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Artisan Cash And Lecture Tonight

What do BerkShares have in common with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the online marketplace Etsy?

According to Dan Crane’s article in the Sunday New York Times, they are all part of a movement that is redeveloping small-scale, artisanal production and eschewing the monoculture of a global economy, which includes the anonymity of credit card transactions and global currencies.

Read the article in full on the New York Times website.

In other news, George McCarthy will be speaking at 7pm tonight, August 10th, at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington.

George McCarthy is President of the 41 year-old Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge.  He previously served as the director of the Metropolitan Opportunities Unit at the Ford Foundation where he worked for 14 years.  He is an accomplished housing economist with the mission of bringing social justice to those denied it around the world.  He sees land use policy as a means to reach the equity goals he has worked for throughout his career.

In an interview in Shelterforce in January of this year, he talked about the role that community land trusts can play in landbanking sites for housing and other active community purposes.  Speaking of Detroit as an example, McCarthy commented, “Twenty years from now, people will be bemoaning the fact that they weren’t able to reserve some amount of housing and land in Detroit for affordability, because that place is ready to pop.”

The Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires, working with the newly formed Berkshire Community Land Trust, is considering the role it can play in acquiring and holding key land in the Berkshires for workforce housing, active farms, and new manufacturing, thereby securing the types of land essential to maintaining a diverse local economy.

Tonight’s talk is free and is co-sponsored by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.  The reception begins at 6:30, followed by the talk at 7:00 titled Municipal Fiscal Health and Quality of Life. The American Institute for Economic Research is located at 250 Division Street, Great Barrington. Look for the entrance between two stone pillars on Division Street.  The lecture venue is 3/4 mile further up the hill, at the AIER campus.

We hope to see you there.

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