Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

by Kate Raworth

use, electricity use, and the health of its river. One July evening, as I browsed the website from my UK home over 3,500 miles away, I could track minute-by-minute Oberlin’s local ecological flows: the real-time carbon emissions produced in the city per person that hour, the volume of drinking water used and of wastewater treated, and even the oxygen levels in nearby Plum Creek as the stream flowed past.62 Real-time data are a fun and engaging way to gain community interest but many of the deeper insights come from monitoring their dynamic trends year on year.63 Given Oberlin’s ambitions, I’ll bet that, once the data become available, the city will expand its Environmental Dashboard beyond the local to show Oberlin’s global material footprint, and use it to monitor its ambitious longer-term goal of full-spectrum sustainability.