New online games may lead to new realities.

By John Elkington

Welcome to the Anthropocene era, when human impacts begin to overwhelm those of other species. The implication, as long-term environmentalist Steward Brand put it, is that “Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.” Then provocatively, he argued, “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” 

So where would you look for people – and industries – that are good at thinking through what it would mean to be a god responsible for looking after Planet Earth? Let’s put aside religions, which have tended to be more interested in the after lives of their believers than in the lives of future generations of humans and other species. So who then comes to mind?

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Can “interlinked self-reliant regional economies” replace globalization?

As part of the New Economy 2.0 series

By David Korten

My favorite definition of life comes from evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis: “Life is matter with the capacity to choose.”

The intricate self-organizing structure of Earth’s biosphere is the product of life’s extraordinary 3.5 billion year evolutionary quest to explore and expand the possibilities of its capacity to choose. The result is a complex and highly sophisticated fractal structure of nested, self-reliant, progressively smaller-scale ecosystems, each exquisitely adapted to its particular place on Earth to optimize the capture of energy to sustain matter in a living choice-making state.

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We need to act as citizens of the world to save it.

By Sophie Constance

With Friday marking the 41st anniversary of Earth Day, we need to stop being consumers of the planet, and start being citizens of the world.

“Save the planet,” we hear endlessly. But a planet is just a rock orbiting a star. It’s a self-correcting system and it will be here for a long time after we’re gone. The world, on the other hand, is the interlocking community of people, the environment and millions of species of plants and animals. The planet doesn’t need saving. The world absolutely does.

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