Category Archives: Finance

With the economic slump well into its sixth year and unemployment still significantly higher than at its inception in 2007, it is understandable that the priority of elected officials is job creation. States, counties and municipalities, while dealing with budget deficits, have been competing with each other to attract jobs in their region with tax abatements and other financial incentives mostly targeted at large corporations.

Attracting jobs through tax incentives has been at times extravagantly costly, like the recent $55M tax abatement Apple received from the state of Nevada to create 35 jobs in a new data storage center in Reno, or the jobs created in the State of New Jersey in the last decade – as the NYT reported on April 12^th, 2012 “… the Christie administration has granted more than $900 million in state tax credits over 10 years to 15 companies, including Panasonic, Goya, Prudential and Campbell’s Soup. The companies have promised to add 2,364 jobs, or $387,537 in tax credits per job, over the next decade”.

I spent this weekend at the Bioneers conference and something shifted inside me. I understood at a deep level that the destruction of the natural ecosystems on which our survival depends, is rooted in the loss of our understanding of Nature as sacred. As Sufi scholar Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee mentioned during the panel on Spiritual Ecology: A Spiritual Response to the Ecological Crisis, indigenous cultures have retained the understanding of Nature as sacred while Western culture lost it at around 400AD, when monotheistic religions suppressed pagan earth-based religions, hence banishing the sacred from the Earth and relegating it to the heavens.

Nevertheless, many in our Western culture still seek connection with Nature as a way to nourish and uplift the spirit. Many intuitively understand that a walk through these woods can reinvigorate the body, mind and spirit.