Jeremy Rifkin: The Empathic Civilization - getting us to "biosphere consciousness"

Hazel Henderson's newest book "Mapping the Transition to the Solar Age - from Economism to Earth Systems Science"

An Excerpt from Hazel's latest book which is available as a PDF.

"Towards the Green Economy: Clearly the transition to the green economy is already underway but will be highly disruptive to the industrial sectors and massive global apparatus of the fossil fuel and nuclear era. Many companies based on nineteenth and twentieth century technologies will go under and jobs will be lost. Bridging strategies using natural gas are already highly contested due to their huge water-use, polluted residues, methane release and other problems."

"A study by Cornell and Stanford University scientists outlines a plan for ‘A Fossil Fuel-Free New York State by 2050’ which omits shale gas due to its much higher than advertised methane emissions.24 The consensus reached at Rio+20, G-20 in Mexico and other summits in 2012 included the OECD Global Green Growth Institute, the Knowledge Platform, and 68 global financial institutions. NGOs and governments affirmed commitments to using natural resources in their capital accounting.25 In addition, the $5.2tn of private investments since 2007 tracked in Ethical Markets’ Green Transition Scoreboard® attest to the huge shifts now in the pipeline."

"While renewable energy stocks suffered from their opposition’s media attacks, contrarians saw opportunities. US investor Warren Buffet’s MidAmerica Renewables investments reached $13.5bn, and the US Department of Defense is now the single most important driver of the cleantech revolution in the USA.26 In 2012 and 2013, nature provided ample evidence of the massive CO2 emissions’ effect in ocean warming and driving unprecedented weather conditions worldwide: floods, droughts, fires, tornadoes, heat waves, all causing huge losses and insurance costs." "This paper is an attempt to contextualise all these phenomena and explore the future: the new planetary awareness driving these paradigm shifts as we humans ‘connect the dots’. This knowledge explosion is now challenging our cultural beliefs about money, wealth, scarcity, abundance and transcending financial models derived from obsolete economics, led in many countries by younger generations connected by social media. The new multi-disciplinary models and metrics reassure us that in moving beyond economics and GDP we will not be flying blind but moving to the many earth systems science models (including those from NASA28) and data from many scientific fields which this paper explores."

Bill Moyers and Bill Lofgren on the "Deep State" the core system of how the country is really working.

Downshifting civilization to meet the realities of the biosphere

“The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing… It requires more than productivity and more than technology; it also requires maturity, compassion and wisdom. These conclusions constitute a conditional warning, not a dire prediction. They offer a living choice, not a death sentence… The idea of limits, sustainability, sufficiency, equity and efficiency are not barriers, not obstacles, not threats. They are guides to a new world… We see ‘easing down’ from unsustainability not as a sacrifice, but as an opportunity to stop battering against the earth’s limits and to start transcending self-imposed and unnecessary limits in human institutions, mindsets, beliefs, and ethics.” - Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future

Discussing the access to capital equation at the Innovate! SoCal conference.

Should be an engaging conversation tomorrow on our panel at the Innovate!Socal Conference
"Our panel takes up the challenge of improving performance of pre-seed and venture capital funding and looks at how entrepreneurs can be better prepared for investment. The group addresses the critical need for shortening deal decision times, improving deal quality by better preparing entrepreneurs, and reducing capital access barriers to under-represented demographic and geographic groups."

Panel moderator Paul J. Corson, Executive Director of Innovation Fund America, drives the discussion. 

Panelist 1 – Richard Koffler, CEO, Greenwings Biomedical
Panelist 2 – Greg Wendt, Senior Wealth Advisor, Stakeholder Capital, Co-Chair, Capital Action Team for CA Forward
Panelist 3 – Victoria Sassine, Mutual Fund Trustee, Managers Investment Group Panelist
4 – David Carter, CEO, Upside LA

We must evolve to a complex systemic view to address the world's challenges.

From the article: "Complexity Rising from Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile"

The caption for image on the left shares: 

"A schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations, through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies, to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy. As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increaseing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant. "

and the conclusion of the article sums it up:

"There are two natural conclusions to be drawn from recognizing that human beings are part of a global organism. First, one can recognize that human civilization has a remarkable capacity for responding to external and internal challenges. The existence of such a capacity for response does not mean that human civilization will survive external challenges any more than the complexity of any organism guarantees its survival. However, one can hope that the recent reduction in the incidence of military conflicts will continue and the ability to prevent or address local disasters will increase. The difficulties in overcoming other systematic ills of society, such as poverty, may also be challenged successfully as the origins of these problems become better understood."

"Second, the complexity of our individual lives must be understood in the context of a system that must enable its components (us) to contribute effectively to the collective system. Thus, we are being, and will continue to be shielded from the true complexity of society. In part this is achieved by progressive specialization that enables individuals to encounter only a very limited subset of the possible professional and social environments. This specialization will have dramatic consequences for our children, and their educational and social environments are likely to become increasingly specialized as well."

2013 Annual Holiday Party Green Gifts to the Earth from Green Business Networking in L.A.!

Thought you'd enjoy what we're up to with the non-profit group we started in 2006 - this is our 8th annual Green Business Networking Holiday Party. Our community has grown, with an event every month since we started and now over 5,000 people on our email community list. And, we have so much fun!

Story of Solutions - time to rewrite the rules in our society from more to better!

CA Economic Summit Advancing the Triple Bottom Line

The CA Economic Summit is a collaborative process to "advance the triple bottom line" through advancing our economy. I'm very grateful to play the role of Co-Chair for the Access to Capital Team for the summit. Here's a video which is a quick highlight of the conference. Here's a link to our initial capital action plan for the state and a brief article describing our work.

Must watch - Earth from Space - core perspective from which we can evolve from economism to earth systems science.

This Nova Program - "Earth from Space" gives the perspectives and information necessary to evolve our worldview and create a civilization which will ensure a resilient biosphere for a thriving humanity for many generations to come.

A straightforward pathway out of our myopia...

"Our perceptual myopia, which has focused on products not processes, on objects and entities rather than their broader fields of interplay, has led us to reward analysis and punish synthesis, to overvalue competition while ignoring the equally valuable role of cooperation, and to artificially define "problems" and devise "solutions"to fit them..." - Hazel Henderson 

So... now we systematically build cooperative processes which synthesize broad perspectives into grounded currently relevant coherent solutions contextually applied at human scales across the world. That's all!

"Expanding Our Paradigm from Economism to Earth Systems Science" a conversation between me and Hazel Henderson

Simple, empowering change and applying the vision.

The vision years ago:
 

The vision applied:
 

"Green Century" an inspiring television show which I'm featured in

Great show put together by friends called "Green Century" available online and on public television. My segment starts just after minute 22.

The Gene Revolution - The reality of agriculture with genetically modified crops

Do we really need industrial agriculture?

This video addresses the myths of industrial agriculture.

Innovation for the next 100 years.

Innovation which does not have resiliency embedded at it's core is likely a mirage of true evolutionary change.

The recent article "Innovation for the Next 100 Years"in Stanford Social Innovation Review by Judith Rodin from The Rockefeller Foundation wrote states:

"Innovating for resilience is critical if we are to protect against the disruptions of the 21st-century world. As we do so, we should keep in mind the qualities resilient networks, communities and organizations share. Among them are:

• FLEXIBILITY | able to change, evolve, and adapt at a rapid pace. 

• REDUNDANCY | able to change course and adopt alternative approaches. 

• RESOURCEFULNESS | able to identify problems, establish priorities, and mobilize resources and assets to achieve goals. 

• SAFE-FAILURE | able to absorb shocks and the cumulative effects of slow-onset challenges so as to avoid catastrophic failure if thresholds are exceeded. 

• RESPONSIVENESS | able to re-organize and re-establish fund and order following a failure. 

• LEARNING | able to internalize experiences and apply those lessons to decrease vulnerabilities to future disruptions.

These are very close to the life's principles as defined by the Biomimicry Institute.

 

Catalyzing the Connection Economy

First posted on Ethical Markets and Triple Pundit

Somewhere along the line our culture lost contact with the recognition of oneness of all life, the connectedness to each other. Our institutions – government, economy, religion are all built on a false premise of separation.

Simply spoken, in Economics 101 we learned that everything around a business other than what is termed “business as usual” are “externalities” – “external” to the business, and the economy.  The model of endless growth for its own sake without regard to the effects of such growth is a symptom of blindness to such “externalities.”  Our prevailing economic growth-based model is not working to serve the needs of all humanity. If you don’t agree with me, ask the roughly 2 billion people who are living on less than a dollar a day. You may simply believe that their welfare is separate from yours, and you needn’t concern yourself with their plight…

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Anonymous


The meaning of this quote is so self evident and obvious to me that I find it surprising that we have to say it at all. Yet this is the world we live in right now. I have the quote on my email signature for its relevance to the evolution of economic theory and business management – the world in which I dance. And the inspiration to create a better economics and more effective business models is at the heart of that quote for me.

Our current capitalist model of economics was crystallized in the 18^th and 19^th centuries where two prevailing worldviews dominated our culture. The scientific temperament with reason guiding all was counterbalanced by the enchanted worldview informed by authentic human experience of art, beauty, consciousness and nature.

Many authors and thought leaders point out this schism in our culture – the two major worldviews: Richard Tarnas calls them enchanted vs. disenchanted, Riane Eisler calls them partnership vs. dominator, and David Korten calls them empire vs. earth community. The core insight upon recognizing this cognitive schism is that we are in the need of a fundamental shift in our paradigm, our system.

In other words, we have not only have a crisis of economics, politics and spirituality but a more fundamental crisis. The very way that we perceive reality is proving inept at addressing the complex issues of our civilization.

This dichotomy between reason and faith was the context from which our economics was born. Economics became a bit lopsided toward the rationalist movement, and efforts to make economics a “hard science” combined with the social Darwinism of the time.

Our economic mindset is deeply influenced by the philosophical delusion that the economy is separate from society, and society is separate from nature. Through simple observation one becomes aware that society rests within the womb of nature, and that the economy rests within the fertile soil of society.

In order to meet our own generation’s needs, without compromising the needs of future generations, it is incumbent on us evolve a new enterprise model based on this very straightforward recognition of interlocking complex systems. Some say this is impossible. And it may very well be so, within the lopsided worldview. Yet, the opportunity is clear. It’s time to shift the paradigm, evolve a new economic vision to include components of connection, natural systems, passion, ethics, beauty and trust which have been left on the conceptual shop floor.

 A more resilient and robust ontological fabric is growing for the emerging “connection economy” through deeper interaction between disparate disciplines, groups and efforts. Such a foundation is essential for the broad influence and impact of visionary capital to underwrite a new civilization which works for 100 percent of humanity.

“World views create worlds.” – Richard Tarnas

When we recognize the opportunity to create a new world based on an integrated worldview, the pathway is clear: develop businesses based on the welfare of all stakeholders and be inspired by an economic model, which takes into account all participants in the economy.

My colleague, thought leader and responsible investing pioneer Terry Mollner works tirelessly to make the wellbeing of the common good the highest aim of all economic activity. He calls for a new movement in capital: common good investing. He states, “Common good investing calls on all enterprises to publicly declare that their highest priority is the common good of us all and profit or anything else is second in priority.”

Today, in our hyperconnected world, our culture is increasingly waking up to the interdependence of all the systems on the planet, finally, we’re beginning to see the  synthesis emerging of the rational and the romantic into a worldview.

There are many people in the business world who are waking up to find that the concept that the economy is a separate system from the rest of the world is an illusion. An entire whole movement has emerged in the last 40 years in finance, business and economics responding to the need to express, quantify and model the impact of our businesses and the influence that they have on the world in which we live. The sunrise of a new guiding paradigm in economics is upon us.

If you’re not aware of this – just observe to the topic of hyperconnectivity being discussed in Davos right now or the range of issues being addressed or review the myriad advancements in business school curricula across the planet incorporating sustainability into business.

If you’re reading this you’re likely more than aware that it’s not just dollars and cents, balance sheets, money supply, unemployment, GDP and inflation anymore.

The Social Capital Markets Bay Area conference is the annual incubator for this movement to pollinate and inspire new ways to make money matter. The nexus of nearly 2,000 professionals is a hotbed of connective tissue where key innovators in philanthropy, impact investing, entrepreneurship, non-profit, technology and social enterprise mind-meld to build the new economy. This event is not unlike the ancient sea where new life explodes in the primordial soup of the emerging economy in the ecosystem of interconnection.

In this space, all the traditional silos begin to blur, everyone is working on multiple aspects of the dynamic social capital economy, and the dots further connect, conversation by conversation.

In sum, these thought leaders gather together annually because they recognize there’s much to be gained by “connecting the dots” and building a new economy which ties meaning to money, wellbeing to wealth and cultural evolution to capital.

Similarly on the other coast, the latest effort of visionary futurist Hazel Henderson and her contemporaries gather annually for the “SRI Leaders Retreat” which created the latest statement for the “Transforming Finance” initiative which she leads.

The Statement – “Tranforming Economics Into True Wealth” is born a recognition of an interconnected world begins: “We undersigned investment professionals recognize our human responsibility for the many breakdowns in our societies and enfolding ecosystems resulting from our limited consciousness: climate change, hunger, poverty, conflicts, financial crises and ecological destruction. These systemic breakdowns are accelerating due to global interconnectedness and now driving the breakthroughs worldwide occurring below the radar of the mainstream mass media.”

The statement further calls upon the entire industry to lead the new integrated worldview of capital.

 “We celebrate the growth and success of our industry, but the time for a narrow focus on competitively developing the market for our own products, brands and services is past. We honor and acknowledge those of us already engaged in system change.  Let us challenge ourselves to go further and exercise ethical leadership by engaging our energy and resources in collaborative networking to manifest the integrated system change we all believe will lead to a more positive future for all life on this planet.”

 It’s imperative for all of us in the social capital movement to connect the dots and embody a new world view and create the next economy to serve all life. If you consider yourself part of the new economy and impact investing movement, you are a crucial catalyst for a new paradigm for our civilization.  The living reality of the connection economy is a sprouted seed in your heart.

Enoughness....

My first published work, in book form, "Creating Good Work"

My first published work, in book form, came out today. I wrote a chapter in "Creating Good Work - The World's Leading SocialEntrepreneurs Show How to Build a Healthy Economy"

In the book over 20 leading innovators in social entrepreneurship, known as "deliberate disruptive design" share their learnings, experiences and insights gained from their work in building a new healthy economy.

Jeff Hollender, thought leader in corporate responsibility and co-founder of Seventh Generation wrote about the book: "Social entrepreneurs are committed to a goal that neither our government nor big business has been willing to take on - the building of enlightened society. It's the job of these special people who want to leave the world a better place for those who have yet to be born. The book provides practical, hard-won advice for how prospective and even-in-the-trenches social entrepreneurs can do just that. This is a book you'll not want to miss."

I resonate with his sentiments - that it is incumbent upon everyone in this generation to work for the well being of current and future children, of all species. I'm privileged to be part of such a movement, and inspire others to do the same through this work.