Feasta’s book Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse draws together many of the ideas our members have developed over the years and applies them to a single question – how can we bring the world out of the mess in which it finds itself?

The book confronts this mess squarely, analysing its many aspects: the looming scarcity of essential resources such as fossil fuels – the lifeblood of the world economy; the financial crisis in Ireland and elsewhere; the collapse of the housing bubble; the urgent need for food security; and the enormous challenge of dealing …

Drastic cuts in the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are required to avoid a climate catastrophe. A worldwide agreement to secure such cuts will be impossible to negotiate unless both the pain and the benefits are shared equitably around the world. Moreover, the sharing system must be robust enough to ensure that the cuts agreed actually happen. Cap & Share is both robust and equitable. It has the additional advantage that, until it is adopted globally, it can be used by individual countries to make sure their emissions take a downward path. This 32 page Feasta booklet explains how C&S could …

Read The Ecology of Money online

In The Ecology of Money, Richard Douthwaite argues that just as different insects and animals have different effects on human society and the natural world, money has different effects according to its origins and purposes. Was it created to make profits for a commercial bank, or issued by a government as a form of taxation? Or was it created by its users themselves purely to facilitate their trade? And was it made in the place where it is used, or did local people have to provide goods and services to outsiders to get enough of it to trade among themselves? The Briefing shows that it will be impossible to build a just and sustainable world, unless and until money creation is democratized. Richard says that it is potentially the most important thing he has written.

A Look at Rural Social Enterprises in Britain and the Czech Republic

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Living-and often thriving-in the cracks between the business world and the state system is an amazing variety of organisations which, according to some economists, theoretically shouldn’t exist. That’s because their goal is not to make profits but to meet social needs which both the market and government either can’t meet nearly as well or have totally ignored.

Growth: The Celtic Cancer, Why the global economy damages our health and society

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A new issue of the Feasta Review was published in November 2004. “The aim of the Review is to present in a permanent form some of the thinking that has been going on in the Feasta network since the previous one appeared” says John Jopling, who edited it with Richard Douthwaite. “It is three years since the last issue and there’s a lot to report.”

from James Robertson’s December 2004 newsletter.

This fine collection of high-quality items (207 double-column pages), edited by Richard Douthwaite and John Jopling, and published in November 2004 by the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability in Dublin, is something special. [...] It can be read online at www.feasta.org/documents/review2/index.htm.

On that page, there’s also an option to order it for £9.95 from Green Books.

Unlike Feasta Review No.1 (2001), this one has a title – “GROWTH: THE CELTIC CANCER: Why the global economy damages our health and society”. But potential readers should not be misled into supposing the Review …