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hey guy - open letter


Hey Guy,

We caught a bit of your climate change phone-in show on CBC. At the end, you were talking about neighbourhoods getting together, and the hard work that all the volunteers do trying to deal with the problems that just keep increasing, despite all of our best efforts to slow down the race toward extinction.

But .. there was NO discussion of money itself. Surely you see how the form of money we use affects climate change, and of course a myriad of other local and global issues. It's a mystery - hardly anyone can see the money problem, and even less can see there is a ridiculously simple solution - community currencies. Any community, anywhere, can have its own money, and use it to change patterns of energy use, transportation, food production - you name it - change the money, change the world.

Using our own money means that we can really get to work on dealing with these tremendous problems that you so clearly articulate.

Remember Clinton's famous line - "It's the economy stupid." He was close.

Jay Hanson got it exactly right - "It's the money, stupid. Money is power because money 'empowers' people to buy and do the things they want including buying and doing other people...Moreover, the accumulation of wealth invariably corrupts political systems and is inherently "unsustainable". At some point, the wealthy will be able to bribe the last honest politician and then chop down the last tree, catch the last fish, shoot the last tiger, eat the last whale, and so on until our complex society spirals into chaos and cannibalism."

As you said, your own home town, one of the "greener cities" in the world, recycles 44% of household wastes, but gross consumption is growing even faster. In the whole picture, we keep losing ground despite all the heroic efforts, so clearly heroism isn't going to do it. Individual action, based on doing the right thing, is hardly a solution. How long have we known that household chemicals down the drain are bad, and yet how many have actually switched to less harmful ones?

Surely it's obvious? You can't get there from here - in fact, you can't get anywhere until you deal with the money questions. So, where are community currencies in your view of the future?

You have a large audience of caring, thinking people, and a very large responsibility that goes with it. You know how precarious is our existence and how urgent is our need for real, working solutions. Community money is a very powerful tool. Please think about it. Better yet, pick it up, examine it, use it, and tell all.

Ernie Yacub
Michael Linton

We can only see what we see, and what we see is what we get, until we see it differently. This is the quintessential paradox of paradigm shift.


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