Whole System Innovation: the Blog

I have long awaited the day when business and technology would begin to use principles of sustainability as the foundation for how we create and pay for our products and services. Well, the future has arrived with the concept of triple bottom line and socially responsible investing, which holds a whole new framework for innovation to emerge.

If you like to watch your money AND the planet grow green take a look below. Thank you Cliff for all of your years of persevering with GreenMoney Journal. You have helped make a once future idea (green investing) become a growing present day activity.

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In GreenMoney Journal’s special 15th Anniversary issue (Summer 2007) they are looking ahead at the next fifteen years through the eyes of several visionary leaders who have shaped today’s green investing and business world.

GreenMoney forecasts offer a greener future, to be sure. Be prepared to see a “green print” for a more sustainable world in which both challenge and opportunity abound. If fact, the next 15 years will be more critical then the last as we shift our attention from global war to global warming.

How will we evolve? Petroleum wars will end as people more fully realize the human and environmental costs associated with the finite commodity. The evolution will continue as the clean green energy revolution builds momentum. Issues of political justices and socio-economic justice will become even more closely tied. Higher environmental standards, clear market incentives and the laws of supply and demand will drive the culture of sustainable innovation.

Patriotism will be demonstrated not by SUV bumper stickers, but by responsible ecological behavior. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says, “Green is the new Red, White, and Blue.”

But this rapidly approaching future for our country is also global. Internationally, corporate accountability will include Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors as corporate management come to the inescapable conclusion that any financial analysis that excludes these factors cannot safely predict a company’s long-term profitability. According to several of our writers, the next 15 years will see the full integration of ESG into financial analysis and corporate decisions to reflect a triple bottom line.

As more individuals understand that their shopping and investing choices have impacts, they will want to make those impacts positive and sustainable. How will that happen? GreenMoney will continue to provide the answers.

In the special Summer issue: Amy Domini of Domini Social Investments shows us how the “culture of capitalism” will be fundamentally transformed; Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm outlines a dynamic future from food to technology, examining the challenges and opportunities of climate change; our favorite futurist Hazel Henderson spells out future global trends and counter trends; Spencer Beebe of Ecotrust keeps it green with an environmental discussion on advantages of Bioregions; and Joe Keefe of Pax World Funds shows us the road from Socially Responsible Investing to ESG and sustainable investing.

And if you want to get the 32-page print version (with exclusive features like the socially responsible mutual fund performance chart) of the special 15th Anniversary Summer ‘Visionaries’ issue for the Special Anniversary Rate of just $15 ( discounted from $50 ), go to the GreenMoney Journal via our website at- www.greenmoney.com . See details below.

You can also find an extensive set of 'exclusively online' articles on our web site by sustainability leaders, including Joan Bavaria of Trillium Asset Mgmt, Barbara Krumsiek of Calvert, Woody Tasch of Investors Circle, Allan Savory of Holistic Mgmt. Intl., Jean Pogge of ShoreBank, author and vegetarian chef Deborah Madison, as well as Tessa Tennant and many others.

SUBSCRIPTION Information
Online at- www.Greenmoney.com
US - $15 a year, Canada - $20 a year, International - $25 a year
Cliff Feigenbaum, Founder and Managing Editor,
GreenMoney Journal and greenmoney.com
Co-author, “Investing with Your Values” with Hal Brill and Jack Brill
Subscriptions - (800) 849-8751
Email - cliffgmj@gmail.com

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This landmark article by Thomas Friedman is on how the U.S. can retake its role as a global leader and address the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature, and terrorism. Think there may be a need for new forms of innovation here? : )

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The Power of Green
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (video: meet the man)
Published in New York Times: April 15, 2007

Excerpts from article ...

"... The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field. The convergence of all three has turned many of our previous assumptions about “green” upside down in a very short period of time, making it much more compelling to many more Americans.

But here’s the bad news: While green has hit Main Street — more Americans than ever now identify themselves as greens, or what I call “Geo-Greens” to differentiate their more muscular and strategic green ideology — green has not gone very far down Main Street. It certainly has not gone anywhere near the distance required to preserve our lifestyle. The dirty little secret is that we’re fooling ourselves. We in America talk like we’re already “the greenest generation,” as the business writer Dan Pink once called it. But here’s the really inconvenient truth: We have not even begun to be serious about the costs, the effort and the scale of change that will be required to shift our country, and eventually the world, to a largely emissions-free energy infrastructure over the next 50 years. ...

Read more of this New York Times article "The Power of Green"

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