William Rees, FRSC (born December 18, 1943), is a professor at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC.
Gold is not less but more rational than paper money. Money holds value so long as it is in limited supply; gold will always be in limited supply, and would require real resources to produce even from the sea; paper and printing ink are not in limited supply. The gold system is much closer to a modern automatic scientific control system than the crude and relatively unstable system of paper.
We do not have an ecological crisis. The ecosphere has a human crisis. Our 'story' about our place in the scheme of things has somehow gone awry in the industrial age.
To prefer paper to gold is to prefer high risk to lower risk, instability to stability, inflation to steady long term values, a system of very low grade performance to a system of higher, though not perfect performance.
One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.
The good news is that. . . humans are gifted by the potential for self-awareness and intelligent choice, and knowing our circumstance is an invitation to change.
Human societies as temporally and spatially far-flung as the Mesopotamians, Mayans, and Easter Islanders likely came to ruin by expanding beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain them.
Michael Huffington
John Petrucci
Samuil Shatunovsky
John Updike
Graham Hill
Tharman Shanmugaratnam
Peter Sarsgaard
Frances Sargent Osgood
Walpola Rahula
Landon Liboiron
Sandy Adams
Bernard Law Montgomery