David C. Korten’s LIVING ECONOMIES FOR A LIVING PLANET
Having reached the limits of an Era of Empire humanity is now compelled to make a conscious collective choice to live into being a new human Era of Community. It is a profound evolutionary challenge and an unprecedented opportunity to graduate from the excesses of adolescence to embrace the possibilities and responsibilities of species maturity in service to the living web of planetary life. Theologian Thomas Berry calls it the Great Work — a creative, life-serving work toward a more creative, vibrant, and fulfilling human future.
The Era of Empire has led to the pursuit of money as humanity’s defining value and hierarchy/domination as society’s organizing principle. It has led to the emergence of a corporate global economy — appropriately described as a suicide economy, because it is destroying the foundations of its own existence and threatening the survival of the human species. It is the Era’s final stage.
The human future depends on moving beyond the self-limiting and ultimately self-destructive ways of Empire to live into being a new Era of Community in which life is the defining cultural value and networking/partnership is the organizing principle. Ironically, the possibility of achieving such fundamental change resides in the awakening of hundreds of millions of people to the reality that humanity is on a path to social and environmental collapse, which create an imperative to accomplish the seemingly impossible.
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David Bollier’s The Cornucopia of the Commons
A few years ago, the newspapers of New York City were ablaze with a controversy about dozens of plots of derelict land that had been slowly turned into urban oases. Should these beautiful community gardens that neighborhoods had created on trash-filled lots be allowed to stay in the public domain? Or should the mayor and city government, heeding the call of developers, try to generate new tax revenues on the reclaimed sites by selling them to private investors?
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