These are curious times. Even as the world burns, sustainable finance and green capitalism are booming: Sustainability Reporting. Net Zero. Climate Finance. ESG. Green New Deal. By some estimates, assets invested with environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria now top £35 trillion. Why would investors put money into an asset class – sustainability – that so clearly doesn’t do what it says on the box?

I turned for an answer to the Sustainable Finance Group at Oxford University. It is part of a Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment, or GRASFI

GRASFI certainly sounds green – but then I learned a dispiriting thing.

The purpose of sustainable finance is not to make the actual world actually healthier.

Rather, as explained by @adribuller in her book, The Value of a Whale, “ESG is a means of betting on the likelihood of a green future, rather than actually help build it”.

The numbers ninjas at Oxford admit as much, themselves. Their flagship report is named Sustainable Finance and Transmission Mechanisms to the Real Economy

‘Real Economy’?

To the GRASFI-fed mind, the real world appears to be regarded as a sub-division of the financial one. They probably imagine a dingy office in the basement with a sign saying “Real Economy” on its door.

Yes, of course, green risk management is a lucrative business for consultants. But what about the rest of us – down here in the real world – who want to do something positive and practical for ecological flourishing?

Seventy five per cent of office workers, after all, want to participate in real-world activities that have a positive impact on their local environment.

The good news? Real-world activities to repair ecosystems, and strengthen communities, are growing all around us: projects to green the streets around offices; set up biocanteens with local farmers; plant micro-forests on depaved land; ‘daylight‘ lost rivers.

For confirmation, check out People Doing Stuff: Case Study Collections:
or take a quick look at Bottom-up biodiversity

There’s a lot happening – but which kind of real-world earth repair would best suit your place of work?

If you’d like to explore that question – and what steps you might take to make something happen – we still have two places at our next Meetup starting 30 August

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Here follows a case study in how the gift economy works. All of the following content, which has always been available here free, will remain so:

872 blog posts and essays;
23 essays on food systems and design;
20 to-do lists and handouts;
13 writers recommended for their insights on on design and energy;
83 radical alternatives to university and design school;
19 off-the-wall action plans for replacing education with something feral;
34 more meaningful things to do in your city than make it “smart”;
24 provocations on the future of journeying and mobility;
100 books (selected from thousands) in our fabled Reading List;
23 texts that ask, “what’s so great about social innovation?”;
42 stories about art, communication and embodied perception;
9 Doors of Perception conferences (especially transcripts and reports);
11 City Eco Labs and xskools (i.e. the learnings therefrom)

The way the gift economy works is simple: if any of this content proves valuable to you, please consider making a donation. If your monthly donation totals more than the cost of a coffee and muffin in Starbucks – or one per cent of the cost per year of your college education – then go directly to Gift Economy Heaven.

Thanks!

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Several hours later, I am suspending this project. I cannot find a neat comparison league table – and the numbers I *have* found look so insane that I repeat them here in the hope that someone will reassure me that I am not imagining things.
For example, an article in Counterpunch called Gargantua’s Mouth: The Pentagon and the Suckers states that “44 cents of every taxpayer’s dollar feeds the military budget – at a time when no nation has a military capable of challenging us.” Saul Landau and Nelson P Valdes write that “since 1988, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, and no major power threatened, the military has ingested some $5.1 trillion. Every two years since 2001, the military budget has grown by approximately $100 billion”.
OK, so Counterpunch is a radical magazine and they would say that. Looking for more impartial data, I found a chart in Aviation Week, which is almost a trade magazine of the military industrial complex, that included these numbers for per capita military spending:
U.S.: $545.3 billion, that’s roughly $45,500 per head of the population.
U.K.: $63.2 billion, or $34,800 per head.
France: $60.3 billion, or $32,100 per head.
Germany: $41.8 billion, or $33,800 per head.
Then I found a study that concludes that the United States spent $1,780 per head on education in 2001 (France, The Netherlands and Canada each spent more than $1,200 per capita). Hmmm.
Turning to culture and the arts, the best I could find is a perplexing web database that appears to show that cultural expenditure per capita in Spain is euro 135, compared to Germany which, in 2007, spent 99 euros per capita.
In round numbers, then, Germany appears to spend 25,000 euros per person on defence, versus about 100 euros per head on culture. I have to assume that the gap in the US and UK, were the numbers to be available, would be a good deal wider.
As I said: insane numbers.
I distract you (and myself) with these numbers mainly because, in the years ahead, spending on the things that we do care about – education, culture, sustainability – looks certain to plummet.
In the UK, for example, commentators are talking gravely about public spending cuts of 10, 15, or 20 percent. Insiders tell me that cuts will be 40 percent or more, in real terms, over the coming few years.
Large cultural and educational institutions will suck in what little public funding is available. Government funding for small, grassroots activities will dry up almost completely.
Time to despair? Not necessarily. The future, for me, belongs to ultra-light culture and education. I’ll write about light education at a later date – but for now, here are two cultural green shoots.
Located in the centre of Beijing on one of its old hutong alleyways, HomeShop [below] is a 25sqm store space turned sleeping-working-living studio.

HomeShop is “an open platform, working diversely via the realms of art, theory, community practice and urban research to explore the possibilities of the microaesthetic and the micropolitical”. HomeShop “begins within a shrinking neighbourhood of steadfast Beijingers and reexamines that which is embedded within the everyday: emerging communities, daily routes, minor practices and the spectacular banal. All pass by our window front, and it is right here that we can begin to engage the certain potentialities in our very midst”.
HomeShop reminds me of Galerie Zero in Berlin, which, at 20 square metres, is physically even smaller

But Galerie Zero’s cultural footprint is hundreds of times larger. Galerie Zero has produced 100 pioneering art shows, installations and events in the Kreusberg area of Berlin over a six year period.
Each of these 100 events cost less to produce than the price of a single door in an “iconic” art museum. For the price of one eurofighter, I’m sure Galerie Zero, or HomeShop, could stage 25,000 events. And it’s not just about quantity of output: their activities, being created in and by a community, have a quality that big ticket items can never equal. They are the future.

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