Braintrust
Peter Victor
Peter Victor–eminent ecological economist, winner of the Canadian Council for the Arts' prestigious Molson Award, and author of Managing Without Growth–challenges us to reframe our economic discussions to focus on managing material and energy flows rather than GDP growth.
Stephen Viederman: Investing As If The Future Mattered
The former president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation talks about his crusade to create harmony between the "purpose" of a foundation and its investment practices
A Conversation with Juliet Schor
Juliet Schor, a Professor of Sociology at Boston College, writes and lectures on the connections between consumerism, work life, and environmental sustainability. She is a founding board member of the Center for a New American Dream and author of the best-seller The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure, of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, and Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture.
We spoke with Schor about her new book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (published as True Wealth in paperback), in which she questions the conventional wisdom that maximizing income and growth is the path to well-being.
Simon Rich
Over the course of his fifteen-year tenure as a senior executive with the Louis Dreyfus Group, Simon Rich had an opportunity to observe a troubling trend firsthand--the increasingly unsustainable dependence of the global agricultural sector on fossil fuels coupled with the inevitable depletion of global petroleum reserves. Louis Dreyfus holds a major position in global oil seeds, cereals, cotton and orange juice processing and merchandising, and is active in the global petroleum, natural gas, and electricity sectors as both a producer and merchant. As a matter of course, the company monitors global supply and demand for energy and foodstuffs on virtually a real-time basis. Global food prices and the price of natural gas and oil have been ever more closely correlated in an era when petroleum products have become a critical component of food production and transport. But in the late 1990s, that correlation became a heightened cause for concern as energy analysts throughout the world and within Louis Dreyfus began to warn of the phenomenon of peak oil.
Hazel Henderson
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"It has always been so obvious to me that if you change the scorecard you change the game," says Hazel Henderson. |
Capital Institute owes much to the thought leaders who have helped frame our perspective on “the purpose of capital," and Hazel Henderson is among those to whom we are most indebted. Hazel never ceases to amaze me. Susan Witt, Executive Director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, once described Hazel as a "national treasure." It's true. Never formally trained in economics, Hazel's grasp of the subject, particularly its shortcomings, is remarkable. Hazel is a systems thinker, with a unique grasp of the multiple disciplines necessary to be able to see, holistically, the systemic challenges we face. Yet it's Hazel's intellect, energy, passion, generosity, and drive, often against the grain where it can be lonely, year after year, "self inflicted" I might add, that is so special. I owe a great personal debt to my teacher, advisory board member, and inspirational friend, Hazel Henderson. —John Fullerton, Founder, Capital Institute
Leslie Christian of Upstream 21
The chair of the board of this innovative holding company talks about Upstream 21's alternative transition strategies for small companies, as well as the challenges of channeling growth and profits in directions that have the most benefits for the most people and the environment.
