Upstream - Growing Good Lives with Inez Aponte

Episode Date: February 7, 2016

In this interview, we hear from Inez Aponte, the founder of Growing Good Lives, an organization dedicated to bringing about a socially and environmentally just economic system by putting values, needs, and wellbeing at the heart of economic development work. Inez is a storyteller, facilitator and community organizer who uses the Human Scale Development Approach in her workshops and seminars. We talked about how she came to do this work, why we need a different way of talking about the economy, and the role of story and language in encouraging lasting behavior change. 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.

Hello and welcome. You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. I'm here with Jacob Rosk, and we are joined today by Inez Aponte for an interview. Inez is the founder of Growing Good Lives. She is a storyteller, facilitator, and community organizer who uses the human-scale development approach in her workshops and seminars. We will talk about how she came to do this work, why we need this new way of thinking and talking about economics and development, and the role of story and language in encouraging lasting behavioral change. Inez, thank you for joining us.

Let's start with your idea of change, how we change, what leads us to change, and why sometimes we don't change, and how this relates to your understanding of economics. So I became interested in that question when I started my own journey of change, which was when my son was about a year old. I saw that film, An Inconvenient Truth, which we all know. And there was a moment when I was sitting there with a bunch of friends watching it, and the graph goes up and he gets on that kind of lift and it goes up and up and up and I was watching the dates as it went up you know 2030, 2040, 2050 and my child was then a year old and all I could think about was that's when he's going to be this age and this age that's when he want to have when he's

going to want to have children that's when and I just really literally saw the future disintegrating before my eyes um and it uh plunged me into that sort of dark night of the soul and I thought because I'd been working as a storyteller for over a decade then um and I'd been I guess uh a kind of low-level environmentalist in the sense that I was doing a lot of stuff to reduce my own impact. But at that moment, I felt that that wasn't enough. My individual activism, really, I needed to extend myself. But what was interesting for me around that time was that I then started to look at ways that I could use my skills. And I got involved with the transition movement. I became a trainer. I sort of developed workshops. But what interested me was that the same people in the room with me watching that information,

I think there were about seven or eight of us and only two of us acted upon the information and started to do something differently. And I have no judgment about the other six, but I was really interested how it was possible because the information impacted me in such a way that I thought life is just not going to be the same. I cannot go back. And what I started to realize was there's a set of conditions, I think, that are needed for people to make changes.

And I guess when it comes to the storytelling, that's interesting because I think there's something about how the information became a story for me. It wasn't just information, it was like, that's my child's life. And it became really close. And so it kind of became part of the story of how my life was going to work out. Whereas sometimes that information can just be presented like numbers. And there's a way in which we don't really let it let it touch us um and then the other thing which is how i came to the human scale development framework which was that i was i kept thinking how is it possible that the information wasn't enough for those other people and we know it's not enough for people and i met someone who'd been studying here and they'd met manfred maxff, and they were telling me about this model. And I suddenly thought there's something about how when our fundamental needs aren't being met,

it's very hard for us to start thinking about the Earth as a sort of connected whole in which our needs, actually we need the Earth to have our needs met. But if we have a system in which it looks as if our needs can just be met by the market, then we're more connected to what's happening in the market than we are connected to what's happening on the earth. So I started to use that model to start the conversation with people, not so much about why aren't you doing this, but to look at the more systemic reasons that people don't change so

for example if you uh we all have a need for subsistence but the only way you're going to meet the need for subsistence is by buying your food from the supermarket you're not not going to eat you are still going to eat and you're going to go to the supermarket and telling people that they shouldn't buy at supermarkets when that's the only option they have is just not productive. And that's a very kind of, we all agree that we have a need for subsistence, but we don't often talk about the other needs, such as the need for identity or the need for participation. And there are so many ways in which now those needs for identity and participation are kind of commodified. And we can only meet those needs through maybe shopping or the other ways in which we used to meet those needs that maybe didn't harm the earth are not as available

to us so again um i through that model i became a lot more uh sympathetic and understanding of why it is that people don't make changes and at the same time uh trying to find ways in which um instead of telling what not to do, pointing them to what they could do, which would actually satisfy that need much, much better than what they're doing. And is it not only about personal needs? What I'm hearing is how one could meet their own needs and potentially meet other people's needs and the planet's needs? Yes. Because it's not, you know, to change people's mind, I'm hearing, it's not just about, you know, telling them that if they buy local it'll taste better, but it's also about other things that that'll satisfy. Yeah. I think people are often not aware of what their needs are.

So when you ask people, I mean, I've done this now with hundreds of people, I'll ask them, what do you feel you really need to both survive and thrive? And you get a whole list of things. And it'll be different for different people. And what's interesting about that is that quite often when you ask people what they need, what they answer with is the thing that's going to satisfy a fundamental need. So perhaps I need to explain what those fundamental needs are. So what Manfred Max Neif, who is the person who started the human skill development approach with a number of colleagues, what he came up with in the 1980s was that we had nine fundamental needs which we share across all ages, across all cultures,

and across time. He says these needs, they don't actually change, or they change very, very slowly. So the proposal is that these nine needs, which are the need for subsistence, as I mentioned, so anything you do to keep your body alive and healthy and strong, the need for freedom, the need for identity, so having a sense of where you belong, who you are, your history. The need for creation, both as being actively creating, but also experiencing the creation of others. So I'd say sometimes people say I have a need for beauty, and I think beauty kind of fits into the need for creation in that way. Affection, so love, care, being acknowledged, being appreciated. Participation, having your voice heard, being able to join in with others.

Protection, so feeling safe. Understanding, which is not just understanding as in, you know, human understanding between people, but actually being able to understand the world, so knowledge and information. And idleness, which is a much contested one in the West, but actually he states that we need downtime, we need time to relax, where it's not filled with activity. So if you have those nine needs, what you see is that actually those needs are the same across the world and across ages, but the way we satisfy those needs differs. So if you were born in a tribal culture in Papua New Guinea, you're going to meet your need for idleness or your need for participation in a different way than if you're born in Manhattan, for example. And what you can start to do is you can start to look at how well are these satisfiers working? can start to do is you can start to look at how well are these satisfiers working are they working in a way that meets other needs as well so a synergic satisfier would meet other needs at the

same time an example with that would be if I invited you around to my house to cook a meal together and maybe it was food that I'd grown myself, then I would meet my need for understanding, because I know where my food comes from, my need for participation by being with you, my need for affection, my need for creation, I've cooked a meal. And so you have all these needs being met in one activity. So that's a very positive thing. But what you see is there's also ways in which we meet a need and harm another need.

But what you see is there's also ways in which we meet a need and harm another need. So an example of that would be when we're meeting our need for subsistence, let's say through money, and we have jobs that take us away from our families 40 hours, maybe 60 hours a week, then that's kind of harming our need for affection and idleness and even participation because there's no time for those things. Or on a kind of more sort of national, international scale, if we're trying to meet our need for protection through waging wars, which is very topical, then actually we become less safe. So you can start to look at what is an effective satisfier for the need for protection. And you can also start to look at that there's a kind of historical element a sort of story element to what we think is a good satisfier

because we've been all well most of us or many of us uh have been made to believe that actually uh defense is a a useful thing to invest in because we need to defend ourselves against this big enemy and that story is perpetuated the whole time we've gone to war because that's the story that we have we don't have another story that says actually our protection would be met better met if we provided for the needs of people in other countries with the same amount of money that we're now using to go to war but that's kind of not a narrative that's really existing at the moment. I think it is among some people, but still, it's very interesting how that narrative of war has been perpetuated.

So for each of these needs, there's a story behind it, a kind of inner component, and then the outer component, which is usually reinforcing that cycle. So in order to create a new story, we have to start showing examples of where things have happened differently around those needs, if that makes sense. Can you talk a little bit about human scale development, just that phrase and maybe what that means or how that challenges the traditional understanding of development? Yeah. So Manfred Maxneaf, who is the economist

behind most of this work, he was a conventional economist. He trained at Harvard, I believe. And he was teaching at Berkeley University. And then he ended up in the 70s and 80s working in Latin America. And he was working with some of the poorest people there as an economist, trying to approach the problem of poverty from that, you know, economist point of view, like, how do we develop? And he tells a story about one day being up in the mountains in Peru, in a small village, and it had rained and rained and rained for many days. So the ground had turned into mud and he found himself standing opposite a young man

who he knew this young man had four children, a wife and a mother to look after. And he didn't have a job and he was standing there with no shoes on his feet. And he describes this moment as a real epiphany that he realised actually there was nothing he could say to this man that from an economics point of view that would make any sense. I mean was he going to tell him that he should be happy that GDP had grown or imports had risen or so at that moment he describes it as looking in the face of poverty and having nothing to say.

So he went back and started to think about what does poverty and wealth really mean? Not from a kind of monetary point of view or a conventional economics point of view. What does it really mean to be wealthy? So he came up with those nine fundamental needs. And he realized that a lot of the development models were actually doing more harm than good. So where human-scale development comes in is that it works with communities, and it asks them to kind of evaluate how well their needs are being met. So what are the satisfiers that are currently in place? Are they working?

So where's the wealth? So where are the satisfiers really working? Where is there maybe a wealth of identity and wealth of participation but maybe there's a poverty in other areas maybe there's a poverty of freedom or a poverty of subsistence and so um what a community will do is start to map out the positive and negative satisfiers and then start to have a visioning process to say what would we like this to look like if we really were going to create a society or a community where our needs are satisfied how are they going to what's it going to look like and then there's a process by which you identify the actions to take to get to that place. So what are the bridging satisfiers? And so what people get is the awareness of that their wealth is actually based on meeting their needs,

rather than the story we've been told is your wealth is how much money you have in the bank. So what we see is people become quite empowered thinking about that. Because if you've been told your whole life that you're poor and you're poor and you're poor because you don't have money, but someone comes along and says, actually, you have this wealth of other things in your community that are really working, that's a very empowering thing to experience. And to think that actually if you are given the chance, you have the ability to change certain things in your community. are given the chance you have the ability to change certain things in your community so it talks very much about local self-reliance and not the kind of development model that uh where some westerner comes along and pumps some investment so to speak into the community and then raises gdp

because as we saw gdp a rise in gdp may actually have a negative effect on some of those needs so that's the kind of human scale element of it. You've worked and have a lot of experiences with getting people to think differently about these issues. Maybe can you describe a situation? What do you do to start people thinking differently about it when you do this? I know you've done workshops. So how does that look like? to start people thinking differently about it when you do this work i know you've done workshops and

so how does that look like and what does it yeah um well i actually use another framework as well which is uh um sort of loosely based on ken bilber's integral model um where i described the four quadrants so that the personal which is the inner individual and then our behavior which is the outer individual and then at the same time we have a collective inner and a collective outer and I ask people to think about how the collective outer that we have what are the forces that have created that and they are based on certain beliefs that we have which is why I'm very keen to sort of examine the language that we use and the stories that we tell so there's a story about you know how our need for affection should be met how or even whether our need for affection

should be met by the economic system so it's really interesting when i present this and i'll say okay this is the economic system here are all those needs and the word affection comes up and they're like oh no but that's not about the economy. But when I ask them whether it's okay for the economy to negatively impact your ability to meet your need for affection, let's say by working so many hours, then suddenly people say, oh yes, actually, yeah, we do have to examine that. So it's kind of interesting to bring those things into it. So we start looking really at what the story is that that's got us here um because it's it's um very easy to think that that is the only story that

exists because we're in the middle of it but of course there are other stories in other parts of the world um that have a different idea and you know we're at shumaka college so there's this notion of like we're connected to the earth and the kind of whole indigenous thinking about that connection is a very very different story and it's created very different results so people have an opportunity to think oh so we've got to this point because of the stories that we tell and then i introduce uh the human skill development framework as a different way of telling that story so if we're going to look at how well the economy is or isn't doing, then we have to think how well are our needs met. So we just, we, and also I like to separate,

I introduce a different word, actually the word crematistics, which comes from the word crema, which means money. So in ancient Greece, the word crerematistika referred to the practice of creating money or making money, and the word economics referred to the practice of how to get the most use value out of what we have for the longer term. So those are two different practices. So I'd say that economia, in the way that it was practiced in ancient Greece is much closer to human scale development. And chromatistics is really what we have in a neoliberal capitalist society, where the goal is to create as much money as possible. And then

we have the trickle down effect, and maybe people's needs will get met if we're lucky. But the focus of that economy is chrommatistic. So we have two different stories that we're looking at. And I ask people to think about, again, that same question, how well are your needs met? Because this work has been mostly done with people who have, let's say, poverties of subsistence. So they're what we conventionally call poor people. We know people who can't buy shoes, who don't education you don't have enough food but it's very easy to see that actually we have multiple poverties in the west so if you sit together with a bunch of people and you think okay how well is my need for participation or freedom or understanding or protection met

and you look very deeply then what starts to bubble up is actually we're not doing that well in the conventional in in in the in the sort of more human scale economic sense we're doing well our GDP is going up but actually all these poverties are arising in our communities when we see very very high levels of addiction and social disintegration happening so those are poverties so that that process gets people thinking very differently about what an economy is and then there is a step from there to start thinking okay what can i do how am i an economic actor in the human scale development sense and we know what we are how we are economic actors in the chromatistics or the conventional economic sense we know that we go out how we are economic actors in the primatistics or the conventional economic sense. We know that we go out and we get a job and how much money we make from that job determines our worth.

And it's very different in human-scale development. So people who are kind of invisible in the current economy that we have become visible. So mothers who are staying at home with their children, people who are caring for the elderly, the activities that you do just to kind of make life pleasant for each other, the kind of natural giving, friendships, community, the kind of learning that happens between people that is not kind of official, all those things are really adding to the human satisfaction in that model. But they don't show up in any economic model. And we don't actually, it's not a match of, oh yes, let's take those and let's monetize them so we can measure them.

It's saying, let's drop the monetization. Let's start thinking of different, more qualitative ways of measuring how well we're doing. So that is usually quite a shift for people. Depending on who I'm working with, if they were activists, then depending on what kind of activism they were doing, people in the transition movement are quite often already doing this kind of stuff, but it gives a different angle with which to communicate the value of what they're doing.

Because I think those of us who are doing environmental work we make a lot of assumptions about shared shared value systems and we kind of are we're on one side and we know and those other people don't know and I actually think that those other people they do know and this is a good way to have that conversation are your needs being met and even if you have a big flash car, your needs may still not be met. And if you have the conversation about needs, have that conversation first

before you start talking about the earth or sustainability, which was kind of one of the reasons I got into it because I felt that I really couldn't have the kind of climate change conversation anymore. Really people who believe in climate change, believe in climate change and those who don't, they don't necessarily come over the bridge because you talk more and more about how scary it is or how it's going to destroy, you know, what they hold dear. And so I dropped the climate change conversation many years ago and I talk about needs and how well the current economic system is meeting people's needs and it often isn't even for the wealthy

they're not necessarily they're meeting some needs but quite often they're sort of pseudo satisfying those needs so you know all the shopping and buying immaterial goods isn't necessarily making them feel a true sense of belonging or, you know, a real sense of being valued. And they start to realize that it creates a language that they can then use. Okay, this is not meeting my need for affection. It's not meeting my need for participation. It's a pseudo-satisfier and the word pseudo-satisfier which is one of the terms in human scale development is a very powerful word because when I introduce it it's a lot of lights go on even in people of all ages so I've introduced this concept to young people 12 year olds teenagers older people and it's really that term that articulates what many people are feeling

but don't quite know you know I have all this stuff I have the car I have the house I have you know however many pairs of boots and I still don't feel satisfied it's because they're pseudo satisfiers they're not quite doing the thing and this is not to say that a house doesn't provide us with something it provides us for the need for protection and you know subsistence keeping our bodies healthy but it's not ever going to provide adequately for a deep sense of belonging it might do that a little bit but it may not so it's like people kind of self-identify which bits of these activities i'm involved in are really satisfying my needs. And it's not going to be the same for everybody. And it's also, the workshop is free enough that we have, you know,

useful debates about it. So, you know, I'm, I would say that a lot of what we consume is a pseudo-satisfier, but I wouldn't tell someone, oh, you're doing that because you're sedo-satisfying your need. I would just let people have those words and those terms and they play around with them and they do a kind of self-analysis and they go, yeah, that's kind of what that means for me. I'm smoking because actually, you know, actually I just want to hang out with my friends and they're all smoking and I need to participate. If I give up smoking, I'm not going to be standing there in the cold smoking my cigarette. the same for everyone some people might say no the smoking it really works for me and it's not really up to me to tell people what works

but I find that actually yeah people identify pseudo-satisfiers very very easily because there's lots of them around I mean when we come to growth, we wouldn't be able to grow the economy if we weren't pseudo-satisfying people all the time because people would stop shopping if they were satisfied. What is the relationship between these values and this work with extrinsic and intrinsic values and that kind of concept? What's really missing from the economic conversation is the

psychology of how we got here and the kind of the whole uh uh inner element of why we think certain things are good for us so quite often we just say oh that's human nature people just want this stuff but what we want has been continually manipulated by advertising so there is no such thing as what human nature is. So to get back to that question of intrinsic and extrinsic values, we might experience some of those extrinsic values as very much intrinsic. So I would say I don't use that word. I'm kind of aware, I'm aware of that language. But again, I would not, I would not say to somebody, oh, that's an extrinsic value, and judge it. I would like, you know, let's have a play with these ideas

and see where you get to yourself. Yeah. How does this work relate to the work of nonviolent communication? Because I would say, for me um nonviolent communication feels like a very personal one-on-one way and then this work feels like a more societal or community level but i'm definitely hearing some similar phrases such as needs and strategies to meet needs and requests versus demand and who meets your needs so can you talk a little bit about that relationship? Well, from what I know,

human-scale development was an influence on Marshall Rosenberg's theory. So I don't know that much about nonviolent communication, but I know that there are a whole much, much longer list of needs there. But I think that notion of the difference between a need and a strategy or a need and a satisfier is really crucial. Because quite often we conflate the two. So, you know, we need a car or, you know, we need that new dress. And actually we're not examining what we need it for. So, yeah, so he was very much influenced by human-scale development. And I think it's a very useful model.

I know that the FRAME's work has been used not just with NVC, but other conflict resolution models have used this model as a way to start that conversation, that we all have the same needs, but just different ways of trying to meet them. Is there something about language that you know that we all have the same needs but just different ways of trying to meet them is there something about language that you feel we haven't touched upon the word the use of different words and um yeah did you like to or you'd like to add something um yeah so i'm really interested in this stories that people bring. So one of the things that people very often say in workshops is,

well, the problem is people are just selfish. That's a really, really powerful narrative. And I'm really interested in that. So I often just ask the question, how much do you experience that in your own life that people are selfish because if I if I think of my life which has had its ups and downs I'd say that most people have not been selfish towards me and they've been very generous I'm still alive 47 you know I'm here and I've traveled on my own and I've met lots and lots of generosity.

So it's kind of interesting where we sometimes, and this is not to say that sometimes people have really, really terrible life stories in which terrible things have happened. at how most people certainly those of us who are you know well-fed and clothed in the west i think many people if they look closely can also notice a lot of generosity from people that just came out of the blue that wasn't uh instrumental wasn't like i'm doing this for you so you can do something back for me so why do we say people are selfish rather than people are generous because if you took the you know a lens, you'd see all this generosity happening. And I'm really interested in that because I think that people are selfish under certain circumstances. I think when we feel threatened,

I think when, for example, our needs are not being met, we might become more contracted and it's much harder for us to be generous towards other people. So rather than thinking of it as it being human nature, become more contracted, and it's much harder for us to be generous towards other people. So rather than thinking of it as it being human nature, what kind of society fosters this selfishness? And what kind of society would foster a more generous approach to others? And I do think that there are conditions that help us be more generous. And it's those conditions

that we need to foster so i don't think that selfishness is uh per se human nature because i see so much generosity so that can't just be an aberration um it's a really it's a really interesting story and it's making me think of a of um of of money and the role of money in this because there's some research that was done with children. I can't remember exactly. I'm terrible with remembering dates and times. This research was done with some young children looking at the effects of rewards on behavior.

So there were some children at a party and they'd had a story about a king and a pirate or whatever. So the researcher said, well, she would do some drawings, and they were happily drawing away. Some of them were more interested in drawing than others, but they were all drawing. And then she said, well, you know what I'm going to do? For every drawing, you can have a gummy bear. And then the group apparently divided into two, the business people and the artists. The business people just made as many drawings as possible, handed them over and collected as many gummy bears.

And the artists were like, no, I liked the drawing. I'm just going to keep doing the drawing. And they'd get maybe one or two gummy bears. But they started to notice what the business people were doing. They're like, I kind of want a gummy bear, but I'm conflicted because I actually want to do my drawing. I like doing my drawing. I guess that would come down to sort of intrinsic rewards. So what then happened, the next phase was that the researchers said, oh, no more gummy bears. That's it. Gummy bears are

all gone. And what happened then was that none of the children wanted to draw anymore. Neither the artists or the business people, so to speak, wanted to do any drawing. So initially this activity, which was just giving pleasure to all of them, it suddenly changed into something that can only be done for money. And so that's the interesting thing about when money comes into the equation, which I think a lot of people see, is that it changes our feelings about the activities that we do. So the commodification of actions that we used to do generously for each other, they change, the quality of it changes. And I saw something that really made me think a few years ago in Totnes

which was a little poster on a notice board saying friendship offered for elderly people so a listening ear and it was like £10 an hour and I was fascinated by this I thought on the one hand here is someone who's realized that they have a particular quality particular skill which is really really valuable which is to listen to people and there's a need you know people need to be listened to and why am I bothered that it's being offered at 10 pounds an hour and I thought And I felt very sorry for this person because I also felt that she should

have her needs met. So she shouldn't... I wanted her to have her needs met. The only way she thought she could have her needs met, and it's probably the reality, was to do something and to get paid for it. And she was doing something that she did love. But there was something about that that made me uncomfortable, and I was thinking about this actually last night, and I thought, why does it bother me when the things that we would do generously, like friendship, why does it matter when we put a price tag on that? And then my realisation was that there is no way you can say that friendship costs 10 pounds an hour.

And it's also not 500 pounds an hour. It just doesn't have a price. So any price is kind of a perversion of the actual act. So it's no longer friendship. And some people say, oh, well, that's just some kind of hippy-dippy notion. But it's a bit like, you know, my love for my child. There's no way you can express that in a finite, you know, in something as exact as that. It can be expressed in many other ways, and that's poetry, but it cannot be expressed in a monetary figure. It cannot be expressed in something as exact as numbers. And that's the thing, the dilemma I think we're up against, is that when we try and push everything through the money system we're pushing things like love and affection and friendship and everything that makes love life valuable into a set of numbers and then we try and measure that and

it just it goes against everything that makes us human and yet we have an economic system that's constantly forcing us to do that and that relates to the uprising or the rising of the sharing economy yes so the concept of sharing our homes our bikes our cars um basically looking around our lives and saying what could i profit off of what could i commodify yeah and i really love that you're bringing in the other side of that which is well if people aren't getting their basic needs met for subsistence or for purpose or that type of thing then then maybe they need to commodify everything so yeah yeah yeah so if so the question I sometimes

ask is which of these needs which of the sort of satisfiers do we feel we want to pay money for and what happens when we pay money for those. Most people say, no, I don't want affection to be paid for. But they might say, oh, well, I'm willing to pay for understanding and to go on a course. And that's really okay. But the point of human-scale development is that those decisions are made by the community and not by a government or corporations and that the the the the the government's really a servant of the people rather than that you know the other way around so the question of money i think is really

interesting because money as it is has a particular quality but it could also become a different form of exchange and i don't know if you're familiar with the work of Bernard Lyotard. He talks a lot about having a diversity of money rather than this one system that we're all dependent on. And so there's different ways of us exchanging. And there may be currencies that have a different quality and a different way of operating that may be more suitable to some of these needs. And then there may be currencies that we use for things that we cannot necessarily make in our own communities. But for me, the thing is not so much to come up with one or two answers, but for people to go through the process of thinking about it.

but for people to go through the process of thinking about it. So I wouldn't want to impose alternative currencies. I'd want people to understand enough about what money does so that they say, oh, we want a different money system. So the work for me is about how people have enough information and empowerment to make those decisions. Are you familiar with Paulo Fre frera's work so that was really you know what his objective was rather than even if you come up with the best even the most benevolent idea unless the people take it on for themselves through a process then you're in

fact imposing another form of oppression on them so for me that's really essential is that it isn't just about saying oh we do it human scale development may or we have you know these alternative currencies or this or we do degrowth it's like the process by which people come to that decision has to be their own and it could be quite frustrating because it you know i sometimes have people in workshops and they really don't agree with what i've said and i feel that space has to be opened um and I and I have just worked with you know people not agreeing and that process of not agreeing is part of how we as human beings have to relearn that that process of of what a real democracy is because what we call democracy is just you know a farce democracy is what we do between each other to come up with the most the the best solution for

everyone and uh that's not just sort of putting your you know ticking a box every four years so those processes i think it's what happened because i feel very hopeful because these processes are springing up everywhere our human skill development is part of all these amazing other economic alternatives that are springing up, that are all connected to this notion that the way the economy is working now is going against our needs. It's not meeting our needs, and it's also harming the planet,

which is effectively our most fundamental need of all. It seems like workshops and processes are critical to human-scale development because it's not something a government can do on its own. It really has to be participatory, it feels like, with the community that is working through the human-scale development. So that's critical. Do you have any individual, maybe a journal prompt

or an activity to offer to the listeners to maybe explore these on their own like to think about their own lives in terms of their maybe a question or something to think about their own lives in terms of these needs or um i guess what i've been doing for myself is really examining quite closely how my idea of how my needs should be met has been shaped by the culture. And on the other side is like, how well is the culture meeting those needs? So I'll take Facebook as an example. You know, most of us are on Facebook. Now, Facebook isn't per se bad. There may be some criticisms of who owns it and how it operates,

but in essence that you might go online and make connections with people. I've made some amazing connections through Facebook and through Twitter. But there is also something about what needs it meeting. So if I'm there and actually what I really need is a proper connection, a real sense of participating with others, then I'm not properly getting it. Things like Facebook or other pseudo-satisfiers, if they are pseudo-satisfiers, because that's up to us to decide at that moment, what I think they do is they placate our sense of urgency around these needs. So we don't quite act because we're kind of, we've got a bit of Facebook, so I don't feel

so desperate now. No, I'm not going to call someone or make the effort to go out or organize something because I've sort of like put that need a little bit to sleep. And I think this is the, I think one of the dangers of the kind of society that we have, because of course advertisers also know that we have needs and are throwing things at us just to kind of keep the frustration and the anger below the surface. So I would say that one of the best things we can do is actually to really feel how we really feel about the things that are presented to us. And if they're not doing the trick, it's most likely they're not doing the trick for other people either.

And to have that conversation, the difficult conversation about maybe some of our even slightly addictive behaviours, why is it not working? And just imagining how should it work if it was working? Because what you'll find if you start the conversation is that other people want that too. And then you organize something. And then, you know, whether that's around participation, around being heard,

whether that's around your identity, is it that you gather together and start to, I don't know, look at the ways that things are celebrated in your community. It could be from any level because human-scale development isn't just the kind of big activities that we do. It's really how we are with each other so I would say that's a really good starting point is have that conversation about how satisfied you are with how things are at the moment thank you yeah one thing that came up for me when you're talking about the needs and and also your work is that it seems that um might be that which needs are met are unequally distributed on different lines so between different people within a society between different people globally and uh between genders between and yeah how is your experience when running workshops but

you know is there a pattern in that certain needs you talked about maybe if you're very rich then you might be able to buy a subsistence to a very high level but there might be other areas that um and also i know you you told me that this work has been used a lot in latin america and what you've done is to try and bring it to europe and maybe this for me that was an interesting story and maybe how how it's used differently in different economic contexts well i'd say i mean there's a number of people in Europe who are using human-skilled development. I was in Jena earlier this year at a conference, and Manfred Maxneef came over a day earlier to meet up with a bunch of us. We were about seven.

And I think the focus is different in Europe around needs because, like I said, if you're working with poor communities, then... Like I said, if you're working with poor communities, then... Because I've also worked with people in Portugal and Spain and in Greece where things were really bad. And there's always much more of a kind of willingness to embrace a new model, a new way of thinking, because it's so clear it's not working. Everything has fallen apart. We don't have jobs anyway. We're losing our homes.

Let's try something else. It is more difficult when people are wealthy in the conventional economic sense. But I think what we're seeing is there's still kind of high levels of emotional isolation, of dissatisfaction, even in Western economies. And it's that leverage point, think that's really interesting because it's very hard to again it um it's very hard to ask people to change behavior that they feel is actually working for them so if you say to someone oh don't go on that skiing holiday and it's kind of working oh yeah it's not good for the planet i mean we all have reasons not to do it um that shift that needs to happen i think is really about whether um you know going

on the skiing holiday it and this is again i'm using that example and it may be that it works for people but it may be that at that moment you're touching on the fact that that's something that they're doing because another need is not being met so a lot of the kind of high um sort of carbon intensive activities they can either be done less carbon intensive or maybe they don't need to be done at all um something and i keep i think i'm going off on a tangent again, but something that came onto my Facebook feed, which I thought was a really interesting example, was this, it's like a flying camera. You heard of these?

It's sort of like they can follow you around. And so, yeah, it's like a drone camera that, you know, you can now buy one and, you know, you can have this camera take pictures of you as you're sort of like you know uh skiing down the the mountain and i was like my god that's so fascinating because particularly because it's used a lot in sort of sports so sports are things that on the whole there's kind of extreme sports there the things we're doing in nature we're doing in the environment we and there's something really amazing about uh maybe the sort of adrenaline and the being outdoors and feeling the elements right so we need the earth for that but that drone is not only that it's

exploiting economically people's lives you have to mine you know under terrible circumstances to create that equipment um but everything about it is actually destroying the production of these things it's destroying the world we don't actually need those drones i mean i will say that categorically we do not need drones that take photographs of us other people used to do that and maybe you know maybe they weren't perfect but it's not essentially a need that we have but what i I think it's doing is, what I think the need is there, is something about being seen. About being seen by others, which I completely relate to. So that bit, I totally relate to that.

But is posting Facebook pictures of you, you know, kind of careering down a mountainside that were taken by a drone, is that really going to satisfy? Is it really worth, or is there something there that actually you want to be seen in a much, much more profound way than that? But the only thing you've learned is, well, if I get a drone, then I'll be seen, and then, you know, on social media, people will, you know, have some kind of wow effect. To me, that's a very superficial level of satisfaction. But people don't see it like that, because we're all doing it. We're all kind of like selfie-ing ourselves, you know, into the ether. So the opportunity when you have a conversation is for people to think, ah, maybe I don't really need to spend my money and resources on that thing

because what I'm really craving for could be satisfied in a much simpler way. Now, maybe it's something to do with family or community or maybe my ability to be creative in my life. Maybe I don't actually have enough say in this very high-powered job that I do. Maybe it's not really satisfying me. So I get all this money to buy the drone, to sort of like ski down a mountainside, but it's just not quite working. And all I can say about that is someone will say to me,

well, you know, that's just bullshit. It is working for me. And for that person, there'll be someone who says, it's not working for me. And it's like opening a door to that conversation. And then when that conversation happens, there'll be all sorts of reasons why you don't change. Because if everyone around you does it, your identity is bound up with that. And, you know, you're not necessarily going to change. Other forces have to change.

other forces have to change so in terms of change i don't think it's only about how people realize themselves uh that this stuff isn't working for them i think there also have to be other processes in place i think certain things um will have to be made uh uh illegal in actual fact you know we have to have laws as well it's not just only coming from the inner. It's coming from society. The society is informed by what we collectively think matters. So I would say the production of certain goods should basically be evaluated against how much carbon are you spending and how much satisfaction are you generating. And if it's not weighing up, you should not be allowed to create it but that goes against the growth paradigm it means totally rethinking how our economies work because then you say well then those businesses will go out of go out of business because we just told them that they can't you know produce anymore but think

about something like you know my favorite pet hate is Coca-Cola. If you think of what that corporation is doing, it's taking water that we could drink, that, you know, we could use for our own subsistence. It's adding sugar and all sorts of toxic chemicals to it, selling it back to us and it makes us ill. I mean, this is a violation of so many of our human needs that no sane societal system would allow that. Would just say, look, like if you are living in your tribe

and someone came up with this idea to sort of take the water from the stream and to poison it and to feed it back to you, the chief would say, hey guys, we're not doing that. This doesn't make sense. But that process is so far removed now that you know you can have corporations like you know coca-cola or any number of corporations fanta etc uh making those kind of decisions and we don't bat an eyelid we go oh yeah well you know they have the right to do that because we have a free market and all those ideas mean, the question of what a free market is,

that's another conversation we have. So what does it mean? The market is completely manipulated. So I just kind of love having difficult conversations and seeing where we go because if you do it in a way that's not threatening. So that's why I would love to have a conversation with someone who's working for Coca-Cola, and I would try and do it in a very skillful way. Sometimes there's different ways of having these conversations with people.

So I see it as a way of kind of enabling us to have as many tools as possible, because I don't think, I know I go off on this whole Coca-Cola thing, but I don't think it's useful antagonizing people. But I think it's useful making people aware of the sort of bizarre way that the system works. It is so, if you start to think about it, you think we are collectively insane. And it really is. You think deeply about what we're doing. We're basically destroying the basis of life on earth so that we can watch television and eat junk food. I mean, that's kind of, so we can pseudo-satisfy ourselves.

That doesn't make any sense. And it's also not because we're all wicked, because we're not all wicked. So there's something there about that disconnect that needs to be reconnected again. So I try many ways as possible to create those connections again for people, both in their personal lives and also with what's happening on a larger scale. Thank you. I love the way that you really offer invitations and ways to empower people instead of making people feel badly or judgments.

It's just, like you said said opening the door to difficult conversations yeah and i know that we really enjoyed this conversation with you today i'm wondering if people want to um get in touch with you or read more about the work that you do um you know what's your website or what are the different workshops you have coming up or different ways that people can find you? Yeah. So the website is growinggoodlives.com. And I do need to update what's happening. But what's happening soon in February, there's a February the 20th and 21st. I'm running a workshop with Graham Burgess, who's a green builder. And it's called bypassing the housing crisis community and diy solutions

and it's looking at what's happening with housing but through a human scale development lens so if we're going to start creating better housing then rather than just thinking as a house as a roof over your head how can you think of a house as a way in which your needs are going to be met so that's looking at how we build houses and how they are in relation to the other houses around us how we kind of build communities and that's open to everyone that's open to everyone yeah um that's um going to be in frum with the uh frum community education and then i'm very excited about something that's happening in August in Romania at the Aurora community I'm running a workshop there not quite sure of the title but it's about deep economy but

the special thing about it is that it's for people to bring their children as well because one of the things the way our society structures quite often adult activity and children activity are two separate things those of us with children feel very excluded so I thought why don't I create an opportunity where you can come and learn about economics and you know human scale development and you can bring your children along so it's a beautiful place camping and I don't have the exact details of that but that's something I'm really excited about, particularly around bringing women who are mostly still the carers of our children into this conversation around economics and allowing them to see themselves as economic actors in the human skill development sense. And again, is that an international audience? Yes.

Or is it for local people? But check in with the website. Say it one more time, the website. It's growinggoodlives.com. Growinggoodlives.com. And you have a blog on there as well to read much more about this wonderful topic. Yeah. Great.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks. You've been listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. To listen to more interviews and episodes, please visit economicsfortransition.org. The smoke keeps rising in the hallways The stars blooming from our hopes that break To the morning we run

To shoreline Calling us to speak the truth Waves under the earth and rocks Casting ghostly shadows Tall like giants As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea As we set fire to the sea

As we set fire to the sea Snowgates rising in the hallways Flowers blooming from our boats that break Into the morning we run To the shoreline Calling us to speak the sight Lights under the earth and the world Passing mostly shadows, tall like giants Cause we set fire to the sea

Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Cause we set fire to the sea Take some fire to the sea I am the light of the world. O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, O, © transcript Emily Beynon