14 October 2009

Members of the Rathbone Greenbank Investments team attended this talk, which was part of Bristol’s Festival of Ideas. Zac Goldsmith, former editor of the Ecologist, presented his ideas on how to create a stable society and a constant economy.

“A constant economy is one in which resources are valued not wasted, where food is grown sustainably and goods are built to last. It is a system whose energy security is based on the use of renewable sources, and where strong communities are valued as a country’s most effective hedge against social, economic and environmental instability. The constant economy operates at the human scale and, above all, it recognises nature’s limits”

Amongst other topics, Zac argued for the spread of the existing solutions to the climate crisis, the increased use of political tools to force change, the shift in media representation of climate issues, and the move away from GDP as a measure of prosperity and progress. All this, he reasoned, will be viable without the need for “economic suicide” and could be achieved largely through changes in political will.