1. Please take a look at this wonderful 4-page article by David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World. This was the presentation David made at the conference I attended in Boston a couple of weeks ago. In it, David does the following:
• Correctly identifies the causes of the social and environmental crises now facing us: overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, inequality and ‘institutional pathology’ (the fact that ‘private-benefit’ corporations are designed to increase consumption and inequality, instead of to advance the public good)
• Prescribes what is needed: reduced consumption, redistributed wealth and power, reallocation of resources from harmful to beneficial uses, increasing ‘natural capital’ while reducing financial capital, and freeing up knowledge (removing intellectual property rights) to accelerate social innovation, adaptation and learning.
• Calls for the breaking up and replacement of ‘private benefit’ corporations with rechartered ‘public benefit’ corporations with a mandate to produce what is needed for social and environmental health and well-being instead of to produce as much as possible as profitably as possible; these would serve as catalysts for the creation of a new decentralized, self-organizing economy consisting of self-reliant community-based economies, comprised in turn of locally-rooted, human-scale, fair-trade enterprises (what I have called ‘Natural Enterprises’).
• Calls for leadership of citizens who reject capitalism ‘working from outside the existing institutions of elite power’, to educate others and demand ‘strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules’ to create this new economy.
2. Then please take a look at my article from Tuesday, which the graphic above is from. You’ll notice that what Korten is calling for is precisely the model corresponding to the Natural social worldview in the lower left of this graphic: Natural Enterprises making up a Natural Economy operating within devolved-power, self-sufficient Natural Communities. 

What’s your reaction to Korten’s proposal? Mine was that it’s exactly the impossible and unachievable change we need. Citizens just don’t rise up against a dysfunctional socio-economic-political system and replace it with something else. And if they did, they would be fighting the government of the day to the death, since that government exists precisely to defend and sustain the existing dysfunctional economy. We are not going to have a collective anti-capitalist uprising and revolution, and even if we were governments certainly wouldn’t be responsive to it.

Let me say it again: Whether you want to change the political or economic system, save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else, the answer is in how meaning, and understanding of what needs to be done, emerges from conversation in community with people you love, people who care.

That’s the way you see the solution to problems when you take the ‘feminine’ Natural social worldview in the lower right of the graphic above. If (let’s be optimistic, when) communities start having conversations about this, and start to really care about it, so it goes from the ‘nice to do’ list (that never gets done) to the ‘have to do’ list (that does get done) — when that happens, the kind of emergence of ‘what needs to be done’ is unlikely to be revolution, mass uprising, or pressuring of governments. The consensus on ‘What needs to be done’ is more likely to be a walking away from the existing economy, a refusal to do business with ‘private-benefit’ corporations, and the creation of local, mostly women-run cooperatives, Natural Enterprises within a cooperative local Natural Economy. We’ll just drop out of the industrial economy, and starve it to death. It’s our consumption that drives the current dysfunctional economy, after all.

I wonder if I can persuade my publisher, Chelsea Green, to give copies of my book on Natural Enterprise awayfree to aspiring women entrepreneurs.