ICR -- Investigating Community Resilience
Every week Dave Barrons hosts a conversation about community resilience in the Northwestern Michigan. Each show investigates resilience through various themes with his guests. Select one of the themes in the left sidebar to watch past shows from that theme's perspective.
New Name - ICR: Investigating Community Resilience
Beginning with this show OUTSIDE IN becomes ICR: Investigating Community Resilience. A new name reflecting a more direct link to our content. Bob Russell returns to look around at how the term is being used increasingly and to help clarify our focus. We also highlight web-based resources that showcase resilience work going on in other communities. This discussion also looks ahead at broad areas of success and need in resilience development locally.
Reviewing Foundation Concepts of Resilience
Bob Russell is in with Dave this week reviewing foundation concepts that are critical to resilience thinking: adaptability, diversity, redundancy, and feedback loops. The discussion seeks to detail the connections between each concept and the idea of building resilience into our Northwest Michigan communities. Towards the end of the discussion Bob and Dave make an announcement which includes a name change. From now on these weekly discussions will be known as ICR: Investigating Community Resilience.
A Shining Example
In this week's program Jan Shireman and Gerard Grabowski join us to tell their story of a business that is a shining example of the all-local, farm to business to consumer economic model so important to building local food resilience. These two created Pleasanton Brick Oven Bakery nearly two decades ago in search of a locally made, healthy bread and in the process became national leaders in the artisan bread movement. Pleasanton Bakery today employs nearly a dozen people in direct bakery jobs. Learn what makes their bread so different. Jan and Gerard share their dream of local sustainable agriculture and of ag-to-consumer businesses to support locally grown food. Only one of the grains they currently use comes from outside of Michigan, but the rest is grown on downstate farms. Gerard argues that northern Michigan needs to grow much more grain for local use, and develop its own milling facilities to turn the grains into flour.
Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay Updates
Andy Knott, Executive Director of the Watershed Center, joins Dave for an update on Watershed activities which include major storm water mitigation projects around the Bay and long term work managing sediment behind three dams scheduled for removal from the Boardman River. Brown Bridge Pond will see dam removal and restoration of the river bed over the next year. Dave and Andy also discuss a presentation at the recent Fresh Water Summit in Traverse City. We share a portion of Dr. Gary Fahnensteil's talk on developments in the water-column food web in Lake Michigan where the Quagga mussel is changing everything at an historic rate. Fahnensteil works at the Great Lakes Research Lab in Ann Arbor and his findings are sobering.
More With Tom Greco
Our second conversation with noted writer, economist, and historian Tom Greco continues with his major thesis: that our money system is built on a debt and interest structure that is corrosive and unsustainable. In this conversation Tom develops his view that the current money system mis-applies the three roles of money: to an instrument to transfer value, to be a measure of value, and to be an instrument holding value itself. The transfer value of money must separated from the other two, argues Greco, by the development of credit clearing associations built carefully on a regional basis among mutual needs of the participants.
Author Tom Greco talk about the history of money and debt
Tom Greco author of THE END OF MONEY AND THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION joins us for two half hour discussions on the history of money and the debt building pyramid- scheme modern money is based on. In this first discussion Greco puts modern money in its historic context and traces its growth to contemporary times where money is controlled by political elites through a interconnected array of national central banks. New money is created by creating debt, and interest is charged on the debt. The debt imperative of money creates a growth imperative in the economy which is destructive of our social fabric and our environment. Greco argues for creation of credit exchange associations, free corrosive effects of interest charged on debt, the topic we pick up in part two.
