North Bay Report: Sustainability, State Budget, Legalizing Hemp

The State of Sustainability

Our Gross National Product, as currently calculated, is not a good measure of actual economic productivity, much less the growing move toward more sustainable business practices. So says a San Francisco business school leader.

Maggie Winslow, academic dean of the Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco, is not a big fan of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measurement of economic achievement. Not only does it tend to credit resource consumption as a positive, but she adds, it also fails to measure or even allow for numerous other gauges of quality of life.

The current move toward sustainability in business, and the upheaval that accompanies it, is not really new, Winslow says. It's just the current manifestation of an economic phenomenon known as "creative destruction."

Interested in this story? Listen to the full report from KRCB's News Director, Bruce Robinson.

Remaking California

There’s widespread agreement that California’s state government is dysfunctional and “broken.”  Our constitution was adopted when the the Golden State small, homogenous and barely industrialized. What will it take to bring the mechanics of the California'’s governance into the 21st century? 

In addition to editing Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good, R. Jeffrey Lustig, a  professor of government at Cal State Sacramento, contributed chapters framing the overall issue and spelling out the metholoogy and some suggested changes to be made in a "people's constitutional convention." Other contitutional changes are proposed in a series of essays from diverse thinkers and analysts including historian Kevin Starr, poet Gary Gnyder, and former North Coast legislator Barry Keene.

Nothing has changed the California state constitution as much as the statewide initiative process, which Lustig explains was an early reform measure that, over time, came to be emlpoyed in ways that countermand the reformers' intentions.

Proposition 14, passed by California voters last June, was presented as a reform that would reign in partisan extremism through a sort of Open Primary. Lustig, however, is not conviced that either the state issue or the adopted change is an accurate assessment of the state's current crisis of governance.

Listen to the full report on KRCB by clicking here.

Legalizing Industrial Hemp

From the sails on Columbus' ships to some early American currency, industrial hemp has played a vital and varied role in American history. A North Bay legislator is working to update that history into 21st century California.

Industrial hemp is remarkable for its versatility, as a source of fiber, oil, and more. In fact, says North Bay State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), it is theoretically possible to supply all the basic needs of a small village just with the products derived from this single plant.

For most of this nation's history, Leno observes, industrial hemp was an important an valued crop, and a widely used raw material.

Listen to the full report from KRCB by clicking here.

Editor's note: This story was reported and produced by KRCB, and written for Rohnert Park Patch with the permission of KRCB News Director Bruce Robinson.