A few weeks ago we introduced Rethinking Prosperity’s latest initiative: UW Sustainability Action Network (UW-SAN), a campus-wide sustainability resource center that provides online and in-person support for student driven projects. Today, we are pleased to announce that a part of the online component of UW-SAN is almost out of its concept phase and moving on to implementation.
Introducing…
THE SEED RESOURCE CENTER
The economic thinking taught in top universities still produces experts who discount environmental costs and offer failed formulas for prosperity based on unrealistic growth, whether from the remnants of the Keynesian left or the still reigning neoliberal right. Meanwhile, democratic reform movements face resistance from established parties and interests, and fail to mobilize broader engagement among publics caught up in more immediate issues and economic crises. The activists calling for changes in these areas of environment, economy, or democracy too often operate in separate spheres, promoting reforms that fall short of systemic change.
The SEED library will help integrate and spread ideas created by actors working for economic, environmental, and democratic systems that are fair, representative and sustainable. The goal is to develop a new generation of thinkers that challenge the dominance of obsolete, neoliberal, grow-at-all-costs economics and politics. SEED empowers the people with the knowledge necessary to successfully reshape political institutions and policies with democratic approaches that work for the people and the planet.
In order to achieve sustainability and global equity, we need a greater understanding of the intricate networked relationships of systemic problems. SEED will provide cutting edge ideas and proposals, and illustrates their interconnectivity visually in interactive network maps, making complex networks intuitive and digestible.