Over the nearly 600 years since the onset of the Commercial Revolution, we have as a species learned a great deal about the making of money and we have created powerful institutions and technologies dedicated to its accumulation. But in our quest for money, we forgot how to live. Now, on the threshold of the third millennium we find our planet beset by growing climatic instability, disappearing species, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and eroding soils, while the institutions of family, community, and the nation-state disintegrate around us and the gap between rich and poor becomes more unconscionable by the day. Our obsession with money has led us to create an economic system that values life only for its contribution to making money. With the survival of civilization and perhaps even our species now at risk, we have begun to awaken to the fact that our living planet is the source of all real wealth and the foundation of our own existence. We must now look to living systems as our teacher, for our survival depends on discovering new ways of living ­ and making our living - that embody life's wisdom.
Living Economies

Since the dawn of the scientific revolution, we have been so busy subduing nature that we have given little thought to the possibility that living systems might embody wisdom essential to our own lives. This is beginning to change. Industrial ecology, for example, draws on life as a model for the design of closed-loop production processes in which all products and by-products are eventually used and reused,just as they are in nature. Likewise,a number of organizations are drawing from living systems models to enhance the creativity and effectiveness of employees. However, aside from social Darwinists who use only a narrow spectrum of natural processes to justify an ideology of unrestrained economic competition, there have been few serious efforts to distill principles from nature's economies for the design of human economies as a whole. Since the economy's incentive systems and feedback loops are so central in determining how we produce and for whose benefit, and who pays the costs, this area clearly holds enormous promise.
All living systems, from individual cells to biological communities, are complex self-organizing economies in which many individual entities cooperate to sustain themselves and the life of the whole - as when plants produce food and oxygen needed by animals, which in turn produce fertilizers and carbon dioxide that feed plant life. As Willis Harman and Elisabet Sahtouris write in Biology Revisioned, "Trees shelter birds and insects, bees pollinate flowers, mammals package seeds in fertilizer and distribute them, fungi and plants exchange materials, sapotrophs, whether microbes or vultures, recycle, birds warn of predators, etc." The species that survive and prosper are those that find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve others. Life, then, consists of countless individuals self-organized into "holarchies" - nested sets of cells, multi-celled organisms, and multi-species communities or ecosystems with ever greater complexity and capacity. Each individual functions both as a whole and a part of a greater whole. Take our own bodies as an example. Each of us is a composite of more than 30 trillion individual living cells. Yet even these cells constitute less than half of our dry weight. The remainder consists of microorganisms, such as the enteric bacteria and yeasts of our gut that manufacture vitamins and help metabolize our food. These symbiotic creatures are as necessary to our survival and healthful function as our own cells. Each cell and microorganism in our body is an individual, self-directing entity, yet by joining together they are able as well to function as a single being with abilities far beyond those of its parts. Throughout its life span, each organism constantly renews its physical structures through cell death and replacement. Ninety-eight percent of the atoms in our bodies are replaced each year. Yet the identity, function, and coherence of the body and its individual organs are self-maintained - suggesting that each cell, organ, and body possesses some degree of inner knowledge and awareness of both self and the larger whole of which it is a part.
Life's Lessons
Life creates economies for living. We, in contrast, have created an economy for making money at lifes expense. What if we were to retool our economy according to the principles of a living economy? What might be its major features? From our observations of living systems, we may distill a number of principles helpful both in understanding why our existing economy is destroying life and how we might redesign it to serve life. Living systems are, for example:
· Self-Organizing and Cooperative -
Though we once assumed that cells are centrally controlled by their DNA and the body by the brain through the nervous system, science is discovering that the body's control processes are actually highly decentralized and involve a substantial element of self-regulation at the cellular level .The regulatory processes of biological communities are even more radically self-organizing, with no functional equivalent of a centralized planning or control system. Yet living economies do have mechanisms to control or eliminate rogue elements that do not serve the whole. For example, our immune system is comprised of cells that specialize in identifying and immobilizing or destroying harmful cells and viruses that pose a threat to the whole. In a cancer, when a genetic malfunction causes cells to forget they are a part of the larger whole of the body and unleashes the pursuit of their unlimited growth, the healthy cells attempt to destroy the defective cells by cutting off their blood supply. This has potential implications for how we think about our human economies. The global corporation, which is programmed by its internal structures to respond to the incessant demand of financial markets to seek its own unlimited growth, behaves much like a cancerous tumor. Furthermore, the economy internal to a corporation is centrally planned and directed by top management, not to serve the whole of the society on which its existence depends, but rather to maximize the capture and flow of money to its top managers and shareholders. These characteristics - growth at the expense of the whole and centralized planning - represent serious violations of the principle of cooperative self-organization in the service of life. Given that the economies internal to the largest corporations are larger than the economies of most states, this is cause for serious concern. Many large corporations do organize their operations around smaller operating units and worker teams. But because the rights and powers of ownership flow downward from absentee shareholders whose only interests in the firm are financial, the corporation's singular goal remains profit, and any authority delegated to subordinate units can be withdrawn at any time. A good first step in creating self-organizing economies that honor the freedom and responsibility of the individual in economic as well as in political life would be to sell off those decentralized units to their stakeholders - people such as workers, customers, suppliers, and community members. Doing so would make managers accountable to those who have a living interest in the firm and the health of the community and natural setting in which it is located.
· Localized and Adapted to Place -
Each bio-community creates its home on a particular place on Earth. Its members organize themselves into numerous, multi-species sub-communities where, through a process of progressive experimentation and adaptation, they learn to optimize the capture, sharing, use, and storage of the resources available. As each living community adapts itself to the most intricate details of its particular physical locale, it, in turn, modifies the physical landscape, creating soil and holding it in place, holding and releasing water, creating micro-climates - creating the conditions for the further evolution of the eco-system. The human economy likewise could be comprised of a holarchy of self-reliant, place-based economies that each adapt to the conditions of its physical place by becoming proficient at the collection and conservation of energy and the recycling of materials. Each could be organized to offer all who reside within its borders a means of livelihood consistent with their full and free development. Our existing global economy, by contrast, is dominated by financial markets and corporations programmed to reorient the purpose of local economies from meeting local needs to meeting the financial interests of distant institutions. They do this by imposing cultural and genetic monocultures and by extracting as much wealth as possible while contributing as little as possible in return. As corporate control over markets, technology, land, and other resources becomes more pervasive, people and communities become less able to adapt their local economies to local needs and conditions. Humanity has a long history of achieving sustainable, long-term relationship to place. A small farmer who knows the land and its characteristics learns to adapt her crops and methods to local microenvironments to get high yields without chemicals, energy subsidies, and wastage. So too an economy comprised of many decision makers can adapt efficiently to the opportunities of a locality, and to the needs and preferences of each of its members, in a way that is impossible when critical decisions are made by distant corporate managers. Furthermore, the need to manage the business firm in service to more than purely financial values becomes self-evident to decision makers who must live with the social and environmental consequences of their decisions. They are unlikely to sacrifice schools, the environment, product safety, suppliers, employment security, wages, worker health, and other aspects of a healthy community for short-term, shareholder gain when they are the workers, customers, suppliers and community members as well as the owners.
· Bounded by Managed, Permeable Borders -
To sustain itself, life must be open to exchange with its environment. Yet to maintain its internal coherence, it must be able to manage these exchanges. It thus depends on boundaries that are both managed and permeable - neither totally open nor totally closed. If the cell had no wall, its matter and energy would mix with the matter and energy of its environment and it would die. Multi-celled organisms must have a skin or other protective covering. Bio-communities are bounded by oceans, mountains, and climatic zones. Even our planet isolates itself from the rest of the universe - its gravitational field holds in place an atmosphere and ozone layer that control the exchange of radiation with the larger universe. Human economies similarly require permeable - but managed - borders at each level of organization from the household and community to the region and nation that allow them to maintain the integrity, coherence, and resource efficiency of their internal processes and to protect themselves from predators. Political and economic borders define a community of shared interests, identity, and trust - what we call social capital, which is a form of embodied energy that makes a community far more than a collection of individuals and physical structures. Without borders, this energy dissipates, much as the cell's energy dissipates if its cell wall is removed. On the other hand, impermeable boundaries result in stagnation and a loss of opportunity for the exchange of useful information, knowledge, and culture essential to continuing innovation. As with all living beings, living economies need permeable and managed boundaries. The institutions of money have been using international trade and investment agreements to remove the political borders essential to maintaining the economic integrity of communities and nations . [See article on the MAI on page 52.] This process leaves economic resources exposed to predatory extraction, leading to a breakdown of the trust and cooperation essential to any community. [See Jonathan Rowe, page 34.] The real agenda of those promoting these trade agreements is not to eliminate borders, but rather to redraw them so as to establish that what once belonged to the community to be shared among its members now belongs to private corporations for the benefit of their managers and shareholders. Thus, in the name of property rights, corporations draw heavily defended borders around their lands, factories, offices, shopping centers, broadcast facilities, publications, technologies, and intellectual property. With the protection of private guards and lawyers backed by the public's police and military forces, they thus assure that all uses of these assets benefit their private corporate interest and they silence voices of protest.
· Frugal and Sharing -
Biological communities are highly efficient in energy capture and recycling, living exemplars of the motto, "Waste not, want not." Energy and materials are continuously recycled for use and reuse within and between cells, organisms, and species with a minimum of loss, as the wastes of one become the resources of another. Frugality and sharing are the secret of life's rich abundance, a product of its ability to capture, use, store, and share available material and energy with extraordinary efficiency. Human economies can be similarly organized to contribute to life's abundance through the conservation, frugal use, equitable sharing, and continuous recycling of available energy, information, and material resources to the end of meeting the needs of all that lives within their borders. Our existing global economy creates islands of power and privilege in a large sea of poverty. The fortunate hoard and squander resources on frivolous consumption, while other s are denied a basic means of living. Furthermore, those who control the creation and allocation of money use this power to generate speculative profits. These profits increase the claims of the speculators to the wealth created through the labor and creative effort of others - while contributing nothing in return to the wealth creation process. [For elaboration of this argument see David C. Korten, Money versus Wealth YES! Spring 1997.] In our present economy unemployment, hoarding, and speculation are endemic, resulting in a grossly inefficient use of life's resources. In nature, unemployment and hoarding beyond one's own need are rare, and there is no equivalent to financial speculation.
· Diverse and Creative -
Life exhibits an extraordinary drive to learn, innovate, and freely share knowledge toward the realization of new potentials. The result is a rich diversity of species and cultures that give the bio-community resilience in times of crisis and provide the building blocks for future innovation. History provides ample evidence that the same drive is inherent in humans as well. Our most brilliant scientists, innovators, and teachers have been those driven not by the promise of financial rewards, but by an inner compulsion to learn, to know, and to share their knowledge. In our present global economy, corporate controlled mass media create monocultures of the mind that portray greed and exclusion as the dominant human characteristics. Intellectual property rights are used to preclude the free sharing of information, technology, and culture essential to creative innovation in the community interest. We live at a time when our very survival depends on rapid innovation of living economies and societies. Such innovation depe
All of this info you Korten's book "The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism" is available at your local bookstore and through these publishers Kumarian Press

· Buyers and sellers must be too small to influence market price
Meaning that if you are the biggest sneaker maker in the world and you control 30% of the market you could come into work one day and say, "Hey, lower the price of our shoes until everybody else goes out of business." Microsoft would be a perfect example of a company breaking this rule.

· Complete information must be available to all participants and there can be no trade secrets
Meaning that if you discovered a way to sew the soles on your shoes in half the time, you would have to share it with all of the other sneaker makers. General Electric would be an example of a company that breaks this rule.

· Sellers must bear the full cost of the products they sell and pass them on in the sale price
Ahh-Hah! Meaning, quite simply, no corporate welfare. Let's say the rubber for your shoes is really expensive. So expensive that people stop buying your shoes. You then go to the government and say, "Look, I'm going under here and if I go down the whole industry is going to fall apart." So the government steps in and helps you out with buying your rubber. So the price of your shoes comes down from $50 a pair to $40 a pair and people start buying your shoes again. You have just created an artificial demand for your shoes at the taxpayers expense. This is regardless of whether they wear your shoes or not. The dairy and oil industries are good examples for this one.

· Investment capital must remain within national borders and trade between companies must be balanced
In other words, companies can't pick up and move to Mexico because they don't feel like paying a decent wage and they can't take the money the made here and invest it another country. Also if we sell a $1million worth of cars to Honduras we have to buy $1million worth of coffee beans and pineapples from them.

· Savings must be invested in the creation of productive capital
Meaning that if you are rich you can't take your money and use it to buy pieces of paper on Wall St. You have to invest it in real things like apartments or shoe factories.

Unfortunately, none of these rules are followed.

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In 1995 the world's top 200 companies accounted for 28% of the world's wealth and employ only 0.33%
(that's right - one third of a percent) of the worlds population. Where does all of the money go?

The annual sales of Wal-Mart, the twelfth largest corporation, made its internal economy larger than the internal economies of 161 of the worlds countries including Israel, Poland, and Greece.

Your "freedom of choice" is waning. With every merger your options become fewer.

From 1993 to 1997 (in the US alone) there were 2,492 commercial bank mergers worth over $200billion - 5,114 deals in the in the insurance industry worth $110 billion - 1,435 radio and television mergers worth $16 billion. Most of these ended in massive layoffs.

All totaled 9,041 companies disappeared in those industries alone. The combined merger deals - worth $472billion - could provide 236,000,000 households with $50,000 a year for 40 years. That's every household in North America.

The Glass-Steagall Act is a legal restriction passed by Congress during the Great Depression that prohibits banks from owning insurance companies or brokerage houses . It was passed to prevent a repeat of the infamous world financial collapse of 1929. In 1998 Citicorp banking corporation merged with Travelers Group Insurance corporation in direct defiance of that law. It resulted in the worlds largest merger ever and created the worlds largest financial institution.

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What you can do:

· Simplify - Don't buy what you don't need. The next time you go to buy something ask yourself how many hours it took you to make that much money. Is it still worth it? If you normally buy three pairs of shoes a year try cutting back to two; etc, etc. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Buy local - When making purchases try to buy things made locally. The closer to your house the better. If you have a choice between buying a chair at Bob's furniture or Sears stick with Bob. Even if Bob costs more, the money is staying in your community and will come back to you. If your money goes to Sears corporate headquarters, chances are, you will never see that money again.

· Don't work for the man - When choosing a job ask you self if it will mean anything to anybody besides your boss and will it make a positive impact in anybody's life. Go for the businesses that are driven by values and community not by shareholder returns. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Organize - If you have to work for the man, which most of us do at one point or another, try your hand at organizing a union. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Read the real news - Find an alternative to corporate owned media. Subscribe to an alternative newspaper or magazine. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Put your money back into your community - If you have a bank account move it to a community bank. Ask the branch manager to see the figures. If local deposits are much greater than local lending for homes and business loans you know that your money won't be supporting your community. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Vote with your wallet - Only buy from companies that treat their employees, their community, and the environment fairly. If you invest in the stock market choose an investment service that specializes in stocks screened for social responsibility. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Get rid of your car - It costs an average of $4000/yr to own and maintain a car. When choosing a place to live take into account what you can walk or bike to. How far are you from a mass transit line? Look for jobs that you can bike or walk to or are on that mass transit line. Most areas of the country have at least one town that fits this description in one way or another, consider moving there. If you already live in such an area and have more than one car (per 3 people) in your household consider selling the extra car(s) and work out an arrangement to help the car owner pay for insurance and upkeep. You'll be amazed at the money you save. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Support Non-profits - Get involved. Donate your money , labor, or expertise. Would you like to know more. . . ?

· Create a community directory - Let people know what locally owned and/or socially responsible businesses operate in your area. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Support or create a community currency - Community money helps build a sense of community, stregthens the identity of local businesses and products and makes a visible distinction between money that stays in your community and money that doesn't. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Encourage Urban Growth Boundaries, Affordable Housing , and Public Transportation - Stopping sprawl and saving undeveloped land in your area can be as simple as getting rid of your car and moving to that liveable town I mentioned earlier. Certainly don't move to or stay in an area that requires every adult to own a car. Consider going to your town meetings and encourage the decision makers and voters to review your towns zoning laws. Encourage them to change the laws that cater to cars and not people. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Work for community self-reliance - Who is in charge of economic development in your area? Find out! Are they trying to attract global corporations with nice tax breaks and other subsidies or are they shoring up local businesses? Get involved and let your town know what is going on with their tax money. Would you like to know more . . .?

· Establish a municipal foreign policy - Does your town have contracts with companies that don't pay their employees a living wage? Does your town do business with companies who operate in foreign countries with oppresive regimes like Pepsi in Southeast Asia or Shell Oil in Nigeria? Would you like to know more . . .?

· Vote - Vote locally. Get involved with political groups that are working for real change. Would you like to know more . . .?

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