March 2024 Newsletter – SPECIAL! News from David Korten

March 29, 2024

Dear Friends,

With this special newsletter I am launching my just-released paper – “Eco-nomics for an Ecological Civilization” – presenting a framework for a new economics grounded in our deepening understanding of life and our distinctive human nature and potential.

What we now call economics features an ego-driven competition for money. Finding our way to an Ecological Civilization will require the guidance of a new economics with a focus on the eco. Hence, I call it eco-nomics, to distinguish it from the ego-nomics characteristic of most current economic thought and practice.

My 2021 white paper on Ecological Civilization introduced the concept of a life-centric eco-nomics. My defining priority since the completion of that paper has been to complete a companion piece that goes much deeper in framing eco-nomics. This paper frames a true alternative to the ego-nomics that has been the source of so much trauma for humanity and living Earth.

This paper is the current version of a continuing work in progress from which others are free to draw with or without attribution. It is far from complete but provides a skeletal framework upon which others and I can continue to build. It may be freely shared, reproduced, and reposted in whole or in part for so long as there is no restriction on further free distribution and use.

(Click here to get the paper, which you can download or read online or on your mobile device.)

-David Korten

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When we organize based on environmentally self-reliant communities of place, the linkages between rural and urban areas become essential.

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Building public awareness of the failure of ego-nomics is an essential step in awakening public consciousness to the nature and seriousness of the current system failure. That, however, must be followed by the development of a new eco-nomics to guide us to the future we now seek together.

Successful action depends on [individual] initiatives [and micro-movements] joining in unified support of one another in a meta-movement dedicated to peace, equality, and environmental care.