Sustainable settlement is Compact settlement

One of the major advantages of Site Value Tax is that it is a powerful way of limiting urban sprawl and encouraging the intensive use of urban land. It’s good, then, to see compact settlement receiving attention as an aspect of sustainability. George Monbiot discusses it in his Guardian column today. [...]

Even US Big Business can see the sense of a Job Guarantee

Government must take a leading role in job creation. Conservative or even liberal agendas that cede responsibility for job creation to the private sector over the next few years are simply dazed or perhaps crazed. The private sector is the source of long-term job creation but in the short term, no rational observer can believe that global or even small businesses will invest here when the labor over there is so much cheaper.

Re-thinking business structures – how to encourage sustainability through conscious design choices

In this week's chapter from Fleeing Vesuvius, Patrick Andrews argues that business could be the most powerful force in the world in achieving higher levels of sustainability and resilience. Unfortunately, its potential is blocked by laws and by hierarchical structures that mean that shareholders’ interests are put before those of society and the planet. Some firms, however, are adopting new structures that free them to place proper emphasis on social and environmental concerns.

Sharing the Land – an idea whose time has come

Even with a Site Value Tax covering developed land and a Land Value Tax covering all the rest, access to land is important. The taxes recognise land as a commons shared by all but resilience requires that its use is widely spread amongst the population. Distributed landownership is needed to protect against large landowners lobbying to remove the LVT and also to spread the knowledge of carbon building, biodiversity protecting, sustainable food growing methods amongst the widest groups of people. Here is an interesting article in shareable.net about emerging land share systems in the US and UK.