A Conference in Davis, California – Saturday, April 25, 2009
DAVIS COMMUNITY TO HOST CONFERENCE ON LIVING IN THE NEW ECONOMY
Our understanding of the new economy has been evolving slowly and mostly in disconnected bits and pieces over the past six months. On Saturday, April 25, Davis Community Church will be hosting a daylong conference to construct as broad a picture as possible of the effect that the new economy is having on the home front: not on Wall Street or even on main street, but in our home lives, where we live. The better we understand our situation, the better we can deal with it.
The conference will draw on local and state experts of all kinds. The keynote speaker will be renowned futurist author Kim Stanley Robinson, winner of numerous literary awards and one of Time Magazine’s 2008 “Heroes of the Environment”. Also participating will be experts UCD and from our community; financial experts and historians; social workers and psychologists; health care professionals and spiritual leaders and Senator Lois Wolk. We will examine such issues as: what is this new economy, what does it mean for the way we live and how long can we expect it to last?
What happens to people when they face losing their homes? What do people do who have been laid off? What happens to retirees who’ve seen significant depletion of their retirement nest eggs? What happens when people lose health insurance? What can people do in these situations? How are we dealing with the anxiety, sadness, anger and fear that comes along with the new economy? How can we help ourselves to do better?
The new economy will continue to bring changes to our living arrangements and to how we think about living arrangements; to our working lives and to how we think about our means of making a living; to our standard of living and our expectations of the world and how we think and feel about ourselves and others.
The conference is sponsored by the Davis Enterprise, Davis Community Church and a number of local elected officials. It will be held in the Fellowship Hall at Davis Community Church in downtown Davis (412 C Street) from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
More information on conference plans, locating parking and conference registration can be found on the conference website at http://www.neweconomy.webs.com.
The global economy itself lies comatose in the economic intensive care unit, with IV lines of dollars, euros, yen, and renminbis transfusing its hollowed-out carcass. It’s an odd time for attention to be diverted from that awful spectacle. The cash transfusions have sent the Cable TV gang into raptures of “optimism” — meaning they expect debt securitization to resume as before, along with Yuletide-level credit card shopping sprees in the malls, a mass splurging on new cars, and a renewed frenzy of house-building in the Florida buzzard flats. Those “green shoots” and sprouting “mustard seeds” they report seeing may themselves be a flu-like symptom. I don’t know what the so-called Mexican swine flu will lead to, but the global economy as we’ve known it is a goner.