The Common Good Podcast
The Common Good Podcast is a production of Jubilee-Economics.org, a 501 c3 organization dedicated to One Earth Economics for the Common Good.
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Simpler OneEarth Living Episode 0122—Chuck Collins
01/02/2022
Simpler OneEarth Living Episode 0122—Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins on the Industry That Protects Wealth and How It Hurts Everyone--Most people feel on the outside of extreme wealth. Some aspire to it. Many consider it immoral. For most of us it’s a sideshow. But Chuck says, “No! It’s not a sideshow. It’s the main show. It affects all of us.” We pay the taxes that build what everyone uses. They avoid taxes, sometimes paying none, taking no responsibility for the common good though they benefit from it. Chuck explains who makes all this work.
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Ep. 1221--Della Duncan
12/01/2021
Ep. 1221--Della Duncan
As a renegade economist, Della Duncan creates islands of alternative economics in the ocean of capitalism.
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Simpler OneEarth Living Episode 1121--Lauren Van Ham
11/01/2021
Simpler OneEarth Living Episode 1121--Lauren Van Ham
This episode tells how religions are working together to forge new possibilities in ecology, economics and women’s empowerment—all making real difference in their communities. Listen too for the importance of organizing as circles in the practice of cooperation. Previously, the circles of Jubilee. This time, United Religions Initiative's Lauren Van Ham in her work with United Religions Initiatives to form and empower Cooperation Circles around the world.
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Ep.1021-Encuentro
10/01/2021
Ep.1021-Encuentro
A U.S./Mexico Conversation on Living the Alternative Worldview We Call OneEarth Jubilee
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Ep.0921-- Eric LeCompte, Jubilee USA Network
09/01/2021
Ep.0921-- Eric LeCompte, Jubilee USA Network
Ep.0921-- Eric LeCompte, director of Jubilee USA Network: : Forgive Us Our Debts—Woes and Wins in Canceling Student Debt
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Ep.0821-Brenda Wyss
08/01/2021
Ep.0821-Brenda Wyss
Brenda Wyss: Feminist Economics Is Creating Just Systems That Meet Current Crises
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Episode 0721--Matt Brennan
07/05/2021
Episode 0721--Matt Brennan
Matt Brennan: An Advocate for Your Congregation and Nonprofit on How to Install Solar Power
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Ep.0621-Carrie Radloff
05/31/2021
Ep.0621-Carrie Radloff
It’s far too easy to assume that not much good is happening in states that are fertile ground for the growth of right-wing ways of doing things. The states of Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota have been just such fertile soils. And yet, precisely in the area where those three states meet on the Missouri River, this effective activist on environmental concerns helps us break through this stereotype that not much good can happen in areas dominated by right-wing politicians and profit-hungry corporations.
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Ep.0521-Neddy Astudillo
04/26/2021
Ep.0521-Neddy Astudillo
As an eco-minister and eco-theologian, Neddy directs Green Faith in Florida and in Latin America. Be sure you go to the GreenFaith.org to learn far more about Neddy’s accomplishments and hopes.
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Ep.0421-Robin Rivet
03/31/2021
Ep.0421-Robin Rivet
Reversing Climate Crises through Informed Tree Actions
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Ep.0321-Mike Little: Faith and Money Network
03/01/2021
Ep.0321-Mike Little: Faith and Money Network
Mike Little: Faith and Money Network
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Ep. 0221--Economist Barry Shelley: Economic Assumptions and Initiatives for Change
02/01/2021
Ep. 0221--Economist Barry Shelley: Economic Assumptions and Initiatives for Change
We focus in three areas: (1) the underlying assumptions of the prevailing economy and the challenges in moving our economy in new directions, (2) the discussions happening among professional economists about changes and different economic models, and (3) local initiatives he considers important in showing that alternative sub-economies can be created within the larger, prevailing economy.
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Ep.0121-Grace Dyrness
01/02/2021
Ep.0121-Grace Dyrness
Working with people in poverty is central to spiritual practices, but how we do it challenges us all, poor and non-poor alike. When you see poverty in a neighborhood, whether it’s urban or rural, do you assume that the people living there just don’t have what it takes to improve their lives? Most cities develop a poor neighborhood by gentrifying it with lots of financial investment and new buildings. But that displaces all the people and businesses who were there before. Where do they go? There’s also the argument that poor people simply have to help themselves; that aid takes away their incentive to improve their situation. What approach do you believe works best? Stay with us to hear an approach that really does change people as well as their situations.
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Ep.1220--Will O'Brien
12/01/2020
Ep.1220--Will O'Brien
Much of what we assume about the birth of Jesus has to be unlearned if we are to get at how that birth posed a threat to empires and superpowers everywhere. Will O’Brien speaks to the politics and economic alternatives to empire that were announced in the birth stories of Jesus. He’s ability to take apart ideas presented to us by our culture, and find, instead, the nuggets of truth that subvert the cultural understanding. He continually shapes a discipleship in the way of Jesus that is daring in how it seeks justice in politics and economics. That’s what we’ll hear in this episode. Also learn about the Alternative Seminary he hosts in Philadelphia and what he means by the politics of Christmas.
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Ep.1120-How Empowering Women Changes the World
10/29/2020
Ep.1120-How Empowering Women Changes the World
Women are being empowered toward fuller personhood through the work of Jubilee Circles. Women in Mexico are learning their rights instead of obeying patriarchal norms shaped by machismo. Some are being trained in the power of civic action and political candidacy. Others in economic self-reliance. These examples from Jubilee in Mexico relate to all of us, wherever you are listening. Hear these strong real life stories as told by Angelica and Lindsey.
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Ep. 1020--Scott Klinger
09/29/2020
Ep. 1020--Scott Klinger
Scott's current thinking is about how the world could be different, if we all invested in creating the world we want to live in, rather than investing to maximize our financial returns. What would Maximizing Our JUSTICE Returns look like? We can contrast it with Indigenous Peoples values around money. Wealth is held collectively....there are usage rights to the Earth, not ownership as white society thinks of it. We talk about legal barriers to bringing this sort of world about, and some concrete ways that listeners can invest their own assets, and ask questions of pots of money they influence, with their employers, with their churches, with their community foundations.” Fascinating Announcements Jubilee OneEarth Economics has begun to post short videos for free on YouTube at "OneEarth Jubilee." You can be a promoter of Jubilee living. Watch for information about a new Jubilee School and a certification course. In our previous podcast episode we interviewed Lane Van Ham on the power of immigrant advocacy. You can get his new book “Composite Nation: A History of Immigrant Advocacy in the United States,” directly from OneEarth Publishing, a service of Jubilee OneEarth Economics. During Advent, the four week period before Christmas, read and use Lee’s new book “The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse the Earth’s Perils.” // , and at TheOneEarthProject.com/books. Order a copy directly from Jubilee or from various suppliers on the internet.
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Ep. 0920--So Much We Learn from Outsiders: Immigrant Advocacy
08/28/2020
Ep. 0920--So Much We Learn from Outsiders: Immigrant Advocacy
Thousands of people and organizations advocate for immigrants. Even so, the best advocates are the immigrants themselves. Immigrants are archetypally the strangers in a strange land. Enormous creativity is being generated by these strangers—today and throughout human history. It is the strangers in a strange land, far more than the privileged in the land, who envision the world that makes space for all of us; the only world that can save life on our planet today. Immigrant advocates change systems from the bottom up. From the margins outside of borders. They force rethinking of what “border” means and how it gets used politically, racially, and religiously.
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Episode 08/20—Leaving Superpower Ways for Earth-Size Living
08/04/2020
Episode 08/20—Leaving Superpower Ways for Earth-Size Living
Can the current economy handle the global pandemic that increasingly shows it will be with us for a long time? Month by month signs intensify to unveil the economy’s weaknesses, leaving many to conclude that this economy is not flexible enough to bring wellbeing, but is delivering suffering instead. How, then, can we live according to a new economy?
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Episode 07/20—As This World Ends, the Light at the End...
07/07/2020
Episode 07/20—As This World Ends, the Light at the End...
“Within just a few weeks—faster than the blink of an eye in geological time—a tiny, microscopic entity brought the global monolith of human civilization, the captains of industry, the might of the world’s militaries, the financial juggernauts of money and manufacturing, to their knees.”--Ahmed Systems are being exposed, leading to profound transformation: Healthcare systems Farming and food systems Economic systems depending on growth, fossil fuels Political systems and intergovernmental systems Trade and travel systems Social systems structured for racial inequalities and class Arundhati Roy described it poignantly: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” More than that, the pandemic is a crucible, burning away and altering the structures that comprise the old paradigm, remaking who and what we are. The four phases of the “adaptive cycle”-- Growth Conservation Release Reorganization The crucible invokes the truth that The Only Way Is Through. We need to cross the threshold and step into the crucible rather than fight to hold on to what we had.
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Ep. 06/20–Pandemic and Food
06/04/2020
Ep. 06/20–Pandemic and Food
CoronaVirus is revealing breakdowns and lack of resilience in our food supply systems. Which links in the chain are broken? Rather than fixing them, what are new and better choices for us in how we bring food from soil to savory, healthy eating? This is the third successive podcast episode in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic. By the end of May, over 100,000 people have died in the U.S.—a horrific, emotional and spiritual wrenching of lives, hundreds of thousands of people across the nation are hurting, grieving. Surely, this experience of death and suffering—the largest in our lifetimes—is releasing the commitment to new life in enough of us to take leaps in the direction of change—the changes that our planet says we must make in this decade of the 2020s. Not to do so will form calluses on our souls and decay in who we are. Covid-19 abruptly stopped the fragile food supply system we’ve been depending on. The system that’s broken down is driven by industrial agriculture, global markets, trade breakdowns and corporate control. . Excellent sources that (1) explain the breakdown and (2) help us identify the systems we need going forward. Richard Heinberg wrote The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. The final chapter is loaded with things people are doing to adopt practices of OneEarth living and economics measured by wellbeing, not growth. He is senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and continues to share the wisdom of that think and action group in his Museletter on his website, . In 4/20 Museletter #326, “Fraying Food System May Be Our Next Crisis” summarizes flaws in the current system. https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-326-pandemic-response-requires-post-growth-economic-thinking “Experts who study what makes societies sustainable (or unsustainable) have been warning for decades that our modern food system is packed with ticking bombs. The ways we grow, process, package, and distribute food overwhelmingly on finite, depleting, and polluting fossil fuels. Industrial agriculture contributes to climate change, and results in soil erosion and salinization. Ammonia-based fertilizers create “” near river deltas while petrochemical pesticides and herbicides air and water. Modern agriculture also contributes to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Monocrops—huge fields of genetically uniform corn and soybeans—are especially to pests and diseases. Long supply chains make localities increasingly on distant suppliers. The system tends to low-wage workers. And food is often unequally distributed and even , contributing to poor nutrition as well as diabetes and other diseases.” Heinberg: five of the links that are breaking down currently in the food supply chain's “wicked complexity.” These five give us a big picture of what corporations and globalization have been creating in recent decades. 1. Vulnerable Food Workers 2. Fragile Distribution Networks 3. Broken Global Supply Chains 4. Bankrupt Farmers 5. Vanishing Affordability Solutions We Suggest 1. Growing more of our own. — . // seed company, 2. Rationing. — At the national level, food price controls have an of success. Stan Cox: // 3. Shorten supply chains. LINKS: , that // // . 4. Guides for how Our Choices can reconfigure food supply post-Covid-19 (mid-Covid-19) From the Reader Supported News website, an article on young adults turning their grief to action: Anna McClurkan a. Local supply—growers, retailers, markets. Focus in communities instead of corporations. b. Reduce Meat by at least 50% c. Organic—no pesticides, herbicides 5. The Land Institute, Salina, KS, — reconfiguring farming (notes from Panel with Stan Cox, 5/23/20) Detailed Show Notes at
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Ep. 05/20--Life With Covid-19
05/08/2020
Ep. 05/20--Life With Covid-19
CoronaVirus is reshaping life and society, moving in the direction of ecological living. We also acknowledge the intense resistance to that move as many of the powers want to get back to normal.
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Episode 04/20—CoronaVirus
04/10/2020
Episode 04/20—CoronaVirus
So much desolation has been caused by human incursion. We've even given it holy sounding names like Manifest Destiny. In some cases humans carry disease to other cultures that have not developed immunity, such as Europeans invading the Americas. "Perhaps the most important message the coronavirus offers is that the natural world is conspiring to save us from ourselves, to slow our materialistic greed and reign in our aggressive, self-centered, short-term, and xenophobic tendencies." --John Perkins, co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance Lee and Jerry talk about what the virus has to teach us and share pertinent thoughts from experts.
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Episode 03/20—Dave Gardner of GrowthBusters and World Population Balance
03/18/2020
Episode 03/20—Dave Gardner of GrowthBusters and World Population Balance
Simple Living Works and OneEarth Jubilee work on the crises caused by the explosion of human beings on the planet in the past century and on an economics of endless growth on our wonderful planet’s limited resources. Colleagues: (Dave Gardner)-- and ; // ; programs + (); (); ; and (SLW! Ep. of, Part 1; , Part 2); Bill Ryerson of the and ( Part 1--Population Crises; Part 2--Reducing Population Using Methods that Work)
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Episode 0220: John Michno—Adding Leadership for the 2020's Climate Challenge
02/10/2020
Episode 0220: John Michno—Adding Leadership for the 2020's Climate Challenge
Adding Leadership to Jubilee OneEarth Economics for the 2020's Climate Challenge
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Episode 0120: David Hoferer—Birds, Insects, Big Ag and Spirituality
01/02/2020
Episode 0120: David Hoferer—Birds, Insects, Big Ag and Spirituality
http://simpleliving.startlogic.com/SLW-PODCAST/ | Biology professor David Hoferer at Briar Cliff University, Sioux City, IA, an activist with the Sierra Club and Audubon Society, talks about the reasons for and the effects of a huge, precipitous drop in bird populations. Jerry met David through the NorthWestern Iowa Group of the Sierra Club, where he serves as an officer. He also leads the local chapter of the Audubon Society. He knows birds--how important they are to the web of life and how threatened they are in the climate crisis. Only a few months ago Lee began reading reports on the loss of birds, nearly ⅓ of all birds in 50 years. That’s less than his lifetime. The skies are emptier, the woods and our yards are quieter. Hanging bird feeders in our yards was once a kind of hobby. Now it’s radical, spiritual activism in resistance to the prevailing behavior of our species. A New York Times article from 9/19, entitled “Birds Are Vanishing from North America” reviews an article in the journal “Science” that reports on an exhaustive study of bird populations. It left scientists in sad astonishment at the rate of decline. They remind us with urgency of what we’re losing. It’s not only that many birds have nice songs and entertaining behaviors. Common bird species are vital to ecosystems, they control pests, pollinate flowers, spread seeds and regenerate forests.
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Ep. 1119--The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils
11/01/2019
Ep. 1119--The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils
In this episode, Jerry interviews Lee about his new, 130+ pages book on how the perils of our planet can be reversed by the story of the birth of Jesus as told in the Gospels. The Gospels give us a story of new creation. Matthew and Luke give us riffs on Genesis, a collection written to protest the Babylonian Empire. Genesis and the Gospels give us stories that radically counter the stories of superpowers. Their stories are about the creation of the Earth and new life, and they do so in defiance of the superpower domination and death they were experiencing from Babylon and Rome respectively. Those stories give us what we need in 2020 to live by a different story from the superpowers of today’s world that are destroying life for so much of our planet. The interview flows through a series of topics: why Lee wrote the book how the birth story in the Gospels and the Christmas story exist in two different paradigms the significance of the selective, mixed-gender genealogy Matthew gives us at the start of his gospel the significance of dreams in the birth story and in our new creation story today why cosmology keeps the creation story much larger than historical versions do actions we can take to live in the new creation The new book is The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils. It’s available both on Amazon and Powell’s Books. It grows out of blogs Lee wrote in Christmas seasons during past years. This is Lee’s fourth book. See for descriptions of his earlier books.
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Episode 94: Medicare for All
03/24/2018
Episode 94: Medicare for All
Time for Healthcare for All—the Majority Want It and California's Nearly There
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Episode 93 :: Don Hall of TransitionUS
02/27/2018
Episode 93 :: Don Hall of TransitionUS
TransitionUS is part of the global Transition Town movement.
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Episode 92 :: Richard Lawrence
01/27/2018
Episode 92 :: Richard Lawrence
Richard Lawrence, author of "Light, Bright, Damn Near White: Stories and Reflections of a Multi-Racial Black Man's Battles with Racism in America," adds focus to February, Black History Month.
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Mid-Jan. BONUS: Walter Brueggemann
01/15/2018
Mid-Jan. BONUS: Walter Brueggemann
Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann discusses four of his recent books.
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