H: With increasing number of stories being reported, people are starting to put the pieces together and are seeing that there are systemic problems, not just isolated incidents.

MN: Since the book came out there has been sort of a 1-2-3. As we began touring with the book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s movie, started to show. We started to get people in our audiences who had seen the film, and the level of interest went up. Filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide is an example of the human family having grown to fill the planet, and that’s our theme. We were able to tie in with that.

When the price of oil went up last summer people largely forgot about climate change — they were concerned about gas prices. Finally the establishment acknowledged that there is such a thing as peak oil. There will come a time when we can only pump so much, and if we want more the price will just have to go up until some people have to stop buying it.

And then came this economic kerfuffle. The same theme — that the human family has filled the planet — plays out there in a way that highlights how our economic structures are based on the exponential expansion of the money supply. Somewhere around the early 70’s gold and the dollar were separated because there wasn’t enough gold to pay for all of the things that this expanding money supply was wanting to pay for. So it was detached from the material world. Of course it’s grown enormously since then, but it’s all supported by some sort of faith that if things are said to be worth more, then they really are worth more.

We’ve also had a series of bubbles: the savings and loan bubble was the first one I learned about; then we had junk bonds, dot-com, real estate in general and then sub-prime mortgages. The need for a bubble economy comes down to the fact that there isn’t enough earth to back up the exponentially expanding money supply, which is essential for the current system to continue. This brings us back to Life, Money & Illusion, which says that the system had its place at a time when human beings were a small presence on the planet, but now that we cover the planet with our resource extraction and waste we can’t grow as much — it’s an illusion to think that we can.

H: In your writing you point out that new money was being created by loaning out money that didn’t exist, based on capital that wasn’t really there. It’s was just a vast imaginary engine churning out new money.

MN: It’s really a shame that those billions and trillions of dollars of bail-out money went to people who manipulate columns of figures on account sheets and not to the people who produce our food.

H: There are no real goods produced at the end of the day.

MN: Relatively little. If the money created turns around and decides it wants to buy real goods, however, then we’ll have inflation coming out of our ears.

H: There’s more money than stuff.

MN: By numerous orders of magnitude. I’ve been using the figure one in a hundred — for every one dollar spent on goods and services, one hundred dollars are spent on financial speculation. I was recently talking to a Prof. from Carleton and he says it’s more like a thousand to one or several thousand to one. But it’s changing fast. I keep an eye on the stock market — the bubble is deflating.

H: What does that do to the stuff that people need?

MN: That depends on where we get the stuff from. Almost everywhere we go there are community supported agriculture projects, and that’s always the first place I tell people to start. Actually the first place to start is by enjoying yourself — don’t look to buying stuff for satisfaction. The next question is where do we get our food? Any place where people can recycle the nutrients that are in a community back into the soil and back into the community again, those communities can live forever. That’s the nature of life — it’s always been a cyclic, organic, biological process. To get our food from thousands of miles away is a huge liability and people are starting to realize that.

H: Given that you’ve been looking at this for longer than most people, are you hopeful that attention is now shifting in this direction?

MN: It’s encouraging, but the reason it’s happening is not as auspicious as it might be. There have been at least two big waves of public interest since I started studying this. In the early 70’s we had the oil shock, and the United Nations conference on the environment in Stockholm. That was the first time the globe got together and said “it looks like we’re having some environmental problems, what can we do?” There was an increase in interest then. In 1987 the Bruntland Commission report came out — this incredibly accredited group of people were appointed from around the world to go out and talk to people about the problems. They concluded: it’s true, we’re overwhelming the earth. They documented the troubles and they told us we need to learn to develop sustainably — that’s where the phrase “sustainable development” came from. In both of those situations, it was stated very clearly that if we continue to do these sorts of things we’ll be in trouble. Now we’re in trouble. It has people’s attention in a much different way because it’s starting to impinge on economic growth.

So, the good news, if you can call it that, is that since we only seem to learn when we’re in crisis, we’re going to be in crisis until we solve the problem. We can no longer say “Oh, that’s not really a problem,” and expect it to go away.

H: In terms of the things that we need to be doing, we’re currently facing a situation where there’s less to go around. Do you think people will recognize the new reality and change their approach to work and money?

MN: My friend Howard Jerome had a wonderful comment on that. He said: “We can no longer have everything that we want, but we can be more than we’ve ever imagined.” We’ve been ripped off so badly in order to become consumers. We used to have culture, we used to get together with friends to talk about things and sing and dance and play sports. There was a real vibrancy to the nature of human communities. We miss that in our souls. We’re human beings; not human havings.

We’ve had to let that go because in order to make an enormous economy grow you’ve pretty well got to get everybody working all of the time, and when they’re not working you’ve got to get them to go off and spend their money to consume all of the stuff that they’re making. I encourage people to think about what we lost to get into this dead-end route and to think about reclaiming it.

H: What are some of the first steps people can take without becoming terrified and going and sitting in front of their TVs?

MN: Learn to live lightly and seek satisfaction in what life offers rather than through consumption. Then learn as much as you can about the situation so you can find inspiration for applying your creativity to solutions.

Life, Money & Illusion tried very hard not to gloss over the fact that we face great challenges, and to presents the reasons for them. It’s not about a lot of bad will, it’s just circumstances and opportunities and things that were more or less acceptable until we touched planetary limits. Filling the earth is a fundamental change that requires a fundamental change in how we manage things. It’s really a very exciting time. Ours is the generation that will see the human family transform from its long childhood and adolescence to a mature form.

There’s a lot of information out there that scares people. It’s designed to get their attention. But it also turns them off — they shut down and say “What’s the point?” I get to come along and, while admitting that we’ve got problems, point out that solutions exist in this direction. If we apply our creativity and imagination, we can build a world that works within the limits of our planet and we can have more fun while we’re doing it. There are creatures that have been on Earth for hundreds of millions of years that have got very little going for them compared to what human beings have. The idea that we have to succumb and go extinct because we can’t make profits grow forever is just ludicrous.

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Mike Nickerson first encountered sustainability as a co-director of the Institute for the Study of Cultural Evolution. The organization’s study of the aspirations and concerns of citizens’ groups culminated in 1974 with the point form summary, now known as the Guideposts for a Sustainable Future. The background detail of the study was published in 1977 under the title Change the World I Want to Stay On. In 1990 Mr. Nickerson completed production of the Guideposts for a Sustainable Future video along with an accompanying workshop kit. In 1993 his second book Planning for Seven Generations was published in paperback. His book titled Life, Money & Illusion was published in June 2006.

Currently Mike coordinates the Sustainability Project and an initiative to establish a Genuine Progress Index for Canada. He lives near the village of Lanark, Ontario and supports his interest in cultural evolution doing custom woodwork. He would like to spend more time growing things.