Schumacher Center for a New Economics

06/11/2026

Let’s kick off your Thursday on the right note— with a Small is Beautiful quote, of course!

Pause the video or take a screenshot for a quote.

How do you interpret your quote? Does it seem applicable to today’s world?

Let us know in the comments!

06/08/2026

The 45th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture, “The Promise of Bioregional Economies,” is now available to read, for free, on our website!

Delivered by Samantha Power and Tyler Wakefield of the BioFi Project, the lecture offers both a sobering reality check and a hopeful, generative vision for the future. Beginning from the complexity and confusion of the present moment—ecological breakdown, institutional decline, and technological acceleration—Samantha and Tyler ask what it might mean to respond not with panic, but with presence and place-based commitment.

🔗 We invite you to read the full lecture today at the following link! https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-promise-of-bioregional-economies/

06/04/2026

What does commoning look like in the digital world? Check out some examples of projects aimed at democratizing access to digital information and technological advancements!

PEER PRODUCTION: A model of socioeconomic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively (usually over the Internet), without rigid hierarchical structures or economic motivations.

CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSES: A series of free, publicly available licenses that copyright owners can use to enable others to copy, share and modify their works without permission or payment.

PLATFORM CO-OPERATIVISM: Co-operative businesses that sell goods or services primarily online. Like other co-operatives, they rely on democratic decision-making and shared platform ownership by workers and users.

OPEN MANUFACTURING: A series of free, publicly available licenses that copyright owners can use to enable others to copy, share and modify their works without permission or payment.

Eager to learn more about the commons movement? We will explore a new dimension of the commons each week over the next five weeks!

06/03/2026

(SBCC Member Event)

BerkShares Local Inc. and the Schumacher Center for a New Economics will be co-hosting this month's SBCC Business After Hours event!

Business After Hours is a great opportunity to meet up with other people doing business in the Southern Berkshires. Registration is open to anyone involved with a Chamber member business or organization with the approval of the business/organization's own leadership. Staff, volunteers, board members, etc. as well as owners, presidents and CEOs may attend.

Registration and information for this event can be found here: https://www.southernberkshirechamber.com/event-detail/cubaO98htJgmIoYBTzDPTA2/june-bah

🗓️ Thursday, June 11
⏰ 5:00 – 7:00 PM
📍 Schumacher Center Library: 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230

Light hors d’oeuvres and refreshments will be provided!

06/01/2026

🎧 Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #75

Brave New Alps: Catalyzing a Rural Resurgence through Commoning

In this month’s Frontiers of Commoning Podcast, David Bollier speaks with Bianca Elzenbaumer, a community economies designer and cofounder of Brave New Alps. Bianca shares how she is applying commoning practices to help catalyze new forms of rural development and ecosocial transformation in the Italian Alps. Working from a repurposed railway station in Vallagarina, the group relies on radical pedagogy, “feral approaches” to community economies, and lots of DIY making and organizing. Projects don’t aim for market development and conventional investment, but for participatory vehicles that honor social imagination, improvisation, and collective impact.

Listen to Frontiers of Commoning on your favorite podcast platform, or go here: https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes

05/30/2026

What if the path toward a more equitable and resilient United States did not begin in Washington, but in the places where people actually live?

In "The Promise of a Million Utopias," Michael Shuman argues for a more decentralized economic and political system: one in which communities have greater freedom to experiment with new models of economic life, social policy, environmental action, and democratic participation that best fit their own values and needs. Drawing inspiration from Switzerland’s decentralized political system, Shuman makes the case for subsidiarity—the idea that decisions should be made at the most local level capable of addressing them.

Shuman is clear that decentralization must remain bounded by strong civil rights protections and a sense of global responsibility, but he suggests that in a country as vast and divided as the United States, we might need to move beyond the idea of a single national utopia. Instead, he invites us to imagine a country of many local experiments: a “million utopias,” each imperfect, evolving, and accountable to the people closest to them.

The full essay can be accessed here: https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-promise-of-a-million-utopias/. You can find similar writings in the Schumacher Center's Decentralism File collection, available for free on our website.

05/27/2026

(AFFILIATE EVENT)

Registration is open for the 11th Turtle Island Bioregional Congress (https://www.tibc11.earth/) which takes place in Vernonia, Oregon, north of Portland, from September 15-19, 2026.

The gathering will strengthen the growing wave of bioregional organizing across North America (Turtle Island). Building on four decades of previous Congresses, TIBC11 will convene 300+ place-based allies to nurture relationships, share knowledge, and coordinate collective action for community resilience, Indigenous leadership, ecological regeneration, and climate response.

See below a 9-minute video providing context for the Congress and an overview of the bioregional movement's history and principles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5MxOUm4Jz0

186 likes, 36 comments. "THE FUTURE IS BIOREGIONAL"

05/26/2026

MANAS Journal was a philosophical weekly written, edited, and published by Henry Geiger from 1948 – 1988. For over 4 decades, MANAS offered a space for thoughtful reflection in an increasingly noisy world. It explored the ideas shaping modern society while searching for principles capable of supporting what its editors called “intelligent idealism.”

The Schumacher Center worked in conjunction with MANAS Reprints, a group of friends of MANAS, to collect a complete record of MANAS articles. We are pleased to offer free access to this collection on ManasJournal.org, which contains a Foreword to the MANAS Reader by editors of MANAS and a detailed index.

Did you know? E. F. Schumacher’s “Buddhist Economics” appeared (reprinted) in MANAS in 1969, years before it became globally influential through his landmark book Small is Beautiful. You can locate this essay in Volume XXII, No. 33 (August 13, 1969).

Learn more about the Schumacher Center’s work archiving MANAS here: https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/legacy/manas-journal/

05/24/2026

Decentralism File Highlight: Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry is a farmer, essayist, novelist, poet, activist, and teacher who has farmed a Kentucky hillside for over half a century in his native Henry County, where his family has lived for eight generations.

Berry distinguishes between Exploitation and Nurture. He argues that an exploitive society trains us to ask what can be extracted, accelerated, and monetized. A nurturing culture asks different questions: What can be sustained? What does the land need? What forms of work preserve health, character, and community over time?

We feature Berry in our Decentralism File for his legacy defending community stewardship, local culture, and human-scale economies. You can read our remarks on his work in our recent newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/centerforneweconomics.org/donate-9416763?e=0c88b5dd27.

You can access our full entry on Wendell Berry in the Decentralism File, along with profiles over over 100 other leaders in decentralist thought, here: https://centerforneweconomics.org/envision/library/decentralism-file/