Columns

By Laurie Guevara-Stone
As we hear more bad news every day, from the high national debt, exorbitant unemployment numbers and stagnant wages, to havoc wreaked by climate change, it seems that our corporation-dominated system is proving unsustainable. We seem to be hitting both financial and ecological limits. However, there is good news with an innovative structure that can actually strengthen a local economy. This good news comes in the form of cooperatives.

So, two planets are shooting the breeze. One says, “OMG. I’ve just discovered I’ve got people. The other says, “I was just talking to a planet in the next galaxy, he had some. Don’t worry, they don’t last long.”
Alan Watts was a popular philosopher back in the 1960’s — back when we still had philosophers. They are still playing his talks on a Boulder radio station, I learned recently. Watts was known as a Zen philosopher. He loved to tell stories and was very funny at times. In one of his talks he was looking to put the human existence in perspective. He said the earth “peoples” — in exactly the same way an apple tree “apples.” Kind of like, well, we are not such a big deal in the scheme of things. Kind of like the planet joke.