sutton038

I originally wrote this article for  Transition Free Press Edition 4 . It's published under a Creative Commons licence (see side panel for details) Finance, even in its most high-tech formulations, is rooted in ecological systems. A high-frequency trading hedge fund, for example, relies on electricity created by burning fossillised organic matter. It relies on employees, surviving via agricultural systems. It trades in company shares, given value by the actions of those companies’ employees using assets (like computers and telecommunications systems) that are all dependent (at some level) on mining, forestry, and other extractive industries. The financial system has been a net drain on ecological systems though. Finance involves steering economic energy – symbolised in money – in an attempt to generate a yield over time. For example, investors may steer money via financial instruments like shares and bonds into economic activities, and attempt to extract returns in the form of divi...

COMING TO A CINEMA NEAR YOU Last week I got published in The Ecologist. The article was called A four-step guide to bypassing high street banks . This is my second article for the magazine (my first was on food speculation ), and this time the aim was to sketch out how people might engage in financial protest, not by waving placards, but by changing debit cards. Many people agree in principle that major high-street banks have too much power, and that they frequently abuse that power. Nevertheless, many individuals don't necessarily have the time, or inclination, to protest about it directly in the manner of the Occupy protesters. There's been a lot of discussion about how to make financial protest more inclusive (including this piece by Kenth Gustaffson on a type of ‘ virtual occupy movement ’), but perhaps one of the most profound (and often overlooked) forms of protest is to distance yourself from mainstream finance by withdrawing deposits and avoiding using the services. The...