(2003) THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE STEP TO EARTH COMMUNITY

[Guest guest]

http://www.davidkorten.org/PrairieFest.htm

 

THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE STEP TO EARTH COMMUNITY

 

Presentation to Prairie Festival XXV, The Land Institute

Salina, Kansas, September 26-28, 2003

 

By David C. Korten

 

I've been hearing about the legendary Wes Jackson and the Land

Institute for years. That's why I'm thrilled to be participating in

the 25th Prairie Festival. By my understanding the work of the

Institute is at the forefront of one of the most daring and important

agricultural innovations since humans first learned the arts of

settled agriculture. It is audacious, courageous, and visionary. I

love it.

 

This festival is also very special. We gather here in America's

heartland from all around the country and beyond to have fun, engage

in good fellowship, and save the world. You can't do better than that

in these troubled times.

 

The Prairie Festival is also special because it brings together so

many pioneers working on the frontiers of deep change. You may not

think of yourselves this way. So let's do a check. Raise your hand if

you sometimes feel a bit lonely in the work you do. [Many hands go

up.] If you raised your hand, it probably means you are among the

pioneers.

 

One reason events such as this are so exhilarating is because the work

that many of us do is seriously out of step with the system and often

leaves us feeling alone and isolated. At events such as this we find

affirmation that we are not alone. There are a great many of us.

Around the world there are millions. And our numbers are growing.

Change is possible.

 

Make no mistake. Our economic and political systems are not just

ailing, they are broken and badly out of step with the compelling

needs of our time. Our politicians here in America devote themselves

to cutting the taxes of the rich, undermining worker and environmental

protections, and launching pre-emptive wars on devastated and

virtually defenseless nations — while ignoring the fact that right

here in America, 6.1 million adults and 3.3 million children

experience outright hunger. Ten percent of U.S. households, accounting

for 31 million people, do not have access to enough food to meet their

basic needs.

 

The UN World Food Organization reports that the number of chronically

hungry people in the world, which declined steadily during the 1970s

and 80s, has been increasing since the early 1990s. The U.S.

Department of Agriculture estimates that by 2008, two-thirds of the

people of Sub-Saharan Africa will be undernourished. Forty percent of

people in Asia will be undernourished.

 

Someone in the earlier session asked: " How will the dwindling fossil

fuel energy supplies be allocated when supplies decline even as demand

continues to increase. " The answer is much the same as the answer to

the question who gets the available food: whoever has the money. Need

has nothing to do with it.

 

This experience raises a sobering question. How receptive will these

broken political and economic institutions be when the Land Institute

is ready to release its gift to the world?

 

What Wes Jackson and his crew are doing looks harmless enough on the

surface. A few seeds with the promise to feed millions of people while

healing the environment. Surely, their gift will be received with

jubilation.

 

Except for the answer to one key question: Where is the profit in it

for the global corporations that now control our food and agriculture,

biotech, pharmaceutical, and energy industries — and our politicians

and universities — what's the profit for them in an agriculture that

once seeded doesn't need to be reseeded, greatly reduces the need for

chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, dramatically reduces

dependence on fossil fuels, and greatly reduces the release of toxic

agricultural chemicals into our soils, water, and food thus reducing

cancer and other health problems and thus undercutting profitable

markets for chemotherapy and other pharmaceutical and health care

products.

 

While the Land Institute folks are working to get their seeds and

farming systems ready for prime time, the rest of us need to work on

putting in place an economic and political system receptive to the

proper use of these tiny seeds of revolution. It likely means

rebuilding our now devastated local family farm agriculture systems

and spreading the sustainable agriculture methods already available.

As Charlie Melander and Jan Flora explained to me last night over

dinner, this means replacing an existing farming culture that measures

success by maximum yield — which maximizes inputs and thus profits for

the agribusiness companies that supply them — with a farming culture

that measures success in terms of optimizing long-term return to the

farmer. It may require that we consciously grow a new generation of

farmers trained and acculturated in the ways of sustainable and

natural systems agriculture. To do this we must either transforming

our existing schools of agriculture or create alternatives to them.

And of course these future natural systems farmers will need a support

system of finance, technology, and markets that makes it possible for

them to prosper. See how much trouble a few seeds can cause?

 

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that transforming the world

food and agriculture system will be easy. But it is necessary, so we

best get on with it. Fortunately, there's nothing like a little

challenge to put some spice in life. How could we better use the brief

time we each enjoy on this beautiful planet?

 

Food and the soils that grow it are the foundation of life and

community. Food nurtures our souls, as well as our bodies. The bonding

of family, friends, and community has long centered on sitting

together at a table to share food. Food and agricultural practices

distinctive to place are an essential source of the sense of identity

and social bonding that are the foundation of family and community.

How we grow and consume our food matters almost as much to a healthy

society as the food itself.

 

So let's put this task in its larger perspective. We live in what is

arguably the most exciting time in the whole of the human experience.

Having reached the limits of domination and exploitation on a small

planet, we are called as a species to make an intentional collective

choice to bring to an end a 5,000 year era of Empire and take the Step

to Earth Community, the creation of a new human civilization based on

partnership, caring, and mindful responsibility.

 

As a species, we hold in our hands both the opportunity and the

necessity to accept responsibility for our presence on this planet and

carry forward the work of creating a world that works for all people

and the whole of nature. Theologian Thomas Berry calls it, The Great

Work. No species in the experience of this planet has ever before

faced a comparable opportunity to recreate itself as an act of

conscious choice. What an extraordinary moment this is.

 

I like to begin with a brief overview of the work at hand, just so we

can see how exciting this opportunity truly is. We need to:

 

§ Bring the material consumption of our species into balance

with the earth.

 

§ Realign our economic priorities to assure all persons have

access to an adequate and meaningful means of living for themselves

and their families.

 

§ Democratize our institutions to root power in people and

community.

 

§ Replace the dominant culture of materialism with cultures

grounded in life-affirming values of cooperation, caring, compassion,

and community.

 

§ Integrate the material and spiritual aspects of our being to

become whole mature persons.

 

We are constantly told that such goals are all well and good, but we

must achieve them without changing anything of consequence — least of

all upsetting the existing system of power and privilege. We are told

there is no alternative to corporatized industrial agriculture. There

is no alternative to the corporate global economy. There is no

alternative to using U.S. military power to impose order on the world.

 

We're gathered here today because we know the truth. It's all a lie.

 

Our institutions and values are all the result of human choices. It is

in our means to make different choices. We can choose to create an

earth friendly agriculture. We can choose to create local living

economies that serve people and life. And we can choose to create a

world system based on peace, cooperation among nations, and respect

for the sovereign rights of all people. These choices are all

ultimately is in our hands — starting with a choice for regime change

in Washington, DC in the next election.

 

The immediate concern of most of us gathered here today is with a

choice between a food system designed to maximize short-term profits

for people who already have more than they need — and a food system

designed to nurture all people sustainability — forever.

 

We now have a grossly inefficient corporate dominated food and

agriculture system that commands massive public subsidies, is killing

the planet, destroying family farms and communities, and alienating us

all from the earth to produce tasteless, nutritionally empty, and

toxic laden foods that poison our bodies — all so a few corporate

executives can make millions on their stock options and major

shareholders can enhance their position on the Forbes list of the

world's wealthiest people. The system produces abundant delicacies for

the rich; and starvation for the poor. Economists on corporate

payrolls tell us it's the most efficient system of agriculture ever

known. We ask, " Efficient at what? "

 

As other speakers on our program will elaborate, this destructive

system has been the consequence in part of perverse government

policies and misguided research programs at our land grant

universities. We might wonder why public institutions would pursue

policies, programs, and practices so at odds with the public interest.

The answer has become all too evident over the past twenty years.

 

Corporations use their financial power to make political contributions

to buy tax breaks and legislative favors from politicians desperate to

raise money for TV ads to win elections. This has become so blatant

that in many instances the corporate lobbyists literally write the

legislation that favors their interests — including our agriculture

policies. The costs of the subsidies combine with the loss of revenues

from the tax giveaways to starve public institutions — including

universities — of the funding necessary to do their work. So the

corporations that have been enriched by this corruption step in as

" benefactors. " In the case of our land grant universities they step in

to fund research programs — ultimately gaining control over research

priorities and the intellectual property the research generates.

Obviously these priorities reflect the corporate interest in

maximizing the sale of inputs and leads to a farming culture that

emphasizes maximizing yield without regard to consequences either for

the environment or the financial viability of the farmer.

 

I learned first hand about the consequences of the corporate take over

of agriculture during my thirty years as a development worker in

Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

 

You are well aware of how agriculture policy here in the United States

has devastated family farms and benefited agribusiness corporations.

The agriculture programs supported by the World Bank, USAID, and other

aid agencies have done much the same abroad. You know the story. It

begins by introducing family farmers to farming methods that depend on

seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides sold on credit by agribusiness

corporations.

 

Over time, the fertilizers deplete the natural fertility of the soil,

thus requiring yet larger applications to maintain output. The

insecticides kill off the birds and beneficial insects that feed off

the bad insects, which are stimulated to mutate into immune super

pests that require larger pesticide applications. Expenses grow, debts

from a bad year roll over to the next. By the time a farmer realizes

what is happening there is no going back. The traditional seed

varieties are no longer available. His land is depleted. He is

contending with super insects. The bank is knocking on the door to

foreclose on his land. The farmer internalizes the blame for his

failure. And suicide rates skyrocket.

 

If this isn't enough to drive him off his land, the World Bank, the

IMF, and the World Trade Organization demand that his government

remove all protective tariffs and restrictions on agricultural imports

in the name of free trade. The local market is then flooded with

subsidized imports from abroad, depressing local commodity prices and

putting the final nail in the coffin of the family farm. The banks

take the land and sell it to transnational agribusiness corporations

that are consolidating small farm plots into agricultural estates

producing for export with the aid of government subsidies mandated by

the World Bank and IMF in the name of providing incentives to attract

foreign investment.

 

A prominent item on the current free trade agenda is a call for high

income countries to eliminate their tariffs on food imports from poor

countries — ostensibly to help poor farmers. It is an argument with no

more validity than the bogus claim that tax breaks for the rich will

create jobs for the poor here in America. The main reason poor

countries need to export food to rich countries is to service their

debts to foreign banks. Most of the earnings from these food exports

go not to the poor, but to foreign bankers. The hungry poor of Africa,

Asia, and Latin America don't want their food exported to the United

States and Europe. They want to eat it. Even more they want relief

from foreign loans from which they received no benefit and they want

their land back to grow their own food.

 

It isn't just about agriculture. In every sector — the World Bank, the

International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organization

(WTO) are using their power to do an end run around democracy and

rewrite the economic rules in ways that favor the world's most

powerful corporations.

 

All three claim undying dedication to the poor, but their policies and

actions tell a very different story. Look closely and you find that

they apparently consider the ideal country to be one in which all

important productive assets and resources are owned by foreign

corporations and used to produce for export to generate foreign

exchange to repay debts to foreign bankers. Their favored country has

no public services; electricity, water, education, health care, social

security, and financial services are all owned and operated by foreign

corporations intent on extracting as much profit as possible. Food and

other goods for domestic consumption are all imported from abroad and

paid for with money borrowed from foreign banks — thus increasing

foreign debt and perpetuating the cycle of debt and exploitation.

 

This is why millions of poor people have taken to the streets over the

past few years to protest policies of the World Bank, the IMF, and the

World Trade Organization — severely straining their claim to be

serving the poor. It is why there is a growing call among citizen

groups to dismantle all three institutions and transfer responsibility

for international economic affairs to the United Nations.

 

We humans live by stories and our stories differ — sometimes

dramatically. The great global clash between corporate globalists and

global civil society that caught the world's attention during the

historic protest against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in

1999, and was replayed in Cancun a week ago, can be characterized as a

clash of stories so different as to be from two wholly different

worlds — which in many respects they are.

 

The corporate globalists — corporate officers, PR spinners, media

pundits, politicians and economists — inhabit a world in which their

power and privilege are growing — leading them conclude that the

policies they advocate are working just as intended. In their story

the deregulation of economic life and the removal of economic borders

is expanding human freedom and clearing away barriers to creating the

wealth that will ultimately end poverty and save the environment. In

their story they are champions of an inexorable and beneficial

historical process of economic growth and technological progress that

is eliminating the tyranny of inefficient and meddlesome public

bureaucracies and unleashing the innovative power of competition and

private enterprise.

 

Their story portrays global corporations as the greatest and most

efficient of human institutions. They celebrate the Bretton Woods

institutions C the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization C for

their role in expanding market freedom and driving the wealth creation

process by increasing safeguards for investors and private property

and removing restraints to a free movement of goods and services. They

celebrate the consolidation of global corporate empire backed by

American military might as the path to world peace.

 

By contrast, global civil society lives in a world of unemployment,

sweatshop wages, violent social breakdown, and collapsing

environmental systems. Civil society's story tells of a world in

deepening crisis of such magnitude as to threaten the fabric of

civilization and the survival of the species C a world of rapidly

growing inequality, erosion of relationships of trust and caring, and

a failing planetary life support system. Where corporate globalists

see the spread of democracy and vibrant market economies, civil

society tells of the power to govern shifting away from people and

communities to financial speculators and global corporate monopolies.

 

In civil society's story corporations are replacing democracies of

people with democracies of money, self-organizing markets with

centrally planned corporate economies, and spiritually grounded

ethical cultures with cultures of greed and materialism. Civil society

characterizes the corporate global economy as a suicide economy that

is destroying the foundations of its own survival and the survival of

the species in the pursuit of quick profits. It sees a corrupt

political process awash in corporate money and beholden to corporate

interests rewriting our laws to provide corporations with tax breaks

and public subsidies while eliminating the regulations and borders

that hold corporations accountable to some larger public interest.

They see the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization as leading

agents of this assault against life and democracy.

 

Global civil society has set forth its vision of the world that can be

in a remarkable document called The Earth Charter that opens with

these prophetic words:

 

" We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when

humanity must choose its future. "

 

The Earth Charter was produced through consultations over a period of

several years involving thousands of people of virtually every

nationality, race, religion, and ethic grouping on the planet. It

calls on humanity to unite behind the creation of a new human

civilization based on the principles of an Earth Community dedicated

to peace, justice, and the love of life.

 

To create what we want, we need to be clear on the causes of the

dysfunction we don't want.

 

The institutional centerpiece of the suicide economy is a specific

institutional form — the publicly traded, limited liability

corporation. By law and structure, the publicly traded, limited

liability corporation is a single purpose organization in the business

of making money for its richest shareholders. It is not only incapable

of acting with conscience, it is legally prohibited from doing so.

 

Human persons who behave in a similarly self-centered and destructive

way devoid of conscience are called psychopaths and are confined to

prisons or mental institutions as threats to society. The closest

equivalent to a corporation in nature is the cancer cell that forgets

it is a part of a larger whole and seeks its own unlimited growth

without regard to the consequences.

 

Yet in the suicide economy, corporate psychopaths are regularly

rewarded with rising share prices and their CEOs are rewarded with

multi-million dollar bonuses. Corporate officers suspected of

sacrificing share price to acts of conscience out of concern for

workers, community, or the environment are commonly dismissed.

 

There is no rational basis for expecting an economy dominated by

institutional psychopaths to work for people, families, communities,

or nature.

 

If you remember nothing else from this presentation, remember this

point: The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is a

pathological institutional form. There is no place for it in a healthy

economy or healthy society.

 

If there is to be a human future, we must replace the culture and

institutions of the suicide economy with the culture and institutions

of a planetary system of life-serving, democratically accountable

living economies rooted in communities of place and functioning in

creative productive partnership with the living Earth.

 

As noted earlier, we face some difficulties in pulling this off. The

good news is that fate is conspiring to shock our fellow citizens into

a new political awareness and involvement.

 

First, a stolen election revealed the fragility or our democracy. Next

a stock market meltdown unmasked the reality of the bubble economy.

Then the 911 terrorist attacks shocked us out of a deep complacency

regarding America's relationships to the world. A wave of corporate

scandals revealed the deep corruption of the system of corporate rule.

The current U.S. administration's repressive and flagrantly

self-serving responses to America's need for economic recovery and

increased security revealed that we are being ruled by arguably the

most corrupt, deceitful, extremist, self righteous, and dangerous

administration in our country's history.

 

Polling data make clear that the vast major of Americans want a

healthy environment, peace, economic justice and security for all,

freedom, and democracy. To get within half million votes of his

opponent the man the Supreme Court appointed to be America's president

had to present himself as a compassionate conservative who would work

for ordinary people, be fiscally responsible, leave no child behind,

protect the environment, and pursue a peaceful, cooperative, and

non-belligerent foreign policy respectful of the rights and interests

of others. Remember these promises? These were central themes of his

campaign. They represent what the vast majority of Americans want, but

are not getting.

 

Our most immediate and obvious task is to achieve regime change in

America in the next election. It will require a great deal more than

regime change, however, to get us on the path to a just, sustainable,

and compassionate world. And the leadership is unlikely to come from

the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or America's corporate

CEOs. It will come — if at all — from " We the people, " from civil

society. There is no one else. We are the one's we've been waiting for.

 

We necessarily and appropriately work on many fronts — including

peace, civil rights, democracy, food security and agricultural reform,

economic justice, and the environment — for in the end all our

struggles with all their varied labels are one struggle against a

predatory and undemocratic system that values power more than life.

 

Many of us engaged in these struggles have been inclined to think of

ourselves as representatives of an alternative fringe. It is a

self-defeating way of thinking that is both unnecessary and contrary

to fact, for we represent the majority values of the people in America

and beyond. Our work is to midwife the birth of an emerging new

mainstream.

 

Let's focus for the moment on the challenge of creating local living

economies as an essential foundation of the vibrant life-serving

communities we all want for ourselves and our children.

 

I noted earlier that there is no place in a healthy economy for the

pathological institution of the publicly traded, limited liability

corporation. Three characteristics bear primary responsibility for its

pathological dysfunction: unlimited size, absentee ownership, and

exemption from personal liability. A living economy is comprised of

human-scale enterprises locally owned by people who have a direct

stake in the many impacts associated with the enterprise and are

accountable for any harm it may do to others. A firm owned by persons

who have a direct interest in the firm, live in the community where it

is located, and bear the consequences of its actions has a natural

interest in providing:

 

§ Employees with safe, meaningful, family-wage jobs.

 

§ Customers with useful, safe, high-quality products.

 

§ Suppliers with steady markets and fair dealing.

 

§ Communities with a healthy social and natural environment.

 

One of my favorite prototypes of a living economy enterprise is

Philadelphia's White Dog Café owned an operated by Judy Wicks. Judy

buys most of the food served at the White Dog from local organic

farmers, serves only meat from humanely raised animals, pays her

workers a living wage, devotes 10 percent of profits to local charity,

and has mobilized other Philadelphia restaurants to join in rebuilding

the local food production and distribution system. Judy has also

turned the White Dog into a mini-university in social activism,

featuring dinner seminars with visiting speakers and organizing tours

for her customers to Chiapas, Cuba, the Maquiladoras, and the coffee

cooperative in Guatemala from which she buys the fair traded coffee

served by the White Dog. Business Ethics Newsletter recently gave the

White Dog Café its newly established living economy enterprise award.

 

Organic Valley dairy cooperative was another of the Business Ethics

nominees. It is owned by small dairy farmers producing organic dairy

products with pasture raised livestock. In total it is a $100 million

operation with a national reach. Headquartered in Wisconsin it is

gradually enrolling dairy farmers across the country. It demonstrates

a successful approach to national branding and marketing with

accountability to independent family dairy producers with a commitment

to equity and a healthy environment. The cooperative form combines the

advantages of scale with locally rooted ownership and accountability.

 

Living economies were the theme of the Fall 2002 issue of Yes

magazine. You can find YES! on the web at www.yesmagazine.org. Every

issue is filled with stories of people working for deep change and

with lots of suggestions for how to connect with them. It is a regular

reminder that there are a great many of us and we are making a

difference. The theme of the current issue is " Government of the

People Shall Not Perish. " It is about how people are mobilizing to

assure the will of the people prevails in the up coming election. The

next issue will be on water and how people are mobilizing to prevent

global corporations from monopolizing access to water, which is likely

to be the subject of more wars that oil in the near future.

 

The Fall 2002 issue of YES! has many stories of living economies

initiatives around the country. One of my favorites is a story from

the Appalachia region of southwest Virginia about how local

independent enterprises are building business relationships with one

another to increase the value added locally to the region's natural

resources — in part by bringing together producers and the market

place. It began with a community supported agriculture (CSA) project

and a system for marketing local produce to local restaurants and a

locally owned chain of supermarkets as local farmers were making the

transition from growing tobacco to growing organic produce. Locally

owned farm supply stores now carry organic fertilizers and

pest-control products. A local egg producer provides high nutrient

compost. They've established an incubator kitchen that helps local

residents develop and market value-added food products that spin off

to become independent businesses. A sustainable forestry and wood

products program supports sustainable production and harvesting by

local wood lot owners. Harvested timber is now milled and sold locally.

 

There is a similar story from Black Hawk County, Iowa in the Spring

2003 issue of The Land Report

 

Living economy enterprises may be organized as partnerships;

individual- or family-owned businesses; consumer- or producer-owned

cooperatives; com­munity corporations; or companies privately owned by

workers, other community members, or social investors. They may be

for-profit or nonprofit. Just about the only thing they cannot be, is

a publicly traded, limited liability corporation.

 

Most efforts to hold economic institutions accountable to the public

interest have centered on increasing the accountability of

corporations though such measures as appeals to the conscience of

corporate managers, establishing state ownership, introducing

regulatory reform, or some combination thereof. Such measures,

however, only variations on the imperial theme of the central

concentration and control of economic power. For this reason they

rarely provide more than marginal improvements in accountability and

responsiveness to life needs. The world needs a truly democratic

alternative.

 

The goal of political democracy was not to create a more accountable

monarchy; it was to replace the institutions of monarchy with new

institutions appropriate to democratic societies. We need a similar

approach to economic democracy. The appropriate goal is not to reform

the institutions of corporate rule. It is to replace them, through an

emergent process of succession and displacement, with systems of

economic relationships that distribute power by localizing ownership

and control. Ironically, given America's professed commitment to

market economies, it means creating economies that actually honor real

market principles — which corporate capitalism, with its drive to

monopolize markets and externalize costs — systematically violates.

 

The idea of displacing the suicide economy with a system of local

living economies would seem hopelessly naïve, except for the fact that

millions of for- and not-for-profit enterprises and public initiatives

around the world are already aligned with the values and

organizational principles of living economies. They include local

independent businesses of all sorts from bookstores to bakeries, land

trusts, local organic farms, farmers' markets, community-supported

agriculture initiatives, restaurants specializing in locally grown

organic produce, community banks, local currencies, buy-local

campaigns, suppliers of fair-traded coffee, independent media, and

many more. Indeed, independent, human-scale businesses are by far the

majority of all businesses, provide most jobs, create nearly all new

jobs, and are the source of most innovation. The problem is that these

potentially healthy enterprises generally function in a dependent

relationship to the publicly traded mega-corporations that dominate

the suicide economy.

 

Imagine the possibilities if these enterprises were to free themselves

from their dependence on the suicide economy and grow webs of business

relationships with one another to create corporate free, living

economies that give us new choices as to where we shop, work, and

invest. Imagine a world in which every person has an ownership stake

in the assets of the enterprise on which their livelihood depends and

has a say in the management of those assets. It's called economic

democracy and it is an essential foundation for equity, democracy, and

a true market economy.

 

It's more than a dream. People are already working all across America

and around the world to bring it into being. A new national

organization, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

(BALLE), is forming chapters around the country to advance the

formation of local living economies. Find it at

www.livingeconomies.org. BALLE is a natural ally in your work as many

of the BALLE chapters find that rebuilding the local food economy is

the obvious starting point for their work.

 

For those who want to facilitate the emergence of local living

economies it is helpful to focus on clusters of related businesses. We

call these clusters building blocks.

 

Start with a few simple questions. What do local people and businesses

regularly buy that is or could be supplied locally by socially and

environmentally responsible independent enterprises? Which existing

local businesses are trying to practice living economy values? In what

sectors are they clustered? Are there collaborative efforts aligned

with living economy values already underway to bring these businesses

together? The answers will point to the most promising opportunities.

 

Food is usually the logical place to start. Everyone needs and cares

about food, and food can be grown almost everywhere, is freshest and

most wholesome when local, and is our most intimate connection to the

land. In many communities, a farmers' market or a restaurant serving

locally produced organic foods provides a focal point for organizing.

Healthy local family farms are the back bone of a healthy community.

 

In some communities, clusters of businesses devoted to energy

conservation, environmental construction, and the local production of

solar, wind, and mini-hydro power are forming living economy webs

devoted to advancing local energy independence. There are many more

examples relating to forestry, media, health care, materials recovery,

finance and others.

 

*****

 

In these turbulent and frightening times it is important to remind

ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most exciting moment

in the whole of human history. For this is the moment when we are

being called by the deep forces of creation to awaken to a new

consciousness of our own possibilities and to embrace the

responsibilities to one another and to the planet that go with our

collective presence on the living jewel of life called Earth.

 

The time is now. The choice is ours. We are not alone. We have the

power. The work starts here. We're the one's we've been waiting for.

 

Thank you all for the wonderfully important work you are doing to

create the world that can be.

 

__________

 

Dr. David C. Korten <www.davidkorten.org> is board chair of the

Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive

Futures <www.yesmagazine.org>, president of the People-Centered

Development Forum <www.developmentforum.net>, and author of the best

selling When Corporations Rule the World and The Post-Corporate

World: Life After Capitalism.