John Spence says, “Since 1989 I have read a minimum of 120 business books a year, and I can say without question that Noble Enterprise is one of the best I have ever read. Why? Because it does such an incredible job of getting to the heart and soul of what it takes to run a truly successful business in modern times.”

You can learn more about Gillett and NOBLE ENTERPRISE on his website at noblebusinesssolutions.com. You read more about John Spence on his website at johnspence.com

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James Galbraith – the son of famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith - offers his analysis of the roots of the economic recession that has destroyed jobs, families and communities. In line with Cosimo author Danny Schechter, he said the crisis wasn’t an economic crisis at all, but a fraud perpetrated on innocent victims.

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Last week we told you that Hazel Henderson, co-author of the Cosimo Book The Power of Yin, was speaking at the 2010 Enlightened Business Summit on October 28. Her talk on Transforming Finance is now available on the web, and you can check it out here.

Happy Listening!

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You can view the video here.

Van Jones is a former White House Adviser, an environmental activist and social entrepreneur and currently a distinguished fellow in the Center of African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University.

Jones said, “The next American economy should be characterized by production, thrift and ecological restoration. But can our political system meet the challenge of helping America transition to a green economy? Or will a politics of fear ultimately derail the politics of hope?” In his lecture, he links green environment initiatives with the economy, bringing to light that athe United States is in a state of crisis both environmentally and economically. For more information on the climate crisis, read Cosimo Book Earth Fever, Living Consciously with Climate Change and for more information on how to move to a green economy and toward sustainability, check out Up From Wall Street: The Responsible Investment Alternative.

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Hazel Henderson will be speaking on “Transforming Finance” at this week’s Enlightened Business Summit teleconference for The Shift on Friday Oct. 28, 11:00 a.m. ET. You can register for the free call in here.

Hazel Henderson is a leading expert on sustainable development and the environment. She has written nine books, including the award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006). She is the founder of Ethical Markets Media, LLC and the creator and co-executive Producer of its TV series. She also wrote the Foreword to the 2010 Cosimo title Earth Fever: Living Consciously with Climate Change:

Welcome this English edition of Earth Fever, a timely and highly original approach to climate change. The authors move from a rigorous analysis of the latest scientific findings to the political social, cultural, and spiritual lessons we humans need to learn. They review the multidimensional actions that may keep our planet’s atmosphere from further warming beyond the average of 2 degrees centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) considered vital to prevent catastrophic outcomes. Beyond the careful analyses of all those issues and choices for our common human future, this book then breaks important new ground. The global climate crisis is viewed as a systemic learning experience and an opportunity for a rapid evolution of humanity’s planetary awareness and expansion of consciousness of our interdependence. It is as if Gaia, our wondrous living planet, is now our programmed learning environment, teaching us directly about our myopic thinking and careless technologies.

While the authors of Earth Fever examine the technological possibilities for approaching the climate crisis and the many ways those technologies can be accelerated, they also provide the deepest analyses yet of the possibility that humans are becoming more aware of our place in the planetary biosphere. Mass media, the Internet, socially responsible investors and asset managers, companies discovering the savings in energy efficiency, even the “green washing” of much corporate advertising: all are contributing to this growing awareness.

Money is not wealth, but merely one form of information—a brilliant invention to track and keep score of human transactions between each other and the ecosystem services of our planet. Economic textbooks are obsolete, disproved each day by new research into the value of ecosystem services (roughly equivalent to the money-denominated production we count in GDP), the value of unpaid human services (volunteering; caring for the young, elderly, and sick; growing food; building houses; etc.), which constitutes 50 percent of all annual production in OECD countries and as much as 65 percent in more traditional, developing countries. All this is ignored in economic textbooks and even their core tenet—that rational humans maximize their own self-interest in competition with all others—is now disproved by behavioral sciences and brain researchers.

Earth Fever explores our ability to cooperate and how this human skill can be amplified by the challenge of climate change. I have been operating on this same assumption, and today, its application to the climate issue is vital. We must change the debate over climate: from the economic approach (which believes that money is the constraint) to a more realistic view that money is not the issue, but time is the real constraint. Even the studies with the best intentions, such as those of Britain’s Sir Nicholas Stern, are still in the language of economics and money. Costs to the incumbent fossil fuel sectors are still the focus, while the positive benefits, savings, and revenues for ramping up the low-carbon economy globally (estimated for those who think in money terms at over $1 trillion a year) are not well analyzed.

My colleagues around the world in the Climate Prosperity Alliance and I are proposing investments of $1 trillion per year for the next 10 years to double annual installations of solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean technologies, which will save forests and create smart electric infrastructure, for a total investment of $10 trillion. This is less than the U.S. has spent in bailing out Wall Street, auto companies, and other unsustainable sectors, and is only 10 percent of the world’s pension fund
assets of $120 trillion.

My colleagues, including Jim Garrison and others interviewed in this book, and I understand that even though money is worthless (it is just a numeraire), one must engage a money-obsessed society in the metaphors of finance and investment. Our conscious evolution can be mapped by our understanding of the role of money in our societies and how it is evolving in this Information Age, as in Jordan Macleod’s New Currency (2009). Ever more trade and transactions are made without money, as pure information-based trading (see diagram below), e.g., eBay, Craigslist, Freecycle, GlobalGiving, Microplace, and P2P lending sites like Prosper, Zopa, and Qifang in China. Thus the twin crises of our global financial casino and climate change are indeed providing the breakthroughs in our understanding of how to create a saner, ecologically sounder, and more equitable future. In the depth and breadth of understanding of humanity’s real options for the future, Earth Fever breaks important new ground for us all.

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A group of financial experts convened earlier this month in Florida at a meeting on Transforming Finance, hosted by Hazel Henderson, President of Ethical Markets Media, Global Futurist and Cosimo author. They released the following press release announcing the importance of truly reforming finance globally in order to serve human societies:

FOR RELEASE, MONDAY

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010, 12 NOON EDT

ST. AUGUSTINE, FL, USA

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL

GREENWICH, CT , USA

Financial experts, warning of future crises, call for re-affirming finance as a global commons, first recognized at Bretton Woods in 1945.

Co-conveners, John Fullerton, President, Level3Capital Advisors, LLC, and The Capital Institute, former Managing Director of JPMorgan, and global futurist and author of nine books, Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, said, “Our TRANSFORMING FINANCE group, as beneficiaries and active participants in global capital markets, affirms our responsibility to reform finance consistent with this reality.” They added, “Today, 24-hour global capital markets are dependent on satellites, internet and other technologies largely financed by taxpayers as public infrastructure investments.”

The full TRANSFORMING FINANCE Statement, now circulating in their private networks, adds “Financial markets are founded on trust – now eroded by the irresponsible and unethical behavior of many players, including many of our leading financial institutions.” The signers, from the European Union, China, India, Australia, Brazil, Canada and the USA agree that “unbridled greed-driven speculation, the improper use of public infrastructure technology for activities such as high-frequency trading, together with a misguided self-regulatory ideology, damaged the financial commons and the trust on which we all depend.”

The TRANSFORMING FINANCE group outlined necessary principles and conditions to operate the shared global financial architecture consistent with 21st century realities. Their Statement cites many agreements and institutions, global norms and rules that have evolved since Bretton Woods. It shows how markets for public goods can be expanded by pricing carbon and other emissions and external costs and accounting for un-priced assets, including: ecological productivity, biodiversity and other global commons, as well as social and human capital.

The group pledged to continue their own efforts to modernize capital markets to serve human societies as one of the tools to manage the global commons, using the new accounting standards and national accounting beyond “efficient market” and “rational actor” models, now outdated by findings in brain and neurosciences.

Prominent signers include: Graciela Chichilnisky (USA and Argentina); Zhouying Jin (China); Robert A.G. Monks (USA); Karl Kleissner (Austria, USA); Tessa Tennant (Scotland, Hong Kong); Ashok Khosla (India); Lawrence Bloom (UK); Christina Carvalho Pinto (Brazil); Woody Tasch (USA); Orio Giarini (Switzerland); Ladislau Dowbor(Brazil); Richard Spencer (UK); Rinaldo Brutoco (USA); Robert Shaw (USA); Susan Davis(USA and Ecuador); Eva Willmann de Donlea (Australia); Ross Jackson (Denmark); Ellen Hodgson Brown (USA); Steve Waddell (Canada); Terry Mollner (USA); Allen White (USA) and many others.
CONTACTS:

Hazel Henderson: President, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil); Fellow of Britain’s Royal Society for Arts and member of the Club of Rome; www.EthicalMarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, Ph. 904-829-3140

John Fullerton: President, Capital Institute, Greenwich, CT, and Level3Capital Advisors, LLC; www.capitalinstitute.org, john@level3cap.com, jfullerton@capitalinstitute.org, Ph. 203-769-1191

Christina Carvalho Pinto, President – Full Jazz Communication Group and Mercado Ético (Ethical Markets Brazil) Multimedia Platform; christina.cp@fulljazz.com.br, Ph. (5511) 5507-5870

Graciela Chichilnisky: Managing Director, Global Thermostat, LLC; Professor and Director, Columbia Consortium for Risk Management, Columbia University; author of the carbon market of the UN Kyoto Protocol; chichilnisky1@gmail.com, Ph. 212-678-1148

Ashok Khosla, President, Development Alternatives, Delhi, India; President, IUCN; Co-President, Club of Rome; akhosla@gmail.com

Stuart Valentine, President, IOWA Progressive Asset Management, Fairfield, Iowa; svalentine@fwg.com, 1-800-509-9096

Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media; www.ethicalmarkets.com, office@ethicalmarkets.com; to arrange interviews phone at 904-826-1381

They also released a Transforming Finance Statement, explaining in further detail their vision of a world in which the financial system serves a flourishing and sustainable human, ecological, and spiritual future, and inviting all others who share and work toward these goals to co-sign this declaration.

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Tom Croft, author of Up From Wall Street, recently wrote an article about renewing (in both the monetary and green sense) our economy for the fall issue of the socially-responsible investment magazine, Green Money Journal.

This article can be found online right here. As always, Cosimo Books are available in our online store and at Amazon.com.

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Darwin Gillett, author of Noble Enterprise, has written a new blog post to help companies with the current economic meltdown. “Reflections, Examples and Three steps Companies Can Take to Escape the Current Economic Malaise” can be found here. His keynotes and seminars can be read about here.

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