This is pledge drive week on WGDR; we are asking our listeners to help us continue bringing you programs like Relocalizing Vermont. On Relocalizing Vermont, we have these weekly conversations about what to do as climate change, future energy scarcity, and economic uncertainty lead us to change our lives and our institutions—and what models for positive changes we can find.
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This week’s program is inspired by Bernie Sanders’ practice of bringing ambassadors from Scandinavian countries to Vermont, to talk about how the Scandinavian model allows those societies to prosper while workers take five weeks of paid vacation a year, new parents have a year or so of paid maternity/paternity leave, everyone has health insurance, access to higher education is tuition-free, and more. Two culture-crossing journalists combine their personal biography in Scandinavia with frank assessments of the advantages of the Scandinavian models and the drawbacks of living in countries with long, dark winters and a love for herring and cod.
9:00 - 10:00 am
British journalist Michael Booth married a Dane and lived in Denmark, before leaving for a less stultifying place. But, at his wife’s insistence, he’s back living in the country that consistently tops world measures like the the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, trying to understand what happiness even means to Danes. He’s willing to point out, with wit, the downsides of living in a country that lives by its own 10 Commandments, the first of which is “You shall not believe that you are anyone important.” He’s captured his observations in The Almost Nearly Perfect People.
http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250081568
Finnish journalist Anu Partanen had just relocated to be with her fiancé in New York when Newseek declared Finland to be the best country in the world to be a young person. She, too, was puzzled—but gradually came to see that Finland’s social safety net and greater social mobility made the country, in many ways, freer than the land of the free and the home of the brave. You can read her New York Times op-ed, “The Fake Freedom of American Health Care.” Her book is The Nordic Theory of Everything.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/18/opinion/the-fake-freedom-of-american-health-care.html?_r=0
http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062316547
10:00 - 10:30 am
Resilience Thoughts, a locally told Extempo story, plus upcoming events related to energy, food, and the local economy at the end of the age of oil.
Please tune in! Relocalizing Vermont runs Thursdays, 9:00 - 10:30 am Eastern, on WGDR Plainfield 91.1 FM / WGDH Hardwick 91.7 FM / streaming at wgdr.org
Now with on-demand streaming for two weeks after air date at www.wgdr.org/on-demand