The Green New Deal is on everyone’s lips and policy platforms. The proposals vary from place to place, but each GND is a package of policies designed to transform our economy to deal with the dual crises of climate change and social inequality. In this way they link environmental justice with economic justice in an all-encompassing vision for restructuring much of the existing social order. This ambition has led to great excitement. The Left has been reanimated behind a common cause. Yet seemingly every progressive and socialist espouses some version of the GND in part because it remains a vague outline of aspirations. Now its proponents must flesh out the details. We need to publicly debate different visions of the GND. To this end, this webinar presents several views from experts thinking strategically about how to make the GND a reality and how to ensure it is just and truly transformative. Each speaker will take about 10 minutes to present their views on one aspect that any GND must wrestle with — growth, trade, money, education — and then there will be at least 30 minutes for discussion at the end.

Chair: Sam Bliss

Sam recently co-organized, with Leah Temper, a symposium to collaboratively draft a manifesto for a truly transformative Green New Deal and is now co-coordinating a series of articles on a GND for an ecological economy for the political ecology publication Uneven Earth. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Vermont doing participatory action research on non-market food production and sharing. With others, Same is organizing a three-day Degrowth Fest in Burlington, Vermont, June 13-15, 2020. He is also finishing up a book about ecomodernism with Professor Giorgos Kallis.

Riccardo Mastini – A Green New Deal without growth

Riccardo will speak about how a GND can facilitate degrowth, the framework he works on with Giorgos Kallis and Jason Hickel as a PhD candidate in Ecological Economics and Political Ecology in the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Riccardo holds a master’s degree in Human Geography from Lund University in Sweden and has worked as a consultant on sustainability projects for UNEP, WWF, and national governments in several developing countries .

Shaun Sellers – Trade governance will make or break the Green New Deal

Shaun will speak about how a Green New Deal must transform international trade, drawing on her work on ecological economics and trade theory as a PhD Student at McGill University. Shaun has a master’s in ecological economics from Leeds University, where her thesis explored power structures, institutions, and philosophy relevant to envisioning trade policy through an ecological lens. She has also worked on trade governance practically, starting small businesses selling fair trade and organic chocolate as well as second-hand books and also doing sustainability consulting for companies and non-profits.

Gwendolyn Hallsmith – How do we pay for a Green New Deal?

Gwendolyn is one of the co-conveners of the Green New Deal of Vermont, and has written many books and articles about transforming monetary systems for sustainability and equity. She is the executive director of Global Community Initiatives, a non-profit set up to work with communities to implement the Earth Charter, the first international document in human history to recognize the connections between respect and care for the whole community of life, ecological integrity, social justice, democracy, non-violence, and peace.

Gabriel Yahya Haage – Rethinking education for a Green New Deal

Gabriel has written about how a Green New Deal might transform education, and called for public debate about whether it should. What role should government policy play in determining what is taught in classrooms? Gabriel is a PhD candidate at the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Canada. His research focuses on freshwater systems and the methods of understanding water demands in the ecological, social and economic spheres.

2019 International Webinar Series on Ecological Law & Governance https://www.elga.world/2019-elg-webinar-series/