Another view of Tom Friedman's Green article in NY Times Magazine

I just read Tom Friedman's NY Times Cover article "The Power of Green" which was an excellent article reminding us of the grand opportunity to embrace the Green Revolution for a better world. I found the article hugely positive.

and I found this response to the article... The main point that I found is that there are alot of new buzzwords and ideas being thrown around as solutions - which sound better, and address part of the solution, but have SERIOUS downsides like "clean coal and ethanol." For example, is the fuel from GMO corn grown in monoculture factory farms laced with pesticides and herbicides really good for the environment? Since many countries consider GMO corn unfit for human, or animal consumption Ethanol is an excellent solution... or is it? Similarly similarly GMO soybeans grown with pesticides and herbicides that are replacing virgin rainforest is an equally challenging faustian bargain.


http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2007/1528

Is "Green" Tom Friedman the new eco-Orwell of Solartopia?
By Harvey Wasserman
April 19, 2007

Not long ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was America's top op ed cheerleader for George W. Bush's attack on Iraq, portraying it as a "war for democracy."

Now, in a landmark Times Magazine article, he claims naming rights to a "green" movement for nuke power and "clean coal," portraying them as part of the answer to global warming.

This is VERY dangerous stuff.

But before we proceed, this Earth Day we can welcome the fact that major media types like Friedman finally do concede that we have a global climate crisis. The din of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" has corporate big-wigs lining up to be washed green. For that much, we can all be grateful.

There is much that's positive in Friedman's writings about the need for emission-free energy. Most of it derives from countless concerned citizens seeking a Solartopian system based on solar, wind, bio-fuels, efficiency and a truly Earth-based culture.

Friedman never acknowledges them. But tens of thousands of grassroots activists have contributed decades of loving labor, often including jail time (mostly at reactor sites), to give birth to that vision.

Normally, a social movement would welcome the embrace of a New York Times columnist. For a major establishment mouthpiece to start spouting ideas for which so many have marched should be a deeply gratifying accomplishment.

But Friedman's sales pitch also sanctifies nukes and coal. In a single horrifying phrase, he writes in the Times Magazine that "to reach the necessary scale of emissions-free energy will require big clean coal or nuclear power stations, wind farms and solar farms."

Thus, in Tom Friedman's new eco-Orwellian "greenspeak," atomic energy and "clean coal" have become the equivalents of solar and wind power.

This is a suicidal double deception.

"Clean coal" is the ultimate atmospheric oxymoron. Fossil fuel corporations justify it with "carbon sequestration," the idea of pumping CO2 emissions into caverns and other underground storage facilities.

In other words: Yucca Mountain for the coal business. The technology is unproven and the gas is certain, sooner or later, to leak out. Continued coal mining---even with a green veneer---will devastate landscapes, kill miners, cause acid rain and prolong the world's dependence on fossil fuel.

Worse is the proven 50-year failure of nuke power. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Nothing can guarantee their safety from a terror attack.

Fifty years ago the Price-Anderson Act gave federal protection to save reactor owners from paying for a major disaster. No private insurer has stepped into the void, not for the past generation of reactors, nor for the future.

There is also no solution to the waste problem. Yucca Mountain, the multi-billion-dollar alleged storage dump, cannot open for at least two decades. It is capped with perched water, marbled with an earthquake fault and surrounded by (so far) dormant volcanoes like itself. If it opens at all, it will be a casino, in one form or another.

Nukes also spew huge quantities of radioactive radon from the billions of tons of tailings that that sit near uranium mines and mills. That uranium is in increasingly short supply, with prices bound to skyrocket.

The enrichment of reactor fuel creates huge global warming emissions. The nukes themselves pump out direct heat, harming air and water. Radioactive emissions kill billions of fish and other life forms, including humans. Near-misses, as at Ohio's Davis-Besse, which was a bare shred of thin metal away from a catastrophic melt-down, are all too frequent. Sooner or later, by terror or error, we must expect the worst.

Friedman mourns that the melt-down at Three Mile Island caused huge quantities of carbon-emitting coal to be burned for replacement power. But if the $900 million it took to build TMI had been invested in real green energy and efficiency, all those emissions could have been cheaply and safely avoided, then, now and into the future. Take the additional $2 billion required to deal with the seething radioactive mess and we could have had a countryside layered with safe, clean, cheap solar and wind farms.

Friedman never interviews the thousands of central Pennsylvanians who demanded the nuke not be built in the first place. Nor does he mention the 2400 locals who've tried for two decades to get a class action trial on the death and disease caused by the 1979 melt-down's radioactive emissions. To this day, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know how much fallout escaped from TMI, where it went, who it affected or what harm it did.

Friedman instead talks to TMI's newly greenwashed corporate biggies. More nukes would be a great solution to global warming, they say. But they complain that a new reactor could not come on line for, perhaps, fifteen years. And private investment won't do the trick. Government loan guarantees will be required, they moan, because when it comes to energy, the market "doesn't work."

That's an amazing admission for a free market ideologue like Friedman. What he can't face is that the market DOES work for nuclear power, because nobody in their right mind will invest in it without gargantuan subsidies and insurance protection. Only a Bush-style intervention like the one for "democracy" in Iraq will finance new reactor construction.

The real numbers on both existing and new nukes are disastrous. The current generation only looks profitable because the wave of utility deregulation that swept the US a few years ago forced the public to eat the true capital costs.

Back then Friedman yelled that a free market in energy would yield competition and lower prices. But with fake shortages and market manipulations, Enron and its corporate cohorts gouged California and other states for more than $100 billion. Nowhere in the deregulated US is there meaningful competition in electricity. Nor is there an accurate accounting for the true costs of atomic power.

In the 1990s, California's REAL green power movement wanted to install some 600 megawatts of solar, wind and efficiency. That was killed by John Bryson, the "green" chair of Southern California Edison. Bryson then used deregulation to write off the multi-billion-dollar capital costs of four reactors. And then came Enron, to gouge and go bankrupt.

Now Friedman and his fossil/nuke cohorts ask that we repeat the experience in the name of global warming.

We can certainly say "thanks" to him for finally waking up to the climate crisis. But we must also say "no thanks" to fossil fuels and nuclear power.

The Solartopian solution embraces wind, solar, bio-fuels and other truly renewable sources, along with increased efficiency. Wall Street is lining up to invest in these technologies, which have high rates of real return, both financial and ecological.

We've seen the horrific results of Tom Friedman's advocacy of utility deregulation. We've tasted the bitter fruits of his cheerleading for the war in Iraq.

Why would we now buy his fossil/nukes, which are no more green than the climate crisis itself?

Between the lines of Friedman's columns there's a lethal brew of carbon emissions and radioactive crud. Every dime spent on "clean coal" or "safe nukes" will only make things worse.

We're glad so many corporate moguls finally feel compelled to line up at the media greenwash. But there's no need to buy in to their proven failures.

The real solution to climate chaos is the Solartopian Trinity of solar, wind and bio-fuels, with increased efficiency and the return of mass transit. Accept no substitutes.

--
Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org. Long ago he pondered the true meaning of being green in jail cells near the Seabrook and Diablo Canyon nuclear plants.

Kerry and Gingrich agree on Green

Kerry and Gingrich Hugging Trees -- and (Almost) Each Other
___

By Dana Milbank
Washingtonpost.com

Wednesday, April 11, 2007; A02

Yesterday's global-warming debate between John Kerry and Newt Gingrich was, as the moderator put it, "advertised as a smack-down and a prizefight." But those labels were too modest for Kerry.

"Welcome to our environmental version of the Lincoln-Douglas debates," the former Democratic presidential nominee told the crowd in the Russell Caucus Room. "We flipped a coin, and I picked Lincoln."

But something funny happened on the way to 1858. Gingrich, a former Republican House speaker, refused to play Douglas to Kerry's Lincoln, instead positioning himself as a tree-hugging green.

Before Kerry got a word in, Gingrich conceded that global warming is real, that humans have contributed to it and that "we should address it very actively." Gingrich held up Kerry's new book, "This Moment on Earth," and called it "a very interesting read." He then added a personal note about saving vulnerable species from climate change. "My name, Newt, actually comes from the Danish Knut, and there's been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named Knut," he confided.

more here

Having More Won't Make You Happy

http://www.worldchanging.com/local/losangeles/archives//006353.html

I included the comments from the website as well:

Having More Won't Make You Happy

Greg Wendt
March 22, 2007 8:15 AM

As a financial advisor, I regularly meet the "haves and have-mores," and one thing is for sure: More does not necessarily mean more happy.

Barbara Walters interviewed billionaire media mogul David Geffen in a conversation published in More Than Money magazine: "She said, 'O.K., David, now that you’re a billionaire, are you happy?' He shot back without hesitation: 'Barbara, anybody who believes money makes you happy doesn’t have money.'"

It’s a brilliant insight, because money doesn’t make you happy. Today, Alternet posted an excerpt of Bill McKibben's recent book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Community and a Durable Future. I recommend the excerpt highly; it explores the idea that the foundation of our economic assumptions must be re-evaluated and re-tooled for our modern context.

Bill speaks to the heart of the matter: Our civilization has conditioned ourselves to believe that more is better, because we believe simply more makes us happy. We all know it's not true, but many of us are not willing to face our inner shadow work to really embody this truth in our day-to-day lives.

On a similar note, I find many in our circle of friends in the sustainability movement -- myself included -- living lives of accumulation and consumption even with a "modest" lifestyle. Yet as human beings, we know that more "stuff" won't make us happy.

I was speaking about this matter with my friend Marc Barasch, an accomplished author and current Executive Director of the Green World Campaign. Marc said: "The Buddhist tradition states that craving keeps the world of Samsara [eternal suffering] turning."

He continued: "What people want is love and community and the society tends to systematically undermine the means of attaining that, and consumerism is the addictive substitute. The pleasure of the addiction becomes dry and insipid and becomes simply maintenance dosage to avoid greater and greater pain. And it is this collective maintenance of our consumerism addiction that habitually and automatically devours the planet's resources."

So, since you and I have grown up in this system, we are best able to recognize the heart of the matter and begin to deal with the problem at its core. Simply put, in order for us all to manifest the sustainable world built on loving kindness to all beings, we just have to get down to this crucial "shadow work" inside of our own heart of hearts.

You know what I am talking about: inside yourself. You don't need anyone else to know what I am referring to, and you don't need anyone else to do this work inside yourself, right here, right now.

I am very excited that Bill McKibben will be here in Los Angeles on April 4 to discuss his new book with Tom Curwen, editor and writer at the Los Angeles Times. The talk will be at the LA Central Library at Fifth and Flower in downtown Los Angeles. Get more information here; RSVP here.

I look forward to seeing you at the event on the 4th!
Comments

I believe "consumer addiction" is a replacement for feeling alive and buying stuff seems to be a reaction to a missing human need.

Noted Chilean ecological economist Manfred Max-Neef defines nine distinct human needs that are both essential to us all and intrinsically related.

The Max-Neef categories of need are: SUBSISTENCE, PROTECTION, PARTICIPATION, IDLENESS, CREATIVITY, AFFECTION, UNDERSTANDING, IDENTITY, FREEDOM.

He points out that whenever we are systematically deprived of the opportunity to meet these individual needs we have a poverty in our lives. As we move forward with the "green" sustainable economy we must be mindful of the difference between needs, wants, and satisfiers. If we don't examine these distinctions along the way we may end up with different "stuff" in our lives and still lack one or more of the basic human needs.

Max-Neef, M. "Development and human needs." 1992. In Real-life economics: understanding wealth creation. Ekins, P. and Max-Neef, M. (Ed.) Routledge Publishers.

Posted by: Ron Durgin on March 23, 2007 8:02 AM

Outstanding perspective Greg. Glad to have a spokesperson for wealth management acknowledge the realities expressed here-that money does not, and never has, made anyone happy. It is love, community and positive contributions for the future of all living things that brings happiness. Thanks for such a correction to the consuming mentality.

Posted by: Dan Lavery on March 23, 2007 11:01 AM

Squandering our Wealth? It appears so....listen to the bees!

Most of us who are thinking about sustainability are aware that our civilization is living beyond the planet's means to support us. See my earlier blog entry for details. Furthermore, the systems and institutions operating our civilization and our business are borne out of a thinking structure which does not consider the needs of Nature. We are only considering short-term human needs while overlooking both the web of life and the simple fact that we have myriad of plants and animals as our bunkmates on this "spaceship Earth" to use a Bucky Fuller phrase.

I am particularly concerned about a recent news story which is evidence of the aforementioned regarding the rapid drop in bee population. See the article below.

If we humans don't heed the call of such "canaries in the coal mine" then the species extinctions can be drastic, and rapid. With catastophic effects on plant, animal and human well being.


Here's the article I mentioned:

Are GM Crops Killing Bees?

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous.

and another

Colorado beekeepers stung by mysteriously vanishing colonies.

Like other Colorado beekeepers, Jeff Theobald knows that between 2 percent and 10 percent of his bees typically won't survive winter, but this year, the loss rate is 40 percent and rising as entire colonies vanish without a trace.

"It's just bizarre," said Theobald, who runs Grand Mesa Honey Farm in Delta. "I've had hives that had dead bees in them - 4,000 to 5,000 dead bees - and hives that were completely empty. The bees were just gone."

Regional disasters have afflicted beekeepers in the past, but baffled entomologists and agricultural experts call this the first national crisis, with potentially grave consequences. Approximately $14.6 billion worth of U.S. nut, fruit and vegetable crops depend on bee pollination.

Go to the original to read the entire article

Wanna do something?
Then here's what you can do to help the bees, and other insects:
(1) take steps to be aware of GMO foods and the harm they do to ecosystems
Click here
(2) vote your voice through organizations like Organic Consumer's Association and NRDC click here to learn more

Bill McKibben - Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy

AlterNet
Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy
By Bill McKibben, Mother Jones
Posted on March 22, 2007, Printed on March 22, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/49593/

This article is an excerpt from Bill McKibben's new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. It first appeared in Mother Jones.

For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production.

Smith's core ideas -- that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth --have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It's More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound -- like climate change and peak oil -- that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that's as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein's more complicated universe.

1. "We can do it if we believe it": FDR, LBJ, and the invention of growth

It was the great economist John Maynard Keynes who pointed out that until very recently, "there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth." At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living roughly doubled between 2000 B.C. and the dawn of the 18th century -- four millennia during which we basically didn't learn to do much of anything new. Before history began, we had already figured out fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion.

And then, something new finally did happen. In 1712, a British inventor named Thomas Newcomen created the first practical steam engine. Over the centuries that followed, fossil fuels helped create everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from electricity to steel to fertilizer; now, a 100 percent jump in the standard of living could suddenly be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia.

In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America's economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II and the postwar boom -- by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in 1963, he said things like: "I'm sick of all the people who talk about the things we can't do. Hell, we're the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.... We can do it if we believe it."

He wasn't alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, "Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system."

Yet the bad news was already apparent, if you cared to look. Burning rivers and smoggy cities demonstrated the dark side of industrial expansion. In 1972, a trio of mit researchers released a series of computer forecasts they called "limits to growth," which showed that unbridled expansion would eventually deplete our resource base.

A year later the British economist E.F. Schumacher wrote the best-selling Small Is Beautiful. (Soon after, when Schumacher came to the United States on a speaking tour, Jimmy Carter actually received him at the White House -- imagine the current president making time for any economist.) By 1979, the sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to President Carter that only 30 percent of Americans were "pro-growth," 31 percent were "anti-growth," and 39 percent were "highly uncertain."

Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, "is too stressful for societies to endure," and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was "Morning in America" -- out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of the treasury, at one point declared that the Clinton administration "cannot and will not accept any 'speed limit' on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible." It's the economy, stupid.

A sea change in the relationship between corporate america and green

A business week article "Hugging the Tree Huggers" discusses the sea change in the relationship between NGO's and Corporations...

THE ENVIRONMENT

Hugging The Tree-Huggers
Why so many companies are suddenly linking up with eco groups. Hint: Smart business

The article is about how the private equity firms reached out to enviros to make the deal of buying TXU green...


As to why it was important for the capitalists to reach out to the tree huggers the article states:

"Why was that so important? "We all swim in the same culture--and the culture is going green," explains Reilly. Indeed, Americans find nongovernmental organizations, like green groups, more credible than business, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual survey. That's a switch from five years ago, and it gives activists additional clout. "Companies have to be seen as responsible," says Karen Van Bergen, vice-president of McDonald's Europe.

"The TXU takeover is a sign of a remarkable evolution in the dynamic between corporate executives and activists. Once fractious and antagonistic, it has moved toward accommodation and even mutual dependence. Companies increasingly seek a "green" imprimatur, while enviros view changes in how business operates as key to protecting the planet."


Examples of this new relationship are as ubiquitous as Al Gore at the Academy Awards. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT ) turned to Conservation International to help shape ambitious goals to cut energy use, switch to renewable power, and sell millions of efficient fluorescent bulbs. When the CEOs of 10 major U.S. corporations converged on Washington on Jan. 22 and issued a call for mandatory carbon emissions limits, sitting with them at the table were Fred Krupp and the president of the NRDC. And after Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition activists got Dell Inc.'s (DELL ) attention by chaining themselves to computer monitors, they worked with the computer maker on a groundbreaking recycling plan. "Companies have decided it is better to invite us into the tent than have us outside picketing their keynote speeches," says Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition founder Ted Smith. "It's a long way from where we started."

IT'S ABOUT TIME!

Great Dragon goes Green?

China's Wen Seeks to Curb Pollution, Sustain GrowthBy Yanping Li and Zhang Dingmin

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- China will crack down on polluting factories and boost spending on farmers and low-income earners as the government seeks a more balanced expansion of the world's fastest-growing major economy, Premier Wen Jiabao said.

``We need to adjust the balance between investment and consumption,'' Wen said in his annual policy speech to the National People's Congress in Beijing. China must curb loans to ``highly polluting'' enterprises, the premier said.

Wen's speech highlights the shift in government priorities from pursuing economic growth targets to addressing the costs of expansion, including environmental damage and a widening income gap. Excessive investment fueled by cash from China's record trade surplus may spur the construction of too many factories, leaving the economy vulnerable to a slowdown in demand.

More here

Capitalists getting Green!

note the excerpt that "the capital markets are becoming increasingly
sensitive to the climate change issue. But the country and the
environment cannot depend on good sense or even good business sense
to persuade other corporate leaders to follow Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
and Texas Pacific. Congress needs to move briskly toward legislation
that would put a price on carbon, either by taxing it or capping
emissions."

=====

NEW YORK TIMES

February 28, 2007
Editorial
A Green Deal on Coal

People who worry about global warming and want the United States to
do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions received some very good
news over the weekend from a very unlikely source. As part of an
ambitious buyout deal, TXU, a Texas utility that has long been a
target of environmentalists, will abandon plans to build eight old-
style coal-burning power plants, which would have dumped huge amounts
of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The buyers — two private equity companies, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
and the Texas Pacific Group — also agreed to invest $400 million to
help their customers use energy more efficiently, and to explore
cleaner ways to burn coal. In a gesture of potentially broad
political consequence, they pledged to join other forward-looking
companies in backing federal legislation imposing mandatory limits on
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

The deal represents a shrewd reading of the political waters by the
new owners. TXU had come under heavy fire from influential members of
Congress, the courts and even the local citizenry. The companies also
knew that plants using older technologies and producing heavy
emissions could be severely penalized if Congress ever chose to
regulate carbon dioxide. It also helped that Texas Pacific’s co-
founder, David Bonderman, is himself an ardent environmentalist who
was willing to reach out to TXU’s opponents, including influential
environmental groups, for their help in negotiating a deal.

Though the deal could be trumped by another offer, it is already
being hailed as a pivotal moment in the fight against global warming.
We shall see. It is certainly further evidence that the capital
markets are becoming increasingly sensitive to the climate change
issue. But the country and the environment cannot depend on good
sense or even good business sense to persuade other corporate leaders
to follow Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Texas Pacific. Congress needs
to move briskly toward legislation that would put a price on carbon,
either by taxing it or capping emissions.

The Energy Department says there are 159 new coal-fired power plants
on the drawing boards; of these, only 32 are considering — though not
committed to — technologies that could significantly reduce carbon
dioxide emissions. What’s needed is federal legislation that would
drive them in the direction TXU’s new owners have promised to take.

---

The Modern Wizard of Money Bernard Lietaer speaks!

http://www.yesmagazine.com/article.asp?ID=886

SARAH : So you're suggesting that scarcity needn't be a guiding principle of our economic system. But isn't scarcity absolutely fundamental to economics, especially in a world of limited resources?

BERNARD : My analysis of this question is based on the work of Carl Gustav Jung because he is the only one with a theoretical framework for collective psychology, and money is fundamentally a phenomenon of collective psychology.

A key concept Jung uses is the archetype, which can be described as an emotional field that mobilizes people, individually or collectively, in a particular direction. Jung showed that whenever a particular archetype is repressed, two types of shadows emerge, which are polarities of each other.

For example, if my higher self - corresponding to the archetype of the King or the Queen - is repressed, I will behave either as a Tyrant or as a Weakling. These two shadows are connected to each other by fear. A Tyrant is tyrannical because he's afraid of appearing weak; a Weakling is afraid of being tyrannical. Only someone with no fear of either one of these shadows can embody the archetype of the King.

Now let's apply this framework to a well-documented phenomenon - the repression of the Great Mother archetype. The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions - reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts - all the way to the Victorian era.

If there is a repression of an archetype on this scale and for this length of time, the shadows manifest in a powerful way in society. After 5,000 years, people will consider the corresponding shadow behaviors as "normal."

The question I have been asking is very simple: What are the shadows of the Great Mother archetype? I'm proposing that these shadows are greed and fear of scarcity. So it should come as no surprise that in Victorian times - at the apex of the repression of the Great Mother - a Scottish schoolmaster named Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed that was how all "civilized" societies worked. Smith, as you know, created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed.

Upside of Down

The Upside of Down a new book by Thomas Homer-Dixon is part of the new ground-breaking trend in my view of the zeitgeist toward "we have problems - let's deal with them and get on with it!"

Also the article below from Kuntsler - one of our favorite and most erudite on the topic of peak oil has also posted the following on his website


From Alternet:

Ten Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society
By James Howard Kunstler, Kunstler.com
Posted on February 10, 2007, Printed on February 14, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/47705/

Editor's Note: James Howard Kunstler is a leading writer on the topic of peak oil the problems it poses for American suburbia. Deeply concerned about the future of our petroleum dependent society, Kunstler believes we must take radical steps to avoid the total meltdown of modern society in the face looming oil and gas shortages. For background on this topic, read Kunstler's essay, "Pricey Gas, That's Reality."

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions" to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions:

1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

2. We have to produce food differently. The Monsanto/Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.

3. We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami ...) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.

4. We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.

5. We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

6. We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.

7. The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).

8. We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.

9. We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

10. Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Shades of Grey

Enjoyed the following article by David Vogel:

When do 'good' firms go 'bad'?
Ranking corporations by ethics is popular, but telling the good guys from the bad is not clear-cut.
By David Vogel, DAVID VOGEL teaches business ethics at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and is the author of "The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility."
February 13, 2007

SUSTAINABLE FIRMS. Green businesses. Socially responsible corporations. A growing number of magazines, activist groups and websites publish such lists, suggesting that one can distinguish the good companies from the bad.

The claim that such distinctions are possible is likewise central to ethical mutual funds, indexes and stock rating services that recommend "responsible" investing — with some even asserting that "better" firms have superior financial performance.

But corporate social responsibility isn't such a clear-cut matter. People are rarely consistent in their ethical behaviors, as numerous psychological studies have shown. An individual can cheat on his spouse and file an honest income tax return, or be a model employee and an irresponsible parent. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were ruthless businessmen yet also generous philanthropists — a category in which some also place Bill Gates. Interestingly, the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — criticized in The Times recently for "irresponsible" investing — reflected so well on Microsoft that the company topped the Wall Street Journal's Reputation Quotient survey.

So if it is difficult to judge the overall ethics of an individual, it is certainly more so in the case of complex business organizations. Few firms widely regarded as socially responsible consistently exhibit ethical behaviors, while even the most criticized are not without virtues. The more closely one looks, the harder the determination gets.

Consider, for example, British Petroleum — long entrenched in the pantheon of corporate responsibility because of its leadership on the issue of global climate change. Yet after a major oil leak last year, it was revealed that BP had not maintained its pipelines in Alaska. Corporate cost-cutting also contributed to a 2005 oil refinery explosion in Texas that resulted in 15 deaths and 180 injuries. How, then, should we rank BP's overall environmental record?

Another icon of corporate responsibility is American Apparel. This firm has been widely praised for manufacturing all of its products in the United States and for the high wages and other benefits it provides employees at its Los Angeles factory. Yet its marketing uses images of women that border on soft pornography, and its founder and chief executive has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment. On balance, is American Apparel a virtuous firm?

Merck has been widely and appropriately applauded for its decision to develop, produce and distribute without charge the drug Mectizan, which prevents river blindness. Since 1987, Merck has distributed more than 250 million doses, and its programs currently reach 40 million patients a year. Yet this same pharmaceutical firm aggressively marketed the anti-pain drug Vioxx, which increased the risks of heart attacks and strokes. In measuring Merck's overall corporate virtue, how should we assess the millions of individuals saved from river blindness against the firm's belated response to the health risks of its highly profitable, bestselling drug?

On the other hand, consider Altria, which owns Philip Morris. It's shunned by virtually all ethical funds because it makes cigarettes, a product that is inherently harmful. Yet Philip Morris has long been a generous contributor to the arts as well as to the Congressional Black Caucus. Tobacco is still grown primarily on family farms, many of which are minority owned.

Wal-Mart, another corporate villain, is widely condemned for its low wages and unwillingness to provide adequate healthcare coverage for its employees. Yet by using its low costs to lower prices, Wal-Mart is estimated to save American consumers $30 billion a year — the equivalent of a gift of $270 to every family in the U.S. It has also embarked on a number of potentially far-reaching environmental initiatives.

No energy firm has been criticized as vehemently by environmentalists as Exxon Mobil, which refuses to acknowledge, let alone ameliorate, the risks of global climate change. Yet, in contrast to BP, since the 1979 Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon Mobil has had an exemplary record on both workplace safety and pollution control. And unlike Shell, another energy firm applauded for its commitment to "sustainability," its financial reporting has been a model of probity. How then should we rank Exxon Mobil's overall ethical behavior?

These examples are hardly atypical. Few "virtuous" firms are without sin, and few business "villains" have no good qualities. That does not mean we should give up comparing companies' social or environmental performance. But we shouldn't expect to find many black-hatted corporate villains or heroes on white steeds. In corporate America, it's usually shades of gray.

UN panel finds 'unequivocal' evidence for global warming

UN panel finds 'unequivocal' evidence for global warming

Interesting that this is being broadcast from the city of the vatican, cool!

From Monsters and Critics.com

Nature News
UN panel finds 'unequivocal' evidence for global warming
By DPA
Feb 2, 2007, 11:29 GMT

Paris - Human activity is unequivocably driving climate change and unless it is modified, it will cause temperatures to rise by as much as 6.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report issued Friday in Paris.

'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea levels,' the United Nations-overseen IPCC said in a summary of the lengthy report,

The report, entitled Climate Change 2007, also known as the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), was made public after a four-day meeting of ICPP scientists in the French capital.

Eleven of the past 12 years (1995-2006) rank among the warmest years on record of global temperatures, the report noted, and concluded, 'Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.'

The report continued, 'Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre- industrial values.'

The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are primarily due to the use of fossil fuels, the report said, while those of methane and nitrous oxide were primarily due to agriculture.

'Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century,' the report continued.

According to several estimates, these changes will raise global temperatures by an average of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees, depending on the scenario used by the scientists.

As a result or rising temperatures, glaciers and snow cover have decreased in both hemispheres, with glacier and ice-cap melt leading to a rise in sea levels, the report said.

In addition, 'Numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed,' the IPCC noted.

These include changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather, including droughts and the intensity of tropical cyclones.

Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years, the report said, while satellite data since 1978 reveal that the extent of the Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 2.7 per cent per decade on the average.

According to Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as a result of the report, 'February 2, 2007 will be remembered as the date when the question mark was removed from the question, if human activity had anything to do with climate change.'

Steiner told reporters in Paris that the report must produce the 'shift from doubting to having to act ... Science is now unequivocal, but it is looking for an unequivocal commitment from policy-makers.'

Calling the ICPP report 'an extraordinary scientific consensus that climate change is already upon us, and that human activities are its cause,' the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) demanded, 'Governments must negotiate deeper emission cuts for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.'

The IPCC report was produced by some 600 authors from 40 countries. More than 620 expert reviewers and a large number of government reviewers also participated.

© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

© Copyright 2006,2007 by monstersandcritics.com.
This notice cannot be removed without permission.

"GO GREEN, GET RICH" from CNN/Money

Business 2.0 Magazine just ran a cover article on their website called "Go Green, Get Rich" which underscores the sea change in attitudes about environmental responsibility and business. The mainstream media has apparently made the switch from the rediculous assersion "jobs vs environment" to "green business can get rich" - I love it.

The article covers the nine major woes and solutions coming out of business. I don't believe that technologies and business alone will get us out of the mess we're in. Fundamentally, we have to completely reorient the way we relate to eachother as co-inhabitants on planet earth.... Even so, the article is very encouraging!
Here is the article. go to the main website to drill down to each of the 9 areas.

"Go green. Get rich.
Think humanity's problems are too big to be tackled by business? Think again. Here are nine companies showing how we can make millions saving us from ourselves.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Chris Taylor, Business 2.0 Magazine senior editor
January 26 2007: 2:41 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) -- If you've read the news lately, you know the scale of the problem. Catastrophes that once seemed far away are creeping uncomfortably close to our lifetimes. The permanent polar ice cap will disappear by 2040. The seas could be practically devoid of fish by 2048. Manhattan and Miami will be flooded by 2050. Add in widespread disease and famine, and you have a script for the apocalypse.

But before you get too depressed, consider that business - until now part of the problem - is scrambling for answers. Clean-technology investments soared by more than 50 percent in the first three quarters of 2006. And venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has announced a doubling of its renewable-energy fund to $200 million. Kleiner partner Ray Lane told the Wall Street Journal that clean tech will be "bigger than the Internet, by an order of magnitude."

For the following stories, we identified the most intractable problems facing the human race. Beyond climate change, there are the pollution troubles: mountains of trash, haze-choked skies, and dirty water. Disease includes not just viral epidemics but also new strains of ultraresistant bacteria. And our global food problem isn't just about Third World famine; it's also about conditions that could wipe out the $158 billion fishing industry.

It made for a disquieting list - until we found companies developing workable, scalable solutions. For each, we teased out not just the size of the potential windfall but also entrepreneurial insights from the pioneers. Finally, we offer a look at technologies too new to be commercialized but that could emerge in just a few years. Our most disastrous century yet? Maybe. It could also be our finest hour.

The biggest problems

1. Global warming

2. Oil dependency

3. Hunger and malnutrition

4. Dirty air

5. Dirty water

6. Over fishing

7. Epidemics

8. Drug-resistant infections

9. Waste disposal

From the February 1, 2007 issue"

CEOs Urge Bush to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions

CEOs Urge Bush to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 23, 2007; A06

On the eve of the State of the Union address, the chief executives of 10 major corporations urged President Bush to embrace mandatory ceilings on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in order to stem climate change.

But yesterday White House spokesman Tony Snow said that binding caps on carbon dioxide emissions would not be part of the president's proposals tonight. And a member of the corporate delegation said that last week the White House canceled a meeting with the executives that had been scheduled for yesterday morning.

"The President has always believed, when it comes to climate change, that the best way to achieve reductions is through innovation," Snow said, "and to figure out ways to come up with energy sources that are going to meet our economy's constant demand for energy, and at the same time, do it in a way that's going to be friendly for the environment."

There has been widespread speculation about what Bush might say about climate change tonight. Several legislative proposals have emerged in Congress with different ways for addressing climate change.

Major corporate leaders have been changing their position on climate change for the past year or two, and many of them are convinced that some form of regulation of or tax on carbon emissions is inevitable. With many states talking about coming up with their own laws, corporate leaders have started to urge the federal government to establish a nationwide standard.

"We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection," the executives said in a letter to Bush. In an interview later, Jeffry E. Sterba, chairman of PNM Resources, a New Mexico utility, said that it was better to act now than to be forced to act in a "precipitous way" later.

The executives support a system that would create a cap on emissions, give allocations to companies based on past emissions and allow firms to trade allocations to meet gradually declining emission targets. The system, similar to one being used in Europe, would have far-reaching implications for utility rates, power plant construction, energy efficiency and American automobiles.

The executives' plan would slow the growth in greenhouse gases over the next five years, then reverse that growth and cut annual emissions by 70 percent to 90 percent of today's levels in 15 years.

Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of General Electric, pointing to initiatives in California and a group of Northeastern states, said "this is happening already." In addition to Immelt and Sterba, the group included the chief executives of Lehman Brothers Holdings, PG&E, Alcoa, Caterpillar, BP America, Duke Energy, DuPont and FPL Group.

Snow said that he thought Bush's proposals "address in a comprehensive and realistic way concerns about greenhouse emissions, and also their primary sources."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/22/AR2007012201237.html

Corporations like sex and chocolate, too?

Corporations are learning that it's better to collaborate, as described in this recent www.socialfunds.com article "From Competition to Cooperation: Companies Collaborate on Social and Environmental Issues."

What you see is evidence of collaboration going on in the corporate sector led by groups such as: Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), United States Climate Action Partnership, Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP), Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)...

Is it all green washing? Or are there real actions being taken to get us out of the mess we have created on the planet....we'll see.

Sex and Chocolate? What does that have to do with all of this? read my earlier blog entry.

Responsible Competitiveness?

I just read this all on the FSG Advisors Website:

Harvard Business Review article "Strategy & Society: The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility" has won McKinsey Award for the Best Harvard Business Review Article in 2006. These awards, judged by an independent panel of leaders in the business community, recognize outstanding works that are likely to have a major influence on the actions of business managers worldwide.

Professor Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, Co-founders of FSG Social Impact Advisors, introduce a new approach to corporate social responsibility in Harvard Business Review's December 2006 "Strategy and Society: The Link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility."

Moving past generic CSR principles, Porter & Kramer see societal influence as the new frontier of competitive advantage. By integrating social dimensions into the core strategy frameworks that guide business decisions, companies can build on the interdependence between business and society, rather than being held back by the friction between them. The result is a new set of frameworks that enable companies to identify and address the specific social issues that matter most to their long-term success.

Free download of the Harvard Business Review article »

What makes you feel as good as sex or chocolate?

I have been doing alot of thinking about the power of co-creating, collaborations, community economics, mimicing "the web of life" in organizational development, etc. as key factors in helping get our civilization out of the mess we have created for ourselves.

I read in the latest issue of What is Enlightenment? Mag that collaborative behavior is the hallmark of evolution in our society.

David Korten wrote "Using magnetic resonance imaging to take portraits of brain activity, scientists have found that during laboratory excercises that the experience of forming a cooperative alliance with another person produces a storng positive response in the pleasure center of the brain - rather like eating chocolate or engaging in good sex."

A New York Times Article describes the experiments in greater detail.

It's not hard to change the world, just spend our money differently!

NY Times writer David Leonhart, makes a very good point in his latest article:

I post the entire article here...

"What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq. In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

These estimates probably would have turned out to be too optimistic even if the war had gone well. Throughout history, people have typically underestimated the cost of war, as William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, has pointed out.

But the deteriorating situation in Iraq has caused the initial predictions to be off the mark by a scale that is difficult to fathom. The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington.

That translates into a couple of billion dollars a week and, over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.

The two best-known analyses of the war’s costs agree on this figure, but they diverge from there. Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war.

Besides the direct military spending, I’m including the gas tax that the war has effectively imposed on American families (to the benefit of oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia). At the start of 2003, a barrel of oil was selling for $30. Since then, the average price has been about $50. Attributing even $5 of this difference to the conflict adds another $150 billion to the war’s price tag, Ms. Bilmes and Mr. Stiglitz say.

The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion. And if this war’s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam’s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, “It’s like a miniature Medicare.”

In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.

Whatever number you use for the war’s total cost, it will tower over costs that normally seem prohibitive. Right now, including everything, the war is costing about $200 billion a year.

Treating heart disease and diabetes, by contrast, would probably cost about $50 billion a year. The remaining 9/11 Commission recommendations — held up in Congress partly because of their cost — might cost somewhat less. Universal preschool would be $35 billion. In Afghanistan, $10 billion could make a real difference. At the National Cancer Institute, annual budget is about $6 billion.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said Mr. Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group. “In the context of the war, $20 billion is nothing.”

As it happens, $20 billion is not a bad ballpark estimate for the added cost of Mr. Bush’s planned surge in troops. By itself, of course, that price tag doesn’t mean the surge is a bad idea. If it offers the best chance to stabilize Iraq, then it may well be the right option.

But the standard shouldn’t simply be whether a surge is better than the most popular alternative — a far-less-expensive political strategy that includes getting tough with the Iraqi government. The standard should be whether the surge would be better than the political strategy plus whatever else might be accomplished with the $20 billion.

This time, it would be nice to have that discussion before the troops reach Iraq.

leonhardt@nytimes.com"

The Wealth of growing your own food!

This video demonstrates a means for families to grow food in their own homes!

The Wealth of Community

Josh Mailman is a founder of the Social Venture Network, Business for Social Responsibility, Threshold Foundation, and a founding investor in Grameen Phone, Stoneyfield Farms, Seventh Generation, Utne Magazine, Stirling Energy Systems, Global Telesystems, Wayfinder Systems, A.B., Motivano, Econergy International plc., the Fund for Global Human Rights, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, U.K., the Joshua Mailman Foundation, and an advisor to the Pema Fund.

To say the least, he's been busy!

He's certainly one of the leaders of the movement and I found the following quote from him in Kenny Ausubel's book "Bioneers" :

"I'm much more sanguine about the impact that we've been able to have, but I don't want to discount the small acts. We have a need for small acts, and I consider the things I have done small acts, hopefully compassionate acts. To the extent that I've been able to make a contribution, it's been out of a desire to build community, realizing that I'm no more important - and I think in many ways less so - than some local activist. The real leaders are the people that are in there day after day, slugging it out, who have chosen something other than monetary gain, who are there because they are fed by the experience of community that they have."

A recently published book "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom" speaks to this truth, in the context of the internet and our economy...

The book is available onine CLICK HERE.

Our community is our greatest wealth, I would add.

As I reflect on my life, I see that my life depends on a vast network of people 99% who I don't event know, literally. Just think of the number of people it took for you to have your daily cup of tea or coffee, or piece of toast, or oatmeal, or electricity... and that's just people. Add layers of animals, plants, earth, energy, air and water, and the community you live in expands exponentially!

The Wealth of Finding your purpose

Gratitude
Community
Service to others
Family
Meaning

Lynne Twist on Money:
"Q. In conclusion, what is the message about money you most want to convey?

LYNNE TWIST: When the use of money is consistent with our core values, it strengthens the quality of our commitment and our accountability for it. It has a powerful impact on our ethical and moral fiber. We can begin by turning our attention to making a conscious effort to use our money with life-affirming purpose, to nurture those people, organizations, projects and products that represent our most soulful interests. And we can stop the flow of money toward those that debilitate or demean life, or drag us down. We can be more financially generous with organizations and individuals doing good work that we want to support. Some of us may devote ourselves to public service or become advocates for socially responsible public spending on health, education, safety and government. The mindset of scarcity and the longing for “more” will begin to lose its grip when we begin to make different choices. We each have the power to arrange life to take a stand with our money and our life. Every moment of every day we can bring this consciousness to our choices about our money, our time and our talents to take a stand for what we believe in. We have the capacity for much greater lives than just “getting and “having.” I invite you to take a stand. I invite you to separate yourself from the prevailing winds of scarcity, greed and accumulation and use the opportunity that we each have to explore sufficiency and enough – - the true portal to prosperity . I invite you to deepen your values and to live in a new freedom and power in your relationship with money and life."

Price list for polluting - the economics of regulating Carbon Dioxide

A recent article in NY Times discusses issues around Climate Change and regulating carbon dioxide....

The article touches on a very important factor - we must quantify and measure the financial costs of polluting. Money is the driving archetypal language of our current industrial civilization, so when we talk about the perils of pollution as it relates to money, it gets people's attention.

The old adage "money talks" strangely applies in many contexts.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

"Price List for Polluting

'Setting a real price on carbon emissions is the single most important policy step to take,' said Robert N. Stavins, director of the environmental economics program at Harvard University. 'Pricing is the way you get both the short-term gains through efficiency and the longer-term gains from investments in research and switching to cleaner fuels.'

Some academics see an analogy between a global warming policy and the pursuit of national security in the cold war. In the late 1950s, American military spending reached as high as 10 percent of the gross domestic product and averaged about 4 percent, far higher than in any previous peacetime era. A Soviet nuclear attack was a danger but hardly a certainty, just as the predicted catastrophes from global warming are threats but not certainties.

'The issues are similar in that you pay now so things are less risky in the future — it’s an insurance policy,' said Richard Cooper, a Harvard economist. 'And in the cold war, we taxed ourselves fairly highly to mitigate that threat.' "

Read the whole article on NY TIMES here.

BALLE - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

BALLE is a network of networks of locally owned businesses around the country inspired, in part, by the ideas of David Korten. http://www.davidkorten.org/

Their website is www.livingeconomies.org

"BALLE is a growing alliance of businesspeople around the US and Canada, who join local BALLE networks dedicated to building local living economies. BALLE comprises 37 such business networks with more than 11,000 business members overall. It is our mission to catalyze, strengthen, and connect these local business networks. "

New Book: The Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community

I had the pleasure of meeting David Korten at the SRI in the Rockies conference in Colorado. He spoke about his new book "The Great Turning" Here is a website organized by the community around the book. http://thegreatturning.net/

He spoke about the grand challenge the world faces right now - to continue to manage our affairs along the lines of "empire" through domination or through "earth community" partnership with eachother and other beings in nature.

The outcome of our choice will lead to either the "great unraveling" of our world based on the centuries of organizing our affairs "Empire" or the "great turning" a return to a more integrated and sustainable way of living on planet earth.
He writes:

"Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of human societies to maintain the institutions of domination."

"Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must make a choice to re-learn how to live by its principles."

He elaborates in an article based on the book:
http://www.yesmagazine.com/article.asp?ID=1463

David points to the grand moment we are in, and the opportunity we all have to change the course of our time through telling new stories of ourselves, our world, our history and our relationships to eachother and other living beings on the Earth.

He emphasizes that this turning need happen in our politics, our culture and our economy:

"Cultural Turning
The Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening—a turning in cultural values from money and material excess to life and spiritual fulfillment, from a belief in our limitations to a belief in our possibilities, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing in our diversity. It requires reframing the cultural stories by which we define our human nature, purpose, and possibilities.

---

Economic Turning
The values shift of the cultural turning leads us to redefine wealth—to measure it by the health of our families, communities, and natural environment. It leads us from policies that raise those at the top to policies that raise those at the bottom, from hoarding to sharing, from concentrated to distributed ownership, and from the rights of ownership to the responsibilities of stewardship.

---

Political Turning
The economic turning creates the necessary conditions for a turn from a one-dollar, one-vote democracy to a one-person, one-vote democracy, from passive to active citizenship, from competition for individual advantage to cooperation for mutual advantage, from retributive justice to restorative justice, and from social order by coercion to social order by mutual responsibility and accountability."

At the Socially Responsible Investment Conference he spoke to us in financial side of the equation about the importance of recognizing the problem of our economy dominated by the unhealthy model of centrally run publicly traded mega-corporations, which are disconnected from it's employees, environment and communities. ( he wrote about this at great length in his prior book "When Corporations Rule the World.")

He emphasized that we must not only reform, and eventually replace what he calls the "death economy" but also must focus on the creation of a "living economy" based on local and regional commercial relationships of businesses based locally and large corporations which are responsive to welfare of the environment, workers and the community.

Xigi.Net and Springfield Open Exchange a storm of ideas for a new economy and new capital

Three of my friends (and heroes) have created very cool things around new forms of capitalism

New ideas, networks and collaborative brainstorming are some of the most important tasks at hand to create the underpinnnings of the new economy.

I'll let them speak for themselves:

One is http://www.xigi.net/
"xigi is a new kind of research tool for the market that invests in good.

What's unique about xigi is that it interlinks a database of structured information about the organizations, players, and deals in this market with an unstructured conversation (a group blog) about them. It's now in Beta test phase."

and the other is Springfield
http://www.csrwire.com/springfield

The Springfield Open Exchange

The Springfield Open Exchange was inspired by a chemically contaminated, abandoned street in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts in the United States of America, where the need was felt to give value, to that which had been abandoned.

Further inspiration is the collaboration by millions of people to develop computer software for free use and distribution - the 'Open Source' software phenomena. The fundamentals of this collaboration will be used for The Springfield Open Exchange.

The Springfield Open Exchange will be a place to introduce, create, explore and collaborate on innovative and evolving financing mechanisms and economic models. The core of these mechanisms is the principles of triple bottom line returns and complete transparency throughout all business activities.

If we all agreed to give greater value to economic models that improved our lives - we could. Some of the models and experiments being contemplated include:

• Employee Stock Ownership
• Cooperatives
• Green Business Development
• Local Living Economies
• Bottom of the Pyramid Commerce
• Private Stock Exchange
• Mirco Loan Connection
• Alternative Currencies
• Patient Capital Connection
• Sovereign Nation Stock Exchange
• Traditional Financing Instruments
• General Agreements

In the event you are interested in any of these models or are interested in introducing another, please contact us. This part of the site is under development and will be ready soon.

call us at +1.802.251.0110

or by e-mail at help@csrwire.com"

Making conservation profitable... from less harm to restoration

To say that we need to reduce pollution, or slow the damage to the world's climate and ecosystems is akin to saying to a child abuser "you must beat your children less."

Simply put, less harm is not good enough. We have to restore ecosystems!

For our economic endeavors, the pioneering work is being done to actually figure out ways to make money while restoring and conserving ecosystems.

In order to do so, we have to define measures to actually show the economic benefits of natural systems and define ways to profit from their protection and restoration.

A group at the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford is developing the field of Conservation finance which integrates biology, business, economics, engineering, law, and a good dose of real world practicality into the design of conservation investments.

Gretchen Daily and other researchers at CCB are creating a framework for conservation finance, in order to how to accomplish two primary outcomes:

• increasing the flow of resources into conservation
  
• allocating that flow most efficiently.
  

She wrote a book in 2002 which outlines some of the issues:
Here's excerpts from a review on her sight:

"Through engaging stories from around the world, the authors introduce readers to a diverse group of people who are pioneering new approaches to conservation. Daily and Ellison describe the dynamic interplay of science, economics, business, and politics that is involved in establishing these new approaches and examine what will be needed to create successful models and lasting institutions for conservation.

Dan Janzen, a biologist working in Costa Rica who devised a controversial plan to sell a conservation area's natural waste-disposal services to a local orange juice producer.

We meet Adam Davis, an American business executive who dreams of establishing a market for buying and selling shares in environmental services such as water purification by forests and flood protection by wetlands.

There's also John Wamsley, a former math professor in Australia who has found a way to play the stock market and protect native species at the same time."

Here's an article I found on and the company he formed. Althought it is no longer in business, the sites he was operating are now healthy wildlife sanctuaries - thus he accomplished a degree of restoration.

http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/summer03-04/polsumm0304-3.htm

"Private efforts to conserve native species, on the other hand, have proven highly successful. One sterling example is Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd. (ESL), a company which has had some dazzling successes bringing back species from the brink of extinction and changing the way that both conservationists and governments think about endangered species protection in Australia.

Earth Sanctuaries, Ltd. (ESL) was incorporated in January 1988. Revenues would be generated by attracting visitors and through consulting work. The goal of the company would be 'to ensure the survival of remaining Australian native flora and fauna within a commercial environment, [and] to maximize the returns to shareholders.'
As of 2002, ESL had successfully reintroduced 25 mammal species to their former range and eradicated feral cats, foxes, rabbits, and goats from more than 10,000 hectares.At its peak of land ownership in 2001, ESL owned 10 sanctuaries covering more than 90,000 hectares Since restructuring in 2002, ESL has sold most of these properties, but they remain wildlife sanctuaries of note.

Warrawong remained ESL's most popular and lucrative site, featuring tent-style accommodations (local planners would not permit permanent lodgings), a restaurant, gift shop, native plant nursery, and dawn and dusk nature walks. It has won numerous tourism awards, including runner up in the Conde Nast Travelers Choice Awards in 1997. In 2001, about 50,000 people visited Warrawong."

Robert Kennedy Sr. on the limitations of our way of measuring national well being: GNP

Consider this beautiful message from the late Robert Kennedy (father of leading activist Robert Kennedy, Jr.) :

"The Gross National Product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear out highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and nuclear warheads... and if GNP 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, or the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials... GNP 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."

Have you actually read, or even heard of, the UN Millenium Development Goals?

Many of us are attuned to the idea of "you have to have specific goals to achieve what you want" or new movies like "The Secret"( http://thesecret.tv/home.html )to help align us with the alchemy of manifestation...

Well, as a community of human beings all around the world, we are to gain by having specific goals to increase well being of our human family. And by putting our mind to these goals as a human family, they can be achieved!

Along those lines, global leaders gathered at the UN in September 2000 to set goals for a better life for our brothers and sisters around the world.

The Millenium Development Goals are a set of goals made for a just and sustainable civilization on this planet.

They stated it is our "collective responsibility to uphold the principles of human
dignity, equality and equity at the global level."

I would agree. Who wouldn't? Many don't.

Let's hold this vision for a better world by envisioning and learning more about how we can support the attainment of these goals:

1- Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
2 - Achieve universal primary education.
3 - Promote gender equality and empower women.
4 - Reduce child mortality.
5 - Improve Maternal health.
6 - Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and other diseases.
7 - Ensure Environmental Sustainability.
8 - Develop a global partnership for development.

The goals target dates are 2015

Learn more:

Detailed Progress report 2006 : http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2006/MDGReport2006.pdf

http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

Evolve? Or learn to Be Evolution?

YOU are the edge of evolution.

What does evolution have to do with Wealth? Sustainability? Happiness? Quality of Life?

A close friend of mine just sent me some clues in an article by great thinker Tom Atlee who is founder of The Co-Intelligence Institute.

I'll give you a hint of my thinking from Tom's article below "flourishing." Now think about it, isn't the aim to flourish is at the heart of much of our striving?

Hmmm.... read below, and the article in the following link, and I'll let you decide for yourself....

Tom's article is titled "Learning to Be Evolution" enjoy!

"Learning from evolution how to be evolution

Lessons from our long evolutionary journey offer rich sources of guidance about how to consciously participate in the evolutionary process. Taking this guidance seriously can help us transform ourselves, our consciousness, our social systems and cultures, and our technologies in ways that serve our long-term collective flourishing as part of a flourishing Earth.

Here are just a few of the evolutionary dynamics and opportunities we can explore and use, which are described further at the end of this article. A major project of the Co-Intelligence Institute now is researching more of them, and how to best apply them all, and spreading that new old knowledge.

1. LOVE AT THE CORE. Our common past makes us kin, and deep inside we know it. We are wholeness enroute to new wholeness. This deep truth can be called forth to help us resonate with each other. Much of what we need to do next taps into this powerful fact of life.

2. A NEW DANCE OF COOPERATION AND COMPETITION. Evolution has evolved with cooperation enhancing competitiveness. As we become a global society, competition will necessarily evolve to support cooperation.

3. SYNERGY BETWEEN SELF AND WHOLE. Life on earth finds novel ways for self-interest and the whole to serve each other. We are called to create new ways to design this dynamic into complex 21st century societies.

4. HIGHER LEARNING. Evolution is, itself, a vast learning enterprise -- and emergence is its learning edge. That edge involves new forms of ongoing collective intelligence and wisdom, and reframing education to meet the challenges of conscious collective evolution. By its nature, learning on the edge requires a growing capacity to embrace the unknown.

5. SELF-ORGANIZATION AND EMERGENCE. Evolution starts simple and brings forth increasing complexity. At the same time, it creates remarkable ways for life to self-organize without top-down direction. Our social and technological complexity is now calling forth new forms of creative, conscious human self-organization.

6. EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS. Consciousness shapes social systems and culture -- and social systems and culture shape consciousness. This insight, combined with new and ancient methods of expanding consciousness, offer tremendous leverage for humanity's conscious evolution.

7. THE JUICE OF OUR DIFFERENCES. A major driver of evolution is the creative use of diversity, conflict, crisis and dissonance. And our uniqueness -- our individual specialness -- is a vast nascent resource for the world. These insights challenge us, in times of collective trauma, to move beyond peacemaking and crisis management to catalyzing inclusive evolutionary breakthroughs.

8. IT'S ABOUT PROCESS. The essence of evolution is the emergence of outcomes from powerful interactive processes. But it isn't about being attached to particular outcomes, since they, too, will change and evolve. If we want to become evolution, we would be wise to learn how to let go and focus on manifesting powerfully interactive, life-serving processes."

I strongly encourage you to read the entire article and more here at Tom's website:

http://www.co-intelligence.org/Evolution-Learning2BEvol.html