague is first one, and it's made quite a stir in the media. And there's been demonstrations for them to be able to go on and so on. So something is happening.

The young people who have not lived through communism are now sort of seeing that, you know, are able to be critical of capitalism for the first time, maybe. Wow. So you are seeing little signs of this. And also, I appreciate what you said, the quote about how communism and capitalism are similar. And one thing you mentioned earlier was you called it state-sponsored capitalism. And I think that's really important, because it is. It's in very similar ways. It's capitalism or state-sponsored capitalism as communism. Do you want to explain that a little bit more?

It's all a question of power, right? As Chesterton already said, under communism, the power was very much concentrated not only in the state but in the Communist Party. The party was not responsible to anybody. It made its decisions by telephone. It was an elite organization. So the power was concentrated very much in the hands of the Communist Party and the state and ordinary people did not have any assets, there was no economic democracy, they had no political power, there wasn't democracy in either sense, either political or economic, while under capitalism you do have political democracy, you have some sort of certainty that you will have a fair trial maybe.

But again, with the polarization of wealth, you lose your social rights, your right to work, your right to have a roof over your head and you also use your assets because the inexorable sort of motion in capitalism as i said is the concentration of assets because if you have a lot of money you invest it you get more money if you have a lot of land you can sort of get money to to buy more land if you're a lot of land, you can sort of get money to buy more land. If you're a company that grows bigger, you swallow up other companies and you become even bigger. And this leads to the discrepancy between the rich and the poor. If the state is not there to redistribute it, so I actually believe in the state as well.

With, of course, powers limited in some way. well with of course powers limited in some way before the second world war in the czech republic we had a thriving cooperative movement which was quite powerful so the economy had a state part sort of a private part private organizational corporations and it had a cooperative sort of big segment sector so i think there was an interesting economic thinking between the wars in the Czech Republic, former Serbia and these countries, Czechoslovakia, thinking about a different economy that would be called a pluralistic economy.

So that's also a route to explore. So there's a lot in the past and in the U.S. past as well, which I think would be very interesting to dig back to, right? You had very radical thinkers back in the 30s and before in the U.S., which have been forgotten. You had Henry George. In the 30s, the mainstream ideology was very, very much in the corner. You know, we look at books from that time,

it was completely different, and it can come again. Yeah, and you mentioned the pluralistic economics that really goes with ecological systems, right? Have diversity. So to have diversity of different money systems, different currencies, different ways of operating businesses. Yeah, and good power checks, I mean, so that neither of these structures gets to be too powerful.

Even a cooperative, if it gets too big, it can lose its soul, it can lose its ethos. And different views, different opinions, too, like you're mentioning. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think at the same time, it's important to say what your values are. I think our values should be even more explicit yeah even the degrowth movement which we haven't spoken about here but which is i think is also very important explicitly says its values are equitability and environmental sustainability or sort of thinking about nature keeping it keeping it viable. And this brings many other values, right? So I think it's important.

Herman Daly, the ecological economist, also states these values in his work. So it's important to say, okay, pluralism, but not to float in a postmodern world at the same time be grounded in these values. Absolutely. When you do the interviews with people in the Czech Republic, you said sometimes you hear kind of pro-capitalist sentiments, sometimes not.

Do you map the values or do you ask them about values when you do the interviews? Yes, we try to ask several questions over the interview, which tries to sort of gauge, find out what their values are. sort of gauze, find out what their values are. And as I said, it's very variable. There isn't just one kind of value. And some of these people, I mean, you can have a community garden, but you can sort of not be aware of the other aspects. It's very complicated to explain, really. So I'm glad we have these uh we

have this we have a the master's program and the bachelor's program where i'm teaching is a sort of human ecology you could say but in two years time we'd like to start a program so social ecological economics uh looking more at these things and get get people to get a master's program title I mean to get to get more education in this sphere so something a bit similar to what is here in Schumacher College the economics for sustainability but to have it more grounded in the critique and more more sort of practical ways on how to embark on a alternative economic project of your own as well right because that practice is so important not just learning about the theory but how can you actually make this a reality and it sounds like in your program you do do that you you kind of help people create their own co-op or have the tools to to start to practice

yeah theories in our program we don't have so much space for it so in the new one we would like to devote more space to this so what about values changing how can we change people's values then because it's one thing to to map the values or to ask people about their values or to hear more about why people are doing the things they're doing but how do you how do you think that you change people's values i think even by questioning them you you simply change values because always the way your your questions are formulated shows what you are really thinking but otherwise to change people's values i do we do the open space events which help people discuss things i i try to write um you i think the important thing is to sort of or to bring people

who who can who can talk about these things uh it's it's an ongoing it's an ongoing project, but I think it's also in the air, as it were, because the people are disappointed with the system. But it's also a race against extremism, right? Because many people in our country are disappointed with a system which did not fulfill its promise to them. It has made them poor, maybe, unemployed. And then they can either start a community garden or they can go and demonstrate against immigrants, for example.

I think in the US, Donald Trump is an example of somebody who sort of very much sort of being critical of others, pushing your frustration onto other more vulnerable groups. Yeah, it's looking at the problem. They're both acknowledging the problems, but where is the blame being placed? In Central Europe, we have a very bad experience with this because, as you know, the Jews were blamed in Germany

for problems of mainstream economic system, for the crisis. And one and a half, one million was exterminated. Actually, it was much more, I think. Was it one million children and ten million Jews? But I can't remember the exact numbers, but they're just numbers which you can't really imagine. And it was in my family as well, so we live this, we have lived this, so we are very much afraid of some kind of extremism and sort of castigation

of some groups who are even less fortunate than maybe us. And the other way is to sort of start to build from the ground up a new economy, a sharing economy, a way to sort of try to get out of the money system in some way, right? Try to be less dependent on a system which is destructive. Yeah. Well, wonderful. It's been great to hear about all the great examples going on in the Czech Republic and all the great work that you do.

If people want to learn more about you or the work that you do or the things that are going on in the Czech Republic, where can they turn to? Well, I wrote a book called Living in the Cracks, which is the result of some of my research about 10 years ago, which is available also online on the fiesta website f-e-a-s-t-a com i think and i'm starting to have my own website which would be www.nadiajohannisova.cz cz is czech republic but it's not on yet it will be on hopefully this year wonderful so the the book was called living in the cracks living in the cracks living in the

cracks and the website will be www.nadia johannesova which is j-o-h-a-n-i-s-o-v-a dot z-e-t yes cz That is the way the English calls it. Ah, okay. Just CZ. Just CZ. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Nadia. And you've been listening to an Upstream interview,

which is part of the Economics for Transition project. To learn more and hear more interviews and episodes, please visit www.economicsfortransition.org. Thanks so much. The smoke is rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our bones that break To the morning we run to the shoreline Calling us to speak Elsewhere Waves under the earth

And rocks Casting ghostly Shadows Tall like Nile Casting ghostly shadows, tall like nylons As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our bones that break

Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Blades under the earth and pearls Crossing mostly shadows Tall like giants And sweet sapp fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea

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