Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy

by Hazel Henderson (Dec, 2006 Chelsea Green Publishing Company)

www.ethicalMarkets.com

I found this book to be a very comprehensive and interesting reading. The amount of information and the way it was all set out is very helpful. It includes websites where you can get more information if you want to delve deeper into a certain area. It is very positive and shows how much is going on around the world to create a better future for our children and grandchildren.

Food and Health

In 2006, for the first time in history US children are sicker than the generation before them. Obesity affects nearly one-fifth, triple the prevalence in 1980; autism has increased on thousandfold in a generation; asthma is up 75%; life-threatening food allergies increased nearly sixfold; and nutrient deficiencies not seen for decades are now prevalent again, according to a report by Judy Converse, MPH, RD, LD, a licensed dietitian specializing in medical nutritional therapies for children. She and other health professionals note that increasingly aggressive vaccination – children are advised to get fifty-four vaccine doses (most containing mercury) by age twelve – may be causing health problems (www.redflagsdaily.com). –p189

We are slowly remembering that our bodies, minds, attitudes, spiritual lives, social circumstances, and physical environments interact to keep us well, or make us sick. –p202

“The air we breathe on average in our homes is two to five times more polluted than the air outside of our homes, according to the EPA. We can look at a specific situation: when you are using a household cleaning product, and you can smell it. Normally what you smell, whether it’s a scent or a chemical odor, is what is called the VOC, a volatile organic compound. Those VOCs come out of cleaning products into our air. We know without a question that those VOCs are asthma triggers for children. They also cause allergies and various types of irritation to our lungs.” –Jeffrey Hollender (Seventh Generation Company) –p206

Seeds of Change is now owned by M&M Mars, Ben and Jerry’s is owned by Unilever, Boca Foods is owned by Altria, the tobacco firm, formerly known as Phillip Morris. Horizon Organics and Silk Soy Milk are owned by Dean Foods. –p182

Economy

Ralph Abraham (Prof, University of California) declares that “The global economy is suffering enormously from the poor advice of the professional economists who are basing their advice on a completely unproved theory.” –p16

Economists still call those hidden social and environmental losses “externalities” -costs that companies externalize from their balance sheets and pass on to society or future generations. –p17

Replacing employees with machines and energy is rewarded in our U.S. tax code. At current oil prices, the United States, still dependent on foreign supplies, has racked up trade deficits of 7% of our GNP-measured economy. Why not tax waste, resource depletion, and pollution? –p17

“Capitalism as presently conducted is, if you will, violating its own internal logic. We’re not being very good capitalists, because we are losing the human and the natural capital, which are at least as important to economic well-being as the forms of capital that we do count.”
–Hunter Lovins (Natural Capitalism Solutions)

Community Investment

“The more entrepreneurs you have, the more local change makers. Imagine a world where you no longer have just 2 or 3 % natural leaders and everyone else has defined themselves out of that game. Imagine a world where everybody knows they can do this and they know how to work together to do it. This is the most profound step in the evolution of our species.”

–Bill Drayton (ASHOKA) -p84

85% of Americans believe that living in a fair and just society better describes their concept of the American dream . People want to make a difference in the world and are looking for work that provides a living wage as well as something more meaningful. –p170

Transformation of Work

E.F. Schumacher – a student of Mahatma Gandhi said, “We need mass-production less than we need production by masses.” He pointed out that industrialization was about labor-saving and would eventually be unable to employ enough people to be a viable model of development in poorer countries. He correctly predicted the looming global unemployment problem in the US. –p162

The US, Canada, Japan and mature industrial countries in Europe have transformed themselves over the past century into predominantly service-based economies. Such economies become information-based and knowledge-intensive. Thus, knowledge has become an important new form of capital. Few economic textbooks and accounting protocols have devised ways to value information and knowledge correctly. Information and knowledge do not conform to the old economic textbook models of scarcity. Economists assume that fundamental competition for scarce material resources drives economic growth. This economic view still makes sense on the material plane. But information is not scarce. If you give me information, I am enriched-and you still have it, too! –p167-68

Enough!

“You know we have this kind of running dialogue in our heads that there’s not enough. There’s not enough time, there’s not enough money, there’s not enough love, there’s not enough sleep, there’s not enough this, there’s not enough that. This kind of mentality justifies horrendous behaviors in society. This consumer culture is really crushing our capacity to know who we are and to really live within any kind of boundaries. What I recommend is what I call the surprising, stunning, and shocking truth of sufficiency or enough! And in a global society that’s now become a consumer-monetized society everyone is targeted, studied, treated, and talked to as a consumer, and nothing more than that. There is hunger for more centered ways of understanding our relationship with money. There’s a desperate cry-that’s drowned out by advertising-to get out of this consumer culture!”

–Lynne Twist (The Soul of Money 2004) –p171