Slow Money

Astute readers will discern that no headline actually said that. Although one should, with Slow Money’s fourth National Gathering coming up on April 29–30.

Because there is an economic truth—or, as E.F. Schumacher used to say, a “meta-economic” truth—that is bigger and deeper and, oh, so much more durable than any truth that will ever be discerned from the most expert reading of the Dow Jones tea leaves.

This truth has two parts.

Part 1 is subject to considerable debate: Unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is an impossibility. Now, precious few economists will even entertain such a discussion. But if the idea piques your intellectual curiosity, go to the work of Herman Daly and the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, or to the New Economics Institute.

Part 2 is much more straightforward, much closer to home, much more down-to-earth: Increased consumption is not synonymous with improved well-being. Would any among us dare to argue the contrary, that by consuming as much as possible we will be happier and healthier? So just why is it that we confer so much power over our daily thoughts on a set of economic numbers that measure how fast we are increasing our consumption?

There is no true DJIA. There is no false DJIA. There is no wise DJIA. There is no politically correct or incorrect DJIA. There is no DJIA that says: We are 15 times better off as a nation, as a culture, with the Dow over 14,000 than we were in 1968, when the Dow was around 900. There is only a metric of aggregate economic throughput, which contains within it all manner of activities that are not entirely consistent with improved well-being: cigarettes, spiraling medical bills, Superfund sites, disaster relief, Twinkies, pornography, post-traumatic stress disorder, the costs of war, the 2.9 billion gallons of gasoline burned annually by American commuters stuck in traffic … all this and more is included in the DJIA and counted as beneficial economic growth.

These issues weave in and around all of our Slow Money discussions. It could be said that while we’re together next month in Boulder, being inspired by the presentations of dozens of small-food entrepreneurs who are rebuilding local food systems around the country, we will also be listening to folks who are engineering the future that lies beyond the Dow Jones industrial average.

No one, to my thinking, understood such matters or communicated them any better than Bobby Kennedy did while he was campaigning for president in 1968. I’ve found inspiration in his words many times, and find myself doing so again in the context of the Dow’s current climb, looking down from these heights and remembering all that the DJIA does not tell us. (I can almost hear a few folks groaning, “Oh, no. Not that Bobby Kennedy quote again!” To which I offer: Consuming is good for fast food and faster Internet connections, but savoring is better if we’re after knowledge and wisdom. Let’s not confuse consuming a pithy quote here and there with savoring wise words. When we are fortunate enough to have found a bit of wisdom, let’s savor it, deepening our appreciation over time, turning it over again and again, allowing its implications to seep into the soil of our thinking, leading, if we are lucky and patient, toward a certain fertility of thought.)

So, here it is:

“We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones industrial average, nor national achievement by the gross national product. For the gross national product includes air pollution, and ambulances to clear our highways from carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads … . It includes … the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

“And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials … . The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America—except whether we are proud to be Americans.”

But signs of the Dow’s insufficiency as a measure of our well-being are not only to be found in rhetorical heights of the Kennedy kind. They are all around us in the events of the day.

Consider the sequester, stubbornly high unemployment, a housing market that will take who knows how long to heal and, on another front (well, not really, it’s all on the same front, since so many of our dollars are going up smokestacks in China), outgoing Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s recent warning of the dangers posed by growing divisions between rich and poor, unchecked environmental degradation and unbalanced economic growth. What picture of reality does a soaring DJIA give us in the context of such fundamentals as these?

What the DJIA tells us is this: We’ve just lived through—burst bubbles notwithstanding—the greatest legal accumulation of wealth in history, to use the words of venture capitalist John Doerr. Now, we have two choices. We can keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. That is, we can keep putting all of our bets on the latest and greatest, ever more complex and abstract trading strategies and ever faster computer algorithms. Or we can begin to truly diversify our portfolio, go all the way from paper diversification to actual diversity, by putting some of our money into enterprises that we understand, near where we live. We can begin fixing the economy from the ground up.

This is just what we have begun to do under the banner of Slow Money.

Small and midsize organic farms, creameries, grain mills, distribution companies, niche organic brands, restaurants that source as locally as possible, seed companies, urban farms and more—these small businesses that are emerging in communities across the country are not only part of the local food movement. They are part of the Life After Wall Street movement.

What we are up to—those thousands of us who have come together at Slow Money’s National Gatherings and in our 17 local chapters and six investment clubs, moving $23 million into 185 small-food enterprises—is about more than food. It is about what comes after outsourcing and before the next financial collapse. It is about stemming soil erosion and promoting fiscal prudence, about slowing the depletion of aquifers and revitalizing Main Street, about reducing carbon in the atmosphere and building organic matter in the soil. It is about systems that bet way too heavily on technical gimmicks like derivatives and GMOs and way too little on the laws of nature and local ingenuity. It is about food that is full of empty calories and investments that are full of empty profits.

So during these heady days of Dow records, let us ask: Which is the longer shot? That in a world of gigantic financial institutions and a byzantine system of hyper-securitization, we will regulate our way to a better future? Or that, inspired by the rewards of working together at the local level, millions of us will begin to invest as if food, farms and fertility mattered?

I like the latter odds.

Editor’s note: Originally published at The Huffington Post. You can help build the buzz about the upcoming Slow Money National Gathering by sharing this article. 

Perennial vs. Annual: Perennials have larger root systems that improve soil stability, allow better management of nitrogen levels, reduce need for pesticides and store more water in soil. Photo taken at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Information artwork by Douglas Gayeton for the Lexicon of Sustainability.

By Carol Peppe Hewitt

Carol Peppe Hewitt will share her experience facilitating Slow Money loans at Slow Money’s National Gathering April 29–30 in Boulder, Colo. This excerpt is from her book “Financing Our Foodshed: Growing Local Food with Slow Money” (New Society, April 2013). Peppe Hewitt is a business owner, activist and founder of Slow Money North Carolina. Since 2010, she has faciliated 75 Slow Money loans totaling nearly $700,000. This money is now at work growing the local food and sustainable farming economy throughout North Carolina. Find out more at our March 26 webinar, “Financing Our Foodsheds with Slow Money.”

Carol Peppe Hewitt and Jordan Puryear, co-founders of Slow Money NC, shopping in Chatham Marketplace, their beloved co-op grocery store.

Thinking about Jackie Green’s story and how she came to own and run Sweet Cheeks Bakery makes me yearn for a piece of her Southern pecan pie. It may have the same effect on you. She tells her story like this:

I learned the fine art of Southern baking and cooking at a very young age growing up in South Carolina. After the death of my mother when I was 7 years old, I was raised by my grandmother and aunts, who passed on the love of baking. I spent hours in the kitchen under their tutelage learning the baking techniques and specialties that are part of my business today.

In 1993, I started decorating cakes for family and friends. Later, I began working part time for two catering companies decorating a variety of special-occasion cakes and wedding cakes. With a vision to start my own business (still working in corporate management in Winston-Salem, N.C.), I became sole proprietor of Cakes Galore, where I sold my original carrot cake to a local coffee shop. A few years later I started Southern Delectables in Blytheville, Arkansas, where I baked desserts for local families. Several convenience stores sold my signature “Butter Pound Cake” and “Southern-Style Pecan Pies,” which the neighborhood came to love and appreciate.

Jackie Green, of Sweet Cheeks Bakery, making her famous cakes.

In the midst of the economic downturn, I was laid off. Through prayer and reflection, I decided to go back to what I was passionate about: baking. In August 2009, I founded Sweet Cheeks Inc. with a commitment to growing a stellar product line and providing the highest level of Southern hospitality–based customer service. At Sweet Cheeks we are passionate about great-tasting desserts and about baking the highest-quality products—fresh, made from scratch, deliciously moist, elegantly designed cakes, pies and pastries. I chose the recipes reminiscent of my youth, just like my grandma used to make: from scratch, with love!

When Jackie initially called me, it was the early days of our Slow Money project, and she was looking for $40,000 to start her business. At the time, that was way out of our league—$40,000 was 10 times more than any one of the Slow Money loans we’d made so far. I explained that I was sorry, but I didn’t think we could be of much help.

About a year later, she contacted me again. She had tracked down that $40,000 by getting a loan from the N.C. Support Center. She was marketing her wares via a website and was building up a wholesale customer base. She was selling her cakes to Whole Foods and her blond brownies to Ben & Jerry’s, and she had built a strong following of other loyal customers, as well. She hoped to move into her own retail space in the near future.

Now she had another challenge. “Another year has passed, and with the publicity of being on the radio, NBC and local newspapers, we now have a desperate need for a 60-quart floor mixer,” Jackie wrote to me in an email. “This larger mixer will help us maximize the capacity of our commercial convection oven, increase our baked goods output and decrease our labor time. But even the used ones cost several thousand dollars.”

This time, I hoped we could help. Jackie prays hard, and it seems to work. Within a week, I was speaking to someone from Raleigh who already knew Jackie and was happy to make her an affordable short-term loan. So Jackie started looking in earnest for a good, used commercial mixer.

And I went about my life, dealing with my daughter, Meg, who needed to be taken to a clinic in Florida for a week of treatments for an old knee injury that had flared up.

I was navigating Miami traffic when a call came in from Jackie. She was excited about a mixer she had found online. It was a Hobart (the best brand, she said) and it was an even bigger model (80-quart), which was even better. It sounded like it was in good shape; it was only four years old and had been serviced recently. A couple that had owned a pizza shop and just retired wanted to sell the mixer and all the attachments for $4,600. Jackie had talked to them and offered them a bit less. They said they’d think about it and send her some pictures.

She called for my advice. This was bigger than the 60-quart size she thought she’d buy, which meant it was somewhat more expensive. But it was an excellent price for such a big mixer, and she could definitely use the extra capacity. However, the mixer was so far away that she couldn’t go to see it before buying it, and the shipping could be costly. What did I think?

“Where is it?” I queried. “It’s in Miami,” she said. You’re kidding, I thought to myself. “Really?” I replied. “I’m in Miami!”

I like coincidences. I think they are deliberately created by some collection of clever entities with great imaginations who enjoy keeping our lives interesting.

And so began the Heavenly Scavenger Hunt. First, I called Dominick, owner of the mixer and now-defunct Dominick’s Pizza. He and his wife, Marcella, had closed their shop the day before and were putting everything in storage, including the mixer. But I could come see it anytime. I took the address, and Meg and I headed out to meet Dominick and Marcella at their storage facility about 30 minutes north of the city.

They were delightful and reminded me of my own Italian-American family. I got a quick rundown on their life story—how having a pizza shop for years meant never a day off, and how they were ready to take a break.

The mixer looked fine to me. They assured me it was in good shape, and they had the service records showing its maintenance history. Plus, they would include a gallon of the special oil the mixer used and all the various bits and pieces, attachments, etc. In the end, they were happy with a handshake, a $100 cash deposit, and the promise of a wire transfer from Jackie the following day.

Dominick even handled the shipping. Someone came the very next day, packed it up, and sent it on its way to Jackie’s kitchen in Holly Springs, N.C.

We stood around at the storage shed a while longer, scheming about how Dominick and Marcella might get a food truck one day so they could travel and run a restaurant only when they felt like it. And they promised to come by and visit when they passed through N.C. I was sorry to say goodbye, and I hope we meet again.

A few days later, Jackie emailed to say her mixer had arrived. Turns out, it is an older Hobart made of all metal parts, and preferable to the new ones that are now made with some plastic parts. She planned to send it off to be cleaned and refurbished so she could put it in the window when she got her retail location. She was thrilled with her new purchase.

I spoke with Jackie the other day to find out how that mixer was doing and was pleased to hear that it came back looking and working like new. And her dream of opening a retail location has come true. After operating out of her home for four years, Sweet Cheeks Bakery has opened in downtown Apex, N.C. “We’re going to try our best to bring back the traditional bakery, with baked goods as good or better than homemade,” Jackie promises. “I’m looking forward to bringing each customer a memorable moment: when they remember the taste of what their grandmother used to make!”

That certainly sounds good to me. 

By Judy Wicks

Judy Wicks will speak at Slow Money’s National Gathering April 29–30 in Boulder, Colo. Wicks is founder of the White Dog Cafe, co-founder of Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and author of “Good Morning, Beautiful Business: The Unexpected Journey of an Activist Entrepreneur and Local Economy Pioneer” (Chelsea Green, 2013), from which this is excerpted and reprinted here with permission from the publisher. The book is available in hardcover and paperback.

Author Judy Wicks speaks widely about her work as a food-economy pioneer. “Good Morning, Beautiful Business” is a memoir about the evolution of an entrepreneur who has helped communities far and wide create economies that value people and place as much as they do commerce.

It takes a lot of capital to build a new economy. The type of low-interest loan I made to farmer Glenn Brendle for his refrigerated delivery truck is needed across the country. Yet most people, even those who want to bring social change and see the need for a more nurturing economy, invest their savings in the stock market, where it perpetuates the old exploitive economy.

My own experience in learning how to invest differently began in 1999 when I suddenly became a stockholder. After my mother passed away, I inherited a stock portfolio composed of holdings first purchased by my grandfather and kept in the family for over 50 years. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the stock. At first I hired a broker to trade my stock for what was considered “socially responsible investing,” a concept where stock is “screened” to eliminate companies involved with such things as weapons, tobacco and animal testing. But when I looked at my new portfolio, I was shocked to see Wal-Mart! I could not have stock in Wal-Mart, a company known to destroy local economies and underpay its workers—and it sold products produced in sweatshops and factory farms to boot. How could I support such a company, even if it had passed through the screens created by brokers for socially responsible investing?

That’s when I realized that I did not want to participate in the stock market at all. These are single-bottom-line companies, who by law are directed toward maximizing profit for stockholders above the interest of other people and our planet. I wanted to invest in companies that were independent of the stock market and had passed through a different screen, one that can filter out all companies who are not independent, locally owned, and triple bottom line.

So in 2000 I sold all my stock and did something that my broker and all my friends in the socially responsible investment field advised against: I put most of my eggs in one basket—my local economy. My friend and mentor Hal Taussig told me about a local investment vehicle called The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), and there I invested my money to be put to work as community capital for such local needs as wind energy production, small business loans, neighborhood revitalization and affordable housing. To the surprise of my friends, except for Hal, over a 10-year period my local investments at TRF outperformed their stock market returns.

When I discovered that the wind turbines bringing renewable electricity to Philadelphia were capitalized by TRF, I coined the term living return. The return on my investment was not only paid in dollars, but in the benefit of living in a healthier community. I began receiving a living return, and with it the happiness and satisfaction of knowing where my money is—doing good right in my own community.

As was typical, I said to myself, My customers have got to hear this, and scheduled a table talk on local investment at the White Dog with Jeremy Nowak, president of TRF. Why not inspire more Philadelphians to bring their money home—disinvesting in the stock market where we often don’t know what effects our investments have on other people, animals and the environment, and investing instead in our own economy where we have knowledge and a personal stake? That would increase the living return for our whole community.

I also looked into providing an option for our employer-matched IRA at the White Dog so employees could choose to invest their retirement locally. Though I found no options for IRAs to go directly to our local community, we were able to provide an option to invest in the Calvert Community Fund, where money is invested in community development around the country. But clearly we need local financial institutions in every community to set up IRA programs through which citizens can direct their retirement savings toward building their own local economy and community rather than supporting the stock market. Thinking of all that money stuck in pension funds invested in the stock market, when we have such need for local investment in our communities, drives us localists crazy.

• • •

Capital for building local economies was central to another entrepreneur who connected to BALLE in a life-changing way—change not only for him, but also for BALLE and for the world of community capital.

Don Shaffer began his career as a partner in a skateboard design and manufacturing company, Comet Skateboards, where he and his team developed an ecofriendly resin for gluing their skateboards together. Rather than keep the formula as its market niche, Comet shared it with competitors. Protecting the environment meant more to Don than the competitive advantage of a proprietary formula.

In 2004, Don, who was then in his early 30s, read an article in Orion magazine about my work to build local living economies, including the story of sharing my farm sources with my competitors. Don recognized a kindred spirit, and soon he was on a plane flying from San Francisco to Philadelphia to attend the second annual BALLE business conference in 2004. Through conversations at the conference and the after-hours party in my home above the White Dog, Don found like-minded entrepreneurs who shared his values of cooperation and compassion, as well as fun. When Michelle and Derek stepped down from their leadership roles at BALLE that year to focus on growing their local network as well as their family, Don became BALLE’s executive director.

Tall and fair, Don has such a humble, gentle and giving nature that I first described him as angelic (until he told me stories of his not-so-distant past as a rebellious youth). Don recognizes that the can-do focused energy of the entrepreneur is at the core of building a new economy, and to be successful, entrepreneurs need capital. So Don made capital for local economies a strong part of BALLE’s agenda—beginning with many speakers and sessions on community capital at our national conferences. After three years of nurturing and building BALLE, Don left the position to pursue his dream of transforming the way the world works with money as the president and CEO of RSF Social Finance, which offers investments, loans and gifts to enterprises with triple-bottom-line values that are building the new economy.

RSF stands for the Rudolf Steiner Foundation and is inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner, who believed that money has a deeply spiritual dimension and is a form of energy that connects one person to another and strengthens the bonds of community. Steiner’s work keeps popping up in my life. It was Steiner who invented biodynamic farming (sustainable agriculture beyond organics), which is practiced at Hawthorne Valley Farm, the dairy farm I so admire for keeping calves with their mothers. The Hawthorne Valley community also has a Waldorf school, which practices Waldorf education (sometimes called Steiner education), an educational system with an interdisciplinary philosophy founded by Steiner in 1919. There are thousands of Waldorf schools around the world. Steiner also inspired a worldwide network of Camphill Communities—residential and working communities for disabled adults and youth, including two near Philadelphia with which the White Dog developed projects and events. In various ways, all of Steiner’s innovations recognize life’s interconnections and overcome traditional separations in society, education and finance.

Believing that financial transactions should be personal and transparent and based on long-term relationships, and in keeping with Steiner’s philosophy, Don developed a unique practice that brings RSF investors together with RSF borrowers in face-to-face meetings, where investors and borrowers discuss the interest rate that the borrower pays and the investor earns, and in the process get to know each other and the businesses or projects being supported. Here is another example of how relationships that had become separated in an anonymous global economic system are being reconnected—the relationship between lender and borrower.

As a BALLE board member, Don continues to strengthen our efforts in driving investment to local economies by connecting financial resources to BALLE businesses and local networks and suggesting ideas and speakers for BALLE’s monthly community capital webinars. RSF and BALLE work together with a group of innovative funders to direct more foundations and investors toward funding restorative local economies.

Additionally, once a year RSF co-sponsors BALLE’s national Community Capital Day along with our allies at Slow Money, an initiative launched by Woody Tasch, former CEO of Investors’ Circle. The goal of Slow Money is to bring more capital to local food systems through long-term, “slow” investments in sustainable small-food enterprises. It was Woody’s book, “Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered,” that inspired me to approach Philadelphia’s TRF (already engaged in capitalizing grocery stores bringing fresh food to inner-city communities) about targeting investments toward growing the local food system in the Philadelphia region. Today, a recently hired food system analyst at TRF has already directed several loans to local farms and food enterprises, including the Fair Food Farmstand, showing once again how my investments in TRF provide me a living return. After serving as a Slow Money founding adviser, I watched Woody’s campaign manifest in local economies around the country, where many millions of dollars have been invested in farms and small-food enterprises that nurture the soil and feed their communities well. As Woody likes to say, “We must bring money back down to earth.”
 

By Raphaël Souchier

Raphaël Souchier introduces Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini at Slow Money’s National Gathering April 29–30 in Boulder, Colo. This collection of writings is translated from Souchier’s forthcoming book “Local Living Economies: The Post-Wall Street Era Will Be Local” (Editions Eyrolles, September 2013). Souchier is a French consultant and writer who has worked for the last 30 years in the field of sustainable local economies. Souchier is co-founder of Slow Money France. 

On a shelf of the Phoenix bookstore, located in the heart of the ecovillage of Findhorn, in the north of Scotland, the title “Going Local” (Free, 2000) caught my eye. The book was written by the American economist Michael H. Shuman. It was June 2002, and I had come to Findhorn to attend the international “Restore the Earth” conference, during which Vandana Shiva, Winona LaDuke, Helena Norberg-Hodge and some others were to present their ideas.

Shuman, in his book, underlines the importance of local communities reclaiming their independence so as not to be crushed by globalization. His text refers to European and North American successes. He shows that people can “take back control of what is happening to their local communities” by recreating living economies. The angle of attack he proposes, doing business as a way to create a better world, seemed relevant to me. Indeed, big business is the main destroyer of our environment. But companies—both small and big—may well also be the only entity powerful and creative enough to reverse this trend.

Thus we need, as Paul Hawken suggested in his book “The Ecology of Commerce” (Harper Business, 1993), a way to create businesses that ensures that the industrial business model, as it currently exists, will be replaced by businesses that will serve the human community and become the sustainable producers of tomorrow.

Global Intent, Local Anchoring

Aided by their diversity, the forward-thinking entrepreneurs presented in “Local Living Economies: The Post-Wall Street Era Will Be Local” appear to share a common quest: to build a society that may become planetary, participatory and compatible with life, as opposed to a system that has become bankrupt, dysfunctional and meaningless. These citizens, communities and businesses want to invent new ways to reclaim the economy and the democracy.

Such a change requires that vision and action be rooted. Not in a sclerotic withdrawal, but by anchoring the projects to a tangible reality. To have us become more deeply aware of the impact of our decisions. To reinforce the ties of solidarity, locally and with each point on the planet. Because it is really on a local level that individual behaviors and attitudes find sense and vitality.

Kevin Quinn at the People’s Food Co-op in Ann Arbor, Mich.

The old modernist vision believed that it would free humans by having them become individualist consumers. But we ended up being inert and powerless, manipulated by our own desires and for the sake of “market needs.” It abandoned the enduring heritage that is to be passed down to later generations; it reduced work to enslavement to the world of machines; it denatured the lasting use, transforming it into ephemeral consumption, and deprived it of its very function, which is to preserve life. That blind quest has hidden—and reinforced—the malfunctions of a disoriented world, agitated by the unique and destructive frenzy to produce.

If nothing changes in the way we act, a likely scenario for the upcoming years, according to the U.S. National Intelligence Council in its project Global Trends 2030, will involve the hardening and general destabilization of fragile global equilibriums, with unequal economic growth, a weakening of the West to the benefit of Asia, and global stability threatened by volatile markets and a damaged climate.

Changing our actions requires understanding what generates them. “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root,” observed Thoreau. It is indeed at the root where wisdom wishes we would intervene. That is where we are acted upon, manipulated by our own fears. We fear being isolated, threatened by others and by a natural environment that we imagine to be inert, strange and hostile. However, there is at least one other way to see things, just as realistic but more fecund: We are part of an ecosystem to which we are profoundly related and that permanently generates life. Instead of destroying it through ignorance and arrogance, it would be reasonable to honor it while observing it, respecting it and allowing it to inspire our action. David Korten mentioned this when we met: “This system is extraordinary in its ability to organize itself to capture and use local nutrients, water and energy in each area of the planet. It is extremely local. Seize the resources, use them, and trade them to preserve life through cooperative sharing. All these microsystems are interconnected, and in the end they constitute a global interdependent biosphere.”

In the grand scheme of things, large human societies constitute the connective tissue of millions of local societies. Repairing our weakened connections with nature may thus take place both at the heart of these communities and through their continual exchanges.

We can bring a universal view to the human condition. Reflect that after having passed its infancy stage, humanity is getting ready to pass its adolescent stage, rich with ideas not yet well controlled, that tests its new power with a roar, wrongly perceived as without limits. Perhaps the time has come for our young species to begin acting like adults, commanding their ship with wisdom, good sense and elegance. Maybe we can set aside the old story of Separation. If we keep believing we are separated from each other, from life and from the universe, we will take ourselves to chaos. Don’t we deserve a better fate? Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the litany of helplessness? Why should we pass to the future a cry of terror when we are able to offer it a lighthearted polyphony?

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship

Judy Wicks, Woody Tasch, Michael Shuman, Michelle Long, David Korten, Chuck Robinson, Sarah Van Aken, Paul Saginaw, Niaz Dorry, Jason McLennan and all the others: These people have in common a powerful and creative vision of the world. They also have decided to translate their vision into their own lives, their work and their relationships: a concern for consistency, the courage to take risks, to fail and to start over and, lastly, the will to share their passion with those around them and those who will follow.

They and many of us now understand that conscious consumerism will not be enough. As Stacy Mitchell says, “we can’t shop our way to a better economy.” Still, stepping from economics to politics doesn’t mean adopting the old way to do politics. We will have to create an alternative to the traditional domination by force. Which means learning to invent new ways that will link the power of action to the precious tool of co-creation. This form of power relies not on Strength but on deep Authority; on the ability for people to be congruent, aligning their words and their acts.

This new brand of entrepreneurs has the personal qualities to help lead communities into new paths. Because their vision is one of a planet that knows how to feed all of its children, provided that they, in return, choose to respect themselves and the Earth.

According to Ervin Làszlò, the time has come for us to sense the urgent need to abandon our obsolete beliefs, to finally dare to envision the peaceful and restorative civilization that we wish for, and to undertake on a daily basis the changes that will allow us to get through these challenging times.

“What is good for General Motors is good for America” is an old saying. Among the many changes that will bring about a new consciousness, why not decide—calmly and once and for all—that only that which is good for humanity and for life is good for business? Because the existence of the latest is justified, as a last resort, only by the measure of its contribution to the well-being of humanity and the vitality of its ecosystem.