The Great Turning
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The centralization of authority was rarely the consequence of malicious intent. More often people were simply trying to do their jobs, unaware of the consequences of their actions. If things were going badly, the problem was assumed to be local, likely a failure to follow prescribed procedures. Training and tighter controls to assure compliance were the standard solutions—thus affirming the expertise and authority of the central power holders and the incapacity of those at the bottom.
I later came to see how this pattern plays out at all system levels. I saw that the system of foreign aid itself shifts control to global bureaucracies headquartered half a world away from the needs of the people they presume to serve, that institutions of the global economy shift the power of decision from people and communities to corporations and financiers who have no knowledge of the social and environmental consequences of their decisions. Eventually I saw the pattern playing out everywhere on the planet at every level of organization.
In the late 1980s, with the help of astute colleagues from a number of Asian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), I began to see the bigger picture of the ways in which official aid agencies actively, if unintentionally, undermine local control and capacity. Even most NGO leaders, however, were not attuned to these larger issues.
In 1990, then living in Manila, I joined with a few close Filipino colleagues to found the People-Centered Development Forum to serve as a mutual support network for a scattered, often beleaguered band of activists engaged in raising public awareness of the destructive consequences of official aid policies. The further we took our analysis, the more evident it became that, far from being the global benefactor I had once assumed it to be, the United States was the major impetus behind what I had come to recognize as a deeply destructive and antidemocratic development model.
A conversation with a colleague from India, Smitu Kothari, brought it together. He politely suggested that I would best serve the cause of improving conditions for the poor of Asia by returning to the United States and devoting myself to educating my own people about the consequences for the world of the misguided policies of our government. On reflection and consultation with other Asian colleagues, I realized he was right. It was another major turning point in my life.
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RESISTING CORPORATE-LED ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION
When Fran and I moved to New York City in 1992, I turned my attention to sharing the lessons of my experience with my fellow Americans. By this time, I was becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which otherwise perverse economic policies were serving corporate interests. Living in an apartment just off Union Square between Madison Avenue and Wall Street proved to be an ideal location for focusing my attention on the corporate connection. It was there I wrote When Corporations Rule the World.
In 1994, I accepted an invitation to participate in an international gathering of activists concerned with issues of global trade and investment. We subsequently formed ourselves into the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), an alliance dedicated to raising global awareness that “trade” agreements promoted by global corporations had less to do with freeing trade than with freeing corporations from public accountability. These agreements systematically stripped away the ability of communities, and even nations, to determine their own economic and social priorities and left those decisions to global financiers, corporate CEOs, and trade lawyers.
When Corporations Rule the World appeared in October 1995 at an auspicious moment. There was a growing sense in the United States that things were not right with the world. Stories were fresh in the public mind of corporate CEOs taking home multimillion-dollar bonuses for laying off thousands of workers and outsourcing their jobs to sweatshops in Mexico, Indonesia, and other low-wage countries. When Corporations Rule the World connected the dots and provided the analysis for which many people were looking. Suddenly I found myself a figure in an emergent global resistance movement.
The fifty thousand people who took to the streets of Seattle in November 1999 to protest the World Trade Organization and disrupt its secret negotiating processes gave the movement public prominence and sent out a message that ordinary citizens are not so powerless in the face of the corporate juggernaut as they might seem. From that point forward, most every time the corporate elites and their legal minions met to circumvent democracy through international trade agreements, they were confronted by massive street protests. The often violent response of police battalions awakened many minds to the historical reality that, the rhetoric of democracy notwithstanding, when the rights of property13 conflict with the rights of people, the police powers of government usually align with the rights of property.
My belief in the power of an awakened human consciousness comes from my participation in building a global resistance movement, one that—in the space of little more than ten years—grew from fleeting exchanges among a few dedicated but marginal activists to a movement able to challenge some of the world’s most powerful institutions. This experience is a major source of my hope for the human future and my belief that change, if it comes, will emerge through the leadership of millions of people creating a new cultural and institutional reality from the bottom up.
FOR EVERY NO THERE MUST BE A YES
I had realized even in the early 1980s that critiques of conventional growth-driven development models of the previous decade had influenced the rhetoric of development, but not the practice. Practitioners almost inevitably fell back on the frame of a discredited theory because they had no other theory to guide them.
In its simplest terms, the theory underlying corporate-led economic globalization posits that human progress is best advanced by deregulating markets and eliminating economic borders to let unrestrained market forces determine economic priorities, allocate resources, and drive economic growth. It sounds like decentralization, but the reality is quite different. A market without rules and borders increases the freedom of the biggest and most economically powerful players to become even bigger and more powerful at the expense of the freedom and right to self-determination of people and communities. Corporations and financial markets make the decisions and reap the profits. Communities are left to deal with mounting human and environmental costs.
These costs have awakened millions of people to the reality that the health of a community depends in substantial measure on its ability to set its own economic priorities and control its own economic resources. Strong communities and material sufficiency are the true foundation of economic prosperity and security and an essential source of meaning. Street protests are one response to this awakening. Calls for reform of corporate legal structures are another. Less visible, but even more important, is a spreading commitment to rebuild local economies and communities from the bottom up.
14 Such bottom-up efforts can seem like futile efforts to stem the tide —until one begins to recognize that they are springing up at every hand and in every sphere of life, including the cultural and political, demonstrating by results that a different world is possible. To make these demonstrations more visible is to speed the awakening of a new consciousness of the possible and thus encourage yet more local initiatives.
With this in mind, Sarah van Gelder and I joined with other colleagues in 1996 to found the Positive Futures Network (PFN), which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, to tell the stories of creative social entrepreneurs in an effort to speed the awakening of such a consciousness, help people engage, and facilitate the formation of new alliances. I have since served as board chair. Sarah formed the organization, took on the role of executive editor, and later invited Fran to become executive director and publisher. In 1998, we moved from New York City to Bainbridge Island, on Washington State’s Puget Sound, where the PFN offices are located.
YES! has become a valued resource for those engaged in the work of birthing the era of Earth Community and is a go-to place for readers of The Great Turning who want to keep up with new developments and find new allies and ways to en
gage. Find it on the Web at http://www.yesmagazine.org/.
Local Living Economies
Even before completing When Corporations Rule the World, I was aware that simply constraining corporate excess was not an adequate solution to the issues I had identified. Protests could slow the damage, but real change would depend on the articulation of a compelling alternative to the existing profit-driven, corporate-planned, and corporate-managed global economy. It seemed that healthy living systems might offer helpful insights. Yet conventional biology, which seeks to explain life in terms of material mechanisms and assumes that a competition for survival by the most fit is the key to evolutionary progress, offered little of evident use.
Then I met two extraordinary women—microbiologist Mae-Wan Ho and evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. Both were taking the study of life to a profound level that reveals life to be a fundamentally cooperative, locally rooted, self-organizing enterprise in which each individual organism is continuously balancing individual and group interests.5 Here was the natural model for which I had been searching. Life has15 learned over billions of years the advantages of cooperative, locally rooted self-organization. Perhaps humans might be capable of doing the same.
Such insights are a key to recognizing that there is a democratic, market-based, community-serving alternative to the unappealing choice between a socialist economy centrally owned and administered by government and a capitalist economy centrally owned and administered by an elite class of wealthy financiers and corporate CEOS. The key distinction between a capitalist economy and the market alternative is that a proper market economy operates with rules, borders, and equitable local ownership under the public oversight of democratically accountable governments. I spelled it out in The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism, released in March 1999.
That same year, I joined a drafting committee of the International Forum on Globalization charged with producing the consensus report Alternatives to Economic Globalization, edited by John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander. First published in 2002 and reissued in an updated and expanded edition in 2004, this report sets forth a comprehensive institutional and policy framework for a democratic, market-based global economic system based on local ownership and control.
Change through Emergence
I still struggled, however, with how best to advance the transition from a corporate-led global economy to a planetary system of communityled local living economies. At the beginning of 2001 I attended an invitational consultation at the Esalen Institute at which Sahtouris and Janine Benyus, a biological scientist and a leading proponent of biomimicry, made presentations. Both noted that the processes of natural succession by which forest ecosystems evolve offer a potential model for economic transformation. The earliest, colonizing, stage of forest-system development is dominated by fast-growing, aggressively competitive, and transient species that are eventually displaced by the emergence of the more patient, cooperative, settled, energy-efficient species that define the mature phase.
This model pointed to a strategy of change through emergence and displacement. These living system concepts defined the underlying strategic premise of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), which was cofounded that same year by Laury Hammel and Judy Wicks, two visionary entrepreneurs with a passionate commitment16 to the idea that the proper defining purpose of business is to serve life and community.
Soon, local economy initiatives across the United States and Canada were signing on as BALLE chapters. (For more information, see http://www.livingeconomies.org/.) These chapters are devoted to growing and linking local independent businesses, nonprofit organizations, and local governments in mature, locally rooted, life-serving economies with the potential to displace the rootless, opportunistic, money-driven, and ultimately suicidal corporate global economy. The experience of watching the mobilizing power of this idea catch hold is yet another source of my hope for the human future.
Gifford and Libba Pinchot, noted management gurus and founding board members of the Positive Futures Network, launched the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) simultaneously with the formation of BALLE. BGI offers a pioneering MBA program devoted to preparing business leaders with the sensibility and skills to manage truly life-serving businesses. Its larger mission is to transform business education. It draws the most creative faculty members from existing schools to start afresh and design a new MBA curriculum for developing managers for businesses that seek to advance positive social and environmental outcomes as a core business purpose. (For more information, see http://www.bgiedu.org/.) I joined the board of BGI in 2005, the year BusinessWeek reported on a steep decline in applications to conventional business schools and the year student applications to BGI tripled.
GETTING TO THE GREAT TURNING
Transforming the institutions of the economy is critically important to the human future. I was learning, however, that the need for transformation also extends to culture and politics. In this regard, I was also witness to a global dialogue from which an extraordinary consensus was emerging about the world that growing numbers of people were committing themselves to create.
Awakening Consensus
In the late 1980s and early ‘90s I regularly participated in international conferences of NGOs. Many of these gatherings, particularly those organized by NGOs from Southern nations, issued declarations calling for a radical realignment of development practices to give priority to securing17 the rights of people and communities to the lands, forests, and fisheries on which they depend for their survival. These declarations rarely asked for anything from governments or foreign donors other than that they respect and secure the rights of ordinary people to the means of creating their own livelihood.
These citizen conferences prepared the way for the International NGO Forum that met in parallel with the official UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The NGO forum brought together some eighteen thousand private citizens representing virtually all the world’s nationalities, races, religions, and social classes to engage in drafting citizen “treaties” spelling out shared values and common goals.
I had the privilege of participating in the NGO forum in Rio and in drafting its final declaration. It was one of the formative experiences of my life, as it burned into my consciousness the reality that for all their profound diversity, the people who came together for the forum shared similar values and a similar vision of the just, sustainable, inclusive, and democratic world they were committed to creating.
The consensus building was carried forward subsequently under the auspices of a private international commission that organized consultations involving thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world. That process produced a document called the Earth Charter. Often referred to as a people’s Declaration of Interdependence, the Earth Charter elaborates four overarching principles of Earth Community: (1) respect and care for the community of life; (2) ecological integrity; (3) social and economic justice; and (4) democracy, nonviolence, and peace.6 It is also a declaration of universal responsibility to and for one another and the living Earth. I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at the U.S. launch of the Earth Charter on September 29, 2001.
Through these experiences, I have grown in my understanding of the processes by which the world’s people are awakening to the reality that we are one people with one destiny on a small planet and that we can and must accept adult responsibility to and for one another and the web of life that sustains us all.
Naming the Time, Changing the Story
From 1999 to 2004, the Positive Futures Network convened a series of invitational retreats that engaged some two hundred social-change18 leaders from diverse social-movement constituencies in deep dialogue to identify common goals, build relationships of mutual trust, connect with the sacred nature of our work, and facilitate the formation of new alliances. We called the retreats “The State of the Possible.”7
Filipino civil society leader and strategist Nicanor Perlas, who also participated in the retreats, helped us to understand a simple truth: the advantage of civil society in advancing the transition lies in the moral power of authentic cultural values. Perlas helped me recognize that the power of the institutions of economic and political domination depends on their ability to perpetuate a falsified and inauthentic cultural trance based on beliefs and values at odds with reality. Break the trance, replace the values of an inauthentic culture with the values of an authentic culture grounded in a love of life rather than a love of money, and people will realign their life energy and bring forth the life-serving institutions of a new era. The key is to change the stories by which we define ourselves. It is easier said than done, but I have found it to be a powerful strategic insight.