Dedication

By Kent Grant

April 27, 2019

Our journey on this planet is a pilgrimage whether we know it or not. We must evolve to understand the evidence of our sacred journey. I believe that we were put here on earth to learn to love ourselves and one another, plain and simple.  We hope that you enjoy our magazine as much as we enjoyed putting it together for you.

 Our most pressing issues today are those whose domain is centered squarely in the commons.

The tragedy of the commons^[ii] refers to the degradation and collapse of our natural wealth–natural resources and the ecosystem services that they provide. The burning of fossil fuels and carbon based industrial processes and manufactured products are systemic attributes of our modern world. We now know that renewables are abundant, clean and safe alternatives to–and economically competitive with fossil fuels.

Progress we make is hobbled by the huge and growing disparity between those who have and those who haven’t. What happened to the idea give to the needy not to the greedy? Prosperity does not trickle down from the rich..

It is an idea that the wealthy would love for us to believe and have faith in. I think it’s greed and avarice that trickles down from “on high.”

H.W. Arndt, in an article for Australia National University, wrote that in 1933 “Jawaharlal Nehru [“freedom fighter and first Prime Minister of India”] once used the expression [trickle down] and he may have been the first to do so in an economic context.”^[iii] He wrote that Nehru referred to the accumulation of wealth of the British Empire to England was so great that “some of it trickled down to England’s working class.”^[iv] Taken out of context the phrase “trickle down” was corrupted and came to be used in today’s political context as conservative propaganda. Arndt asserts, “that no reputable development economist ever, explicitly or implicitly, entertained any such theory in any of its various alleged versions. Trickle-down is a myth which should be exposed and laid to rest.”^[v]

-The Editor

[i] Davenport, Coral. “Trump Lays Plans to Reverse Obama’s Climate Change Legacy.” Need York Times, March 21, 2017. Accessed May 4, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/climate/trump-climate-change.html?_r=0.

[ii] Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, Issue 3859, (1968), 1243.
accessed May 19, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.

[iii] Heinz W. Arndt, “The ‘Trickle-Down’ Myth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 32, no. 1 (1983), 1.

[iv] Ibid, 1-2

[v] Arndt, “Trickle Down,” 8.