Hyla Cass, MD, is one of the true innovators in the field of longevity medicine. In this article she shares some of her secrets to living a fulfilling, healthy and satisfying life. While Dr. Cass is clear that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in the quest for greater longevity, her practical, grounded approach gives us a genuine insight into some of the specific things people of all ages, but especially Boomers, elders and older GenXers can do to increase their health, wellness, improve the quality of life and slow down the aging process.

A Health Commentary by Dr. Hyla Cass

I was recently asked to reveal my personal approach to health and longevity; that is, how to delay the usual pitfalls of aging as long as possible. While death is inevitable, the goal here is to have a joyous fulfilling and healthy life for as many years as possible along the way . I’ll share what has worked for me, my friends, colleagues, readers, and patients.

As a board- certified psychiatrist and practitioner of integrative medicine, I long ago abandoned the mainstream approach of the “physician as the all-knowing expert, a prescription, for every ailment, and the 10-20 minute office visit.” Instead, I spend an hour or two with patients, work with them as a partner in their health, and look for root causes rather than treating symptoms. For the most part, I depend on natural treatments including lifestyle and supplements, prescribing medications where appropriate and only as a last resort. The natural  “prescriptions” that I give out require more participation than simply taking a pill every few hours. Similarly, the key to preserving our health is participation. There are no shortcuts.

Of course, even doing our best in these areas, we all succumb to the inevitable at some point. I have had friends who lived cleanly and exuberantly—and they departed too early in my opinion. The lesson here is – live every day fully, since it may be your last. Paradoxically, when taken to heart, this awareness can make life a true joy. We’ve seen people told they had several months to live find great meaning in every aspect of the time remaining, and stuffing lifetimes of quality experience into those hours and days. The Bucket List, with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman is a perfect example of the turnaround that a “known” death sentence can inspire. Both diagnosed with advanced cancer, we see how companionship and mutual encouragement can be wonderfully life-enhancing, even — or especially– in the face of death.

So how do we stay as youthful as we can? There are no magic pills, specific hormones, or special diet that are “the answer.” The result derives from a mysterious combination of factors, only some of which we can know or control. There is much that is unknown, as well. According to Deepak Chopra, and others I know who have traveled to India, there are psychic readers there that are able to tell you your date of death if you ask them. This has piqued my curiosity ever since. Does this mean we are already ordained to die at a certain time– so why bother doing anything about it? Knowing our date, do we then make the very best of our remaining time? Or, do we dismiss these predictions as primitive superstition? What effect would it have on your life if you knew your date of death? My own philosophy is that it can happen at any time, so don’t take anything for granted—your health, your relationships, and the beauty that surrounds us all if we only take the time to look.

Questions abound, but I also have a few answers, guidelines to healthy living that will help you make the best of the body and life that you have.

Here is a short checklist of Life Enhancers and likely, Life Extenders that I have found to be useful in this quest:

1. A positive attitude, including psychological well-being and resiliency in the face of life’s stresses
2. Satisfying, fulfilling relationships
3. Stress Management: Build up your stress-resilience
4. A healthy lifestyle including good diet, appropriate supplements, and regular exercise
5. Hormonal supplementation (herbal, or prescription bio-identical) to compensate for waning levels

Here is a deeper look at the checklist:

1.    Positive Attitude:

Research shows that attitude has a powerful affect on the immune system. A positive attitude goes a long way toward keeping us young, vital, and healthy, just as a pessimistic, negative attitude can be aging. Happiness in not happenstance: it is cultivated. We’ve seen people living in miserable circumstances radiating joy, while many with “perfect” lives are miserable. Two books that I recommend on how to create your own happiness are What Happy People Know by Dan Baker, and Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out by Marci Shimoff.

2. Spend quality time with others, in healthy relationship:
Be supportive and loving toward your friends and family. In fact, helping others is a great remedy for anxiety and depression. Volunteer at a hospital or homeless shelter. There is no greater reward than what we receive from giving to others. Research shows that married men live longer and healthier lives than single ones, and it is likely that all the love and support is keeping them going.  And for everyone: don’t forget hugs — natural, safe, free, and mutually beneficial!

3. Stress Management:

Stress is inevitable. It’s not so much what the stresses are, but how we handle them that is most important. As Mark Twain said, “I have had many troubles on my life, most of which never happened.” Allowing our built-in stress response, the flight or flight mechanism, to take over, not only interferes with our productivity, efficiency, and joy, but can negatively impact every system of our body –  blood pressure, digestion, cholesterol levels, and even our immunity to infection. All of this robs us of our energy, and our years. Beyond the Stress Response: There are a variety of specific brief and simple techniques that effectively deal with chronic feeling of stress and anxiety. One of my favorites is Gary Craig’s EFT (www.emofree.com). Though it’s best done initially with a therapist, once you have a good start, you can continue on your own. A powerful tool, EFT combines positive imagery and specific pressure points on the body to release negative thoughts and feelings. Another outstanding technique, called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), uses rapid eye movements (or tapping on alternate sides of the body, such as on alternate knees) to help synchronize the two sides of your brain. This allows negative feelings of fear, pain, and anger to move through you, and be released. EMDR helps to put you back in your emotional driver’s seat (www.EMDR.org).

You can also use positive thinking to reprogram your mind. Add some visualization, picturing and sensing how you would like your life to be, and how you would like to experience an ideal planet. Research has shown this to be a very powerful way to create change in yourself and the world around you.

Along with a positive attitude goes a spiritual connection, being in the present and connected to a larger purpose. Life must have meaning, connection to the Universe outside ourselves, whatever one’s concept of the Divine is. This may include regular meditation, prayer, or simply being present to the wonders of nature.
Adaptogens are specialized herbs that support your adrenals and give you sustained energy when needed. Some of my favorites are rhodiola, reishi mushroom and Siberian ginseng, which can be found in my Energy Balance formula.

Deep relaxed breathing is an excellent anxiety and stress reducer, and overall tension reliever. Try it. You won’t be able to both breathe deeply and feel anxious or tense at the same time! Regular meditation practice takes this a step further. Try 10 minutes twice a day. There are many excellent books and courses – or simply sit quietly and focus on your breath. Your mind and body will naturally settle into a quiet, restorative state. You can add in a supplement formula containing theanine, GABA, glutamine and other natural ingredients that help your brain and body to chill, such as my CALM Natural Mind.

Adapted from Dr. Cass’ chapter in The Fountain: 25 Experts Reveal Their Secrets of Health and Longevity from the Fountain of Youth by Jack Challem, editor; Basic Health Publications, Inc, 2009.  Learn more about Dr. Hyla Cass on our Experts Page and at www.cassmd.com.

Dr. Cass is one of the country’s foremost authors and speakers on the subject of integrative medicine. A former Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine, Her books include: Supplement Your Prescription, 8 Weeks To Vibrant Health. Visit with Hyla on the Wellness pages and at www.cassmd.com.

OFFER TO FACEBOOK USERS: Dr, Hyla Cass’ ‘Secrets To The Fountain of Youth’ is just one of the articles in our FREE eBook – THRIVE – A Guide To Living The Life You Were Meant To Live – Part 1 – Click here for details

Let’s face it, for a lot of us who the world calls Boomers, Elders and Older GenXers (anyone 40 and over) life is more challenging today than it was prior to the financial crisis of 2008. We have watched our investment accounts shrink, the value of our homes and real estate decline and our ability to find meaningful employment tumble. Those of us who own or want to start a new small business also find it harder to get loans and, in many instances, our lines of credit have been significantly reduced.

Not a pretty picture, especially when you consider the demographic shift that is happening that will result in more than 50% of our population being over 50 for the first time in history. When you add in the fact that our elected officials at the national, state and local levels do not appear to have our best interests at heart, the picture becomes even less attractive.

In fact, based on the rhetoric that issues daily both sides of the political aisle, a number of these elected officials (especially the fiscal reactionaries in both parties) appear to believe that ‘we’ (the over 50 crowd) are the problem. So they want to reduce or eliminate Medicare and Medicaid, turn social security into a bonus pool for Wall Street and even increase the retirement age. They are hoping, of course, that they won’t have to face the truth that the real problem lies in the unfair tax cuts granted to the wealthiest, the absurd tax incentives given to corporations, many of whom pay little or no taxes at all and their stubborn resistance to implementing a quality, single payer health care system for us, like the one that they benefit from themselves.

Instead the only thing our elected official can talk about is cost cutting. Somehow they seem to have forgotten that you build the future with a combination of real investment and fiscal responsibility not with budget reductions alone. But when someone is only interested in grabbing a bigger piece of the financial pie and accumulating more political power and not the well-being of the majority, our quality of life, fairness and justice, and our national responsibility to take care of our own, then they focus only on the numbers.

So I say it is time those of us who already belong to the over 50 crowd and those of us who are joining us at the rate of 1 every 7 seconds to stop relying on these self-obsessed dandies with limited personal agendas and start doing things for ourselves.

And the first of these things is to admit that we have a lot more power than we sometimes remember – voting power, buying power and knowledge and experience power. In short, we control a significant amount of this country’s wealth, spend more than 2 trillion dollars annually and know how to get things done. And if you have any doubt look at what we have accomplished in civil rights, human rights, woman’s right, the environmental movement and more.

This leads to the second thing we would be smart to do. We have to stop letting those who want to divide us and manipulate us have their way. Instead, we can remember that those of us who are in the second half of life have a lot in more essential things in common than the superficial things people use to separate us. So it is time we start speaking out with one voice on the issues that directly impact our lives today and our future. (You can learn more by becoming a free member of the AgeNation Community at www.AgeNation.Com/Join

We also have to stop listing to those who suggest that we are over the hill and out of luck. We need, in fact, to stand up on our hind legs and bay at the moon of new possibilities. We need to re-invent and/or invigorate our own careers and stabilize and rebuild our financial futures by remembering who we are, by refining our current skills and developing new ones, by redefining our priorities, by learning about great new business and investment opportunities and by taking a close look at the kind of legacy we want to leave to those who follow us.

So how do we do all or some of this? In the coming weeks and months a number of authors and experts will use this column to recommend a variety of practical and necessary things each of us can do to turn our challenges into remarkable opportunities. They will introduce you to new opportunities, share their strategies, and recommend books and articles, and online and live programs you can take. (You can get a jump start on this today by clicking on the THRIVE slide above and getting your free Volume One of this great library of information. You can also click on the FaceBook symbol on the home page or go www.facebook/agenation

In addition, here are a few steps you can take today to get started on the road to reinventing and reinvigorating your career and your life.

1. First Things First –

As the old Chinese adage suggests, ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.’ So one of the most important things any of us can do to ensure that we our years ahead are filled with the kind of career opportunities we want, the kind of our financial stability we require and the level of genuine meaning and purpose in our lives we want is to take a close and honest look at how our life is going right now.

You can start by making a list of what is working and what is not. List the resources (tangible things you own, skills you possess, individuals you know, etc.) you have that you can use to meet your practical needs. If you are currently employed, ask yourself if you like what you are doing and if it makes best use of your talents? Do you feel valued and are you contributing something that is worthwhile? Does what you do provide you with the money you need? And what about your physical and emotional health, the quality of your relationships, and our living environment? Yes, the first step in the process of creating the kind of life you want involves your taking stock of “what is” going on here and now.

2. Create A New Vision For This Next Stage Of Your Life –

The second essential thing you can do is to get to work on a new vision for this next stage of your life, one that takes into consideration the things you have identified as currently working and not working. This is your starting point.

And please remember the more specific you make your new vision, the easier and quicker it will be to manifest the kind of life you want for as the old cliché goes – if you don’t know where you are going, you’re likely to end up there.”

So take the time to describe the essential elements of this new life. And be bold and imaginative. Make it an ideal scene and not just something you settle for. And even if you believe this ideal scene is out of reach for you at this moment based on where you are at the moment, do it anyway. Let your heart and your imagination loose. What do you really want to do to earn a living and contribute something of value? What skills do you need to work in this field or to open that kind of business you want? Where do you want to live? What kind of financial stability do you want to have?

Don’t forget to include your personal relationships in your ideal scene. Your health, the contributions you want to make to your family, your community, and to the future. And remember be bold and imaginative because you have the right to live the life you were born to live.

Finally please remember Management Guru, Peter Drucker’s sage advice, “If you want to know the future invent it.” For in the end, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

And this is only the beginning. As I said, in the coming weeks leading authors and experts on careers will share their insights, strategies and opportunities with you here in this column. You can also learn more by joining the AgeNation Community for free at www.agenation.com/join. And don’t forget to get your free copy of Thrive, Volume One, it includes insights from Mark Victor Hansen, Dr. Hyla Cass, Jeddah Mali, Michael Gelb, Robin Fisher Roffer and Sedena and myself

So here’s to a bright and remarkable tomorrow that we can start living today! Here’s to all of us being able to say – “Over the hill and out of luck? Not a chance!”

George Cappannelli is co-Founder of AgeNation and President and CEO of The Information and Training Company. He is an world-class consultant, author and expert on change. Over the last 25 years he has worked with hundreds of leading organizations, the people who run them and hundreds of thousands of individuals in the public sector. He books include: Say Yes To Change, Authenticity, It’s About Time, I Dream of A New America and the soon to be released, Do Not Go Quietly, A Guide To Conscious Living and Wise Aging in the 21st Century. For more information on consulting and coaching services visit www.agenation.com/consulting or www.georgecappannelli.com.

Judith Fine and Paul Ross do a lot more than write great travel articles and take world class photographs that capture the spirit of remarkable destinations, they belong to a special breed of adventures who forge paths that others of us can follow not only to explore new geography but to uncover new experiences – eye and heart opening experiences – experiences that help us to understand other cultures, to connect with other people and learn more about this remarkable and extraordinary earth that we are privileged to call home. In keeping with the mission of AgeNation, Judith and Paul will soon be announcing some remarkable journeys for AgeNation Community members.

It’s everywhere, all the time, always around us. It’s there when we wake up in the morning, get the paper, open the blinds, heat water, walk, go online, work, meet, eat, greet and sleep.

It’s the particular sounds you hear and don’t hear, listen to and try to ignore.

In Scotland, there were the sounds of the wind and rain that lashed our hair and faces on the dramatic isle of Skye and the haunting tenor and bass drones of a lone bagpipe player who piped for tourists in Edinburgh. We stood still in the middle of a busy street, overcome by sadness, pride, and a host of emotions that had no name.

In central Portugal, we walked with a chorus of men who played the tinny, clanging chocalhos–sheep bells that were strung over their bodies from shoulder to hip like a sash.

In the historic village of Monsanto, a warm, open-hearted woman played the adufe, a square tamborine that reportedly goes back to Biblical times and was once played by Miriam, the sister of Moses. In the Beiras and Barraida regions, it was the swishing of wine in the mouths of wine experts, and the spitting of red and white wines that were pronounced as fine, fruity, balanced, leggy and tannic.

In Norway, there was the sharp ping and crack our ice-cube glass made when it slipped out of our hands in an ice bar and splattered on the icy floor.

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And the pelting rain that bounced off the ground as we ran for the shelter of a gourmet restaurant in Stavanger, which has been made rich by oil money.

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In Vienna, we sat in what may have been the summer residence of Beethoven, looking out the window at the thin blossoms on the trees and, through headphones, listening to the swelling outpouring of the musical genius.

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On a Uniworld boat that sailed on the Danube through Eastern Europe, we listened to presentations about the terrible war in the former Yugoslavia, told from different sides.

The passengers sighed, huffed, whispered, groaned or held their breath, depending upon how they received the information, and what they thought about it.

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In Vienna, there was the creaking of the wooden floor where Sigmund Freud received patients like the famed Wolf Man, as he puffed the pipe and cigars that would kill him and analyzed the seen and unseen forces that wrestle and grapple in  the human mind.

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On the Journey Through Hallowed Ground in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, we listened to the recreated sounds of cannons that exploded on battlefields where more than half a million humans sacrificed their lives on both sides of the slavery and secession issues.

And, at home, at night, under the covers, when the lights were out, our own giggles about silly things that happened, and our joy at being alive.

May the sounds of life awaken you to the thrill of existence everywhere you go, and remind you of how lucky we are to have been chosen to live. May there be love and laughter in you and around you, and may each year bring more sounds, more variety, more depth and more passion to your inner and outer world.

Happy year end.

Judie + Paul

Jeddah Mali is one of the truly gifted and grounded teachers in the field of spiritual development. In this article, she shares her eminently practical and yet profoundly moving reminders about the preciousness of life, the miraculous nature of the universe and the opportunity each of us has to live a life of greater meaning and purpose. She also calls our attention to the value of mindfulness and reminds us that it is an important and continually present doorway to higher consciousness something that is a particularly important part of the AgeNation mission of living consciously and aging wisely.

A Wellness Post by Jeddah Mali

When we wake up each morning, do we give orders for the sun to pass over the sky, for the birds to start singing, for all the creatures to awake and go about their business? Do we send instructions for our breathing to change its rhythm, for our pupils to bring in the correct amount of light? Do we increase our heart rate so we can be more active? Do we signal for the tide to turn, the moon to wane, the seasons to pass? No, it’s obvious that we don’t. But if we’re not doing it, what is? What is taking care of it all? When we stop to consider the world around us, even if we just look at our own body, we see that life is full of unexplained miracles. Taking place every single second of every single minute. And not just the odd one or two. Thousands of them. Something’s taking care of it all, and whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s doing it so consistently and so precisely that we have come to rely on its delivery.

I often like to imagine exactly how much brilliance goes into each tiny facet of life. If someone asked you to come up with a design for a warm energy source that was the exact distance from the Earth for life to flourish, for the seasons to be possible and for all the processes of nature to exist in symbiosis – would you be able to come up with the Sun? Not the idea of the sun but the actual sun itself! What about designing, and making, a being that is connected at all times to a life giving energy source (which is invisible) but the being also simultaneously appears to be an individual unit (which you can see but which is actually a temporary illusion). Not only that but this being has to be able to think, feel and move. The thinking part has to be invisible, the feeling part can be discerned in the body but not seen by the eye and the movement part has to use the previous two elements to judge its effectiveness. OK. And what’s more the being has to have the faculty of knowing, a level of communication beyond thought, emotions and actions. And while you’re at it, can you make the physical body, although temporary, to be full of complex processes, both seen and unseen, which are synergistically perfect and at the same time, age. Uhmmm! Mind boggling isn’t it? We’re already stumped and we’ve only outlined the basics!

So whatever came up with the design and working of the human being is not only intelligent, it’s able to sustain complex systems and structures simultaneously and effortlessly. And we could go through every facet of life on Earth and find the same story. Flowers, insects, bird migration, whales. An overwhelming display of precision and intelligence. The interweaving of seen and unseen threads in an endless dance. We don’t need to look far in nature to see that one of the strongest qualities of this energy is beauty.

Left to its own devices, it lends itself to beauty. The shine on a horses coat, a sky ablaze with colour, the metallic shimmer of an insect’s armour, the smell of orange blossom, dew drops hung on cobwebs. And not just things, thoughts can be beautiful, emotions can be beautiful, smiling can be beautiful.

How much does it cost to have access to such an incredible environment? What is the price for such a system. It’s free. It’s given freely in every moment. The energy source of life is abundant. We can fashion it into whatever we choose. It’s not stipulated that we must create one form over another. It is completely without preference. So in addition to its intelligence, precision and consistency, we can say that it is also benevolent. It gives without end and it gives without expectation. If we consider the created world in this way, it is of course, incredible. And there’s a sense of wonder and appreciation that naturally arises. A sense of connectedness.

No matter how difficult our challenges can be, no matter how much we might struggle with life, contemplation of the beauty of life can lift our hearts and minds. It can reconnect us to what is real and true. Once we connect with this sense of appreciation., we wonder how we ever felt grumpy or ungrateful. Of course, there will still be income tax and rainy days. There will still be mother-in-laws and traffic jams. There will still be bad hair days and toothpaste tubes squeezed the wrong way. But is that where we want to put our focus, when we’re literally surrounded by beauty and intelligence and knowing what we know now about how this energy works?

When we’re looking at the bigger picture, what happens? Our experience of life changes. Nothing on the outside has to change. It all happens on the inside. And with this shift, we start to see beauty everywhere, we start to see intelligence everywhere, and reliability and precision and benevolence! We start to love life, we start to love the very same life we were just complaining about. And then something very magical happens – and this is where I feel the greatest awe and reverence – life loves us back. And that is when we realize that in addition to all the qualities we have identified, this energy that we are, The Sea of Awareness, is also sentient. Sentience is conscious knowing. It is bringing our world into being and our being into the world. The more we know the sea of awareness, the more it knows us. For there is only one and we are all of it.

This is my love letter to the world. It is my appreciation for all we have and all we are. May we smile often.

What about your experience with The Sea of Awareness?  Do you have examples of from your own life of how even in the middle of significant challenges you have experienced the beauty of life?

Jeddah has studied with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness Ajahn Buddhadassa, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Master Goenka and realised teachers in the Tibetan, Theravadan and Bhutanese traditions of Buddhism. She is a leading teacher in the consciousness movement. Visit Jeddah on the Wellness and Transitions pages and at www.jeddahmali.com.

A champion of the new economics, Hazel provides us with insight into why she believes economics has come to dominate our contemporary landscape and distort our perspectives. ‘New economics’ can provide us with valuable and powerful alternatives. So whether you are young and just starting out or you are a Baby Boomer, elder or older GenXer planning for or already dealing with retirement; whether you have money or need money, whether you are interested saving or spending money, in personal finance or the national debt, you will find some provocative ideas here. After all, that’s what living consciously and aging wisely are all about.

By Hazel Henderson (This article was featured in the February 2006 issue of Vermont Commons & New Economics Institute Blog – Reposted by permission of the author)

The word is out that economics, never a science, has always been politics in disguise. I have explored how the economics profession grew to dominate public policy and trump so many other academic disciplines and values in our daily lives. Economics and economists view reality through the lens of money. Everything has its price, they believe, from rain forests to human labor to the air we breathe. Economic textbooks, Gross National Product (GNP) and the statistics on employment, productivity, investment, and globalization—all follow the money. Happily, all this focus on money is leading to the widespread awareness of ways money is designed, created and manipulated. This politics of money is at last unraveling centuries of mystification.

Civic action with local currencies, barter, community credit and the more dubious rash of digital cybermoney all reveal the politics of money. Economics is now widely seen as the faulty sourcecode deep in societies’ hard drives….replicating unsustainability: booms, busts, bubbles, recessions, poverty, trade wars, pollution, disruption of communities, loss of cultural diversity and bio-diversity. Citizens all over the world are rejecting this malfunctioning economic sourcecode and its operating systems: the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and imperious central banks. Its hard-wired program: the now derided “Washington Consensus” recipe for hyping GNP-growth is challenged by the Human Development Index (HDI), Ecological Footprint Analysis, the Living Planet Index, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, the Genuine Progress Index and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness…not to mention scores of local city indices such as Jacksonville, Florida’s Quality Indicators for Progress, pioneered by the late Marian Chambers in 1983.

As with politics, all real money is local, created by people to facilitate exchange and transactions, and it is based on trust. The story of how this useful invention, money, grew into abstract national fiat currencies backed only by the promises of rulers and central bankers is being told anew. We witness how information technology and deregulation of banking and finance in the 1980s helped create today’s monstrous global casino where $1.5 trillion worth of fiat currencies slosh around the planet daily via mouse clicks on electronic exchanges, 90% in purely speculative trading.

New Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke opined that the mystery of low bond yields and interest rates was due to a “global savings glut.” Former Fed Chairman Greenspan, whose zero real interest rates flooded the US economy with excess liquidity and helped create the dot-com, housing, and global asset bubbles, declared himself “perplexed.” The anomaly involves the global economic imbalances between the USA, the world’s largest debtor—borrowing the lion’s share of global capital—and the developing countries of Asia and those exporting oil as the world’s new lenders. I doubt there is a “global savings glut” or a “Shift of Thrift” from indebted U.S. household’s zero saving rates to thrifty Asian savers as claimed in The Economist editorial of Sept. 24, 2005. My view is that there’s a global flood of fiat paper money—mostly trillions of US dollars—amplified by the pyramiding of financial “innovations” (derivatives, hedge funds, offshore “special purpose entities,” currency speculation, and tax havens) vis-à-vis real production of goods and services in the real world.

Today, we see worldwide experimentation with local exchange, barter and swap clubs, such as Deli-Dollars, LETS, Ithaca Hours and other scrip currencies in the USA and Canada. Billions of people still live in traditional non-money societies and the world’s mostly female voluntary sectors. I have described these huge uncharted sectors as the “Love Economy” estimated by the Human Development Report (United Nations Development Program 1995) as $16 trillion simply missing from economists’ global GDP that year of $24 trillion. Others have described these non-money sectors, notably Karl Polanyi in Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies (1968); Lewis Hyde in The Gift (1979); Genevieve Vaughan in For-Giving (1997); Dallas Morning News financial editor, Scott Burns in Home, Inc (1975); Edgar Cahn’s No More Throw Away People (2004) and his time-banking programs now emulated worldwide (The Time Dollar How To Manual, www.timedollar.org).

All this hands-on experimenting resulted in an explosion of grassroots awareness about the nature of money itself. As local groups and communities created their own local scrip currencies and exchange systems, they learned about economists’ deepest secret: money and information are equivalent—and neither is scarce! As money morphed from stone tablets, metal coins, gold and paper to electronic blips of pure information—the economic theories of scarcity and competition began to be bypassed by electronic sharing and community cooperation. Barter, dismissed in economic textbooks as a primitive relic—went hi-tech. eBay, the world’s largest garage sale, is an example of how to bypass existing markets.

People began to see how central banks and national money-systems control populations by macro-economic managing of scarcity, employment levels, availability of mortgages and car loans, via the money-supply, credit, interest rates and all the secretive levers and spigots used by central bankers. Even Nobel prizes were politicized as mathematicians in 2004 challenged the so-called “Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics” demanding its de-linking from the Nobel prizes and to confess its real name, “The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics.” The mathematicians, Peter Nobel, grandson of Nobel and many other scientists object that economists misuse mathematics to hide their faulty assumptions—and that economics is not a science but a profession. The row over the 2004 Bank of Sweden Prize was because its recipients had authored a 1977 paper with a mathematical model purporting to “prove” why central banks should be independent of political control—even in democracies. Central banking too, is politics in even deeper disguise, as I describe in “21st Century Strategies for Sustainability.”

Today, rapid social learning about the politics of money and how it functions is revealing this key mythology underlying our current societies and its transmission belt: that faulty economic source code still replicating today’s unsustainable poverty gaps, energy crises, and resource depletion. Climate change creeping upon us for 25 years is the latest media wake up call, and predictably economists quickly “captured this issue for our profession,” as a UK economics group put it (Henderson, 1996), to promote their pollution and C02 trading “markets.” In spite of such efforts, the defrocking of economics, the deconstructing of money systems and the growth of all the healthy local, real world alternatives is propagating widely. The World Social Forum launched in sunny Porto Alegre in 2000 by Brasilian reformers is one of many such worldwide movements. Argentina’s default in 2001 taught its citizens that they could trust their own local scrip, flea markets and electronic swap systems more than the country’s official currency: the peso. Argentina, Brasil and Venezuela have announced they will repay their IMF loans in full—to free their economies from “Washington Consensus” prescriptions.

I have documented over the years many of the pioneers of money reform, from the Time Store in Cincinnati in the 1890s; Ralph Borsodi’s “Constants” in Exeter, NH in 1972; and during the 1930s “bank holiday,” Vermont’s own Malted Cereals Company scrip, issued in Burlington and the Wolfboro Chamber of Commerce’s scrip in New Hampshire. The Chicago Plan, promoted in the 1930s by University of Chicago economists sought to reform money-creation by private banks as debt. Through this fractional reserve system, banks are only required to keep less than 10% of their capital in reserve. Banks can lend out the rest at interest, simply creating money out of thin air as those loans in their accounting entries! The American Monetary Institute (www.monetary.org) founded by Stephen Zarlenga, has revived the Chicago Plan, which would raise the fraction of reserves banks must hold—and return the national money-creation function to the federal government. Money would be created and spent into circulation through building and maintaining public infrastructure, roads, education and vital services. Such interest-free money would save municipalities and states billions in interest payments on their bonds and prevent accumulation of debts that lead to bubbles, booms and busts. Ken Bohnsack’s Sovereignty Bill promotes these reforms, all summarized in Zarlanga’s The Lost Science of Money (2004) and The Truth in Money Book by Theodore R. Thoren and Richard F. Warner.

Other perennials—E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), James Robertson’s Future Wealth (1989), Margrit Kennedy’s tireless teachings, and a record of Robert Swann’s work and papers on community economics—are all available at the E. F. Schumacher Society’s Library (www.smallisbeautiful.org).  The Society, engaged in both theory and practice, founded the SHARE micro-credit system in 1981, created Deli Dollars and other customer financing methods in 1989, and is about to help launch the BerkShare local currency program. Since its founding in 1980, the Society has documented other community credit pioneering, such as Michael Linton’s LETS experiments, Paul Glover’s Ithaca Hours, and other projects all highlighted at its 2004 conference Local Currencies in the Twenty-First Century. Bernard Lietaer’s The Future of Money (2001); Lynn Twist’s The Soul of Money (2004); William Krehm’s COMER Newsletter (www.comer.org) and James Robertson and Josef Huber’s Creating New Money (2004) continue to inform us.

My bookshelf on alternative economics, barter, credit and currency system continues to grow, and includes Ralph A. Mitchell and Neil Shafer’s indispensable,  eye-opening self-published Standard Catalog of Depression Scrip of the United States in the 1930s (Krause Publications, Iola, WI) (1984). It contains thousands of pictures of alternative scrip currencies issued in almost every US state and city and many in Canada and Mexico after the Great Crash of 1929 and the bank failures that followed. During the 1980’s in all my talks across North America advocating local self-reliance and alternatives to fiat money, I carried this heavy volume along to show how local inventiveness helped overcome the failures of national banking and finance. People would raise their hands in recognition as I would show on overheads the scrip used in their state. “I remember these in my Dad’s bureau!” “My Mom used that to buy our groceries!”

So, today, as the global casino again reaches crises of abstraction, derivatives, currency futures, and financial bubbles—we have been here before. Today’s global imbalances, deficits, bouncing currencies, poverty and debt crises require a systemic redesign of that faulty economic sourcecode. Worried finance ministers and central bankers call vainly for a “new international financial architecture.” They do little but fret about this behind closed doors, at meetings of the G-8, WTO, and in Jackson Hole and Davos. Some clever libertarians try to beat the bankers at their own game with global digital currencies backed by gold, including e-gold Ltd, Gold Money and Web Money. Based in offshore havens, Nevis, Jersey, Moscow, and Panama, they have become platforms for cyber-crooks (Business Week, January 9, 2006). The rest of us are redesigning healthy homegrown sustainable local economies—all over the world.

Before we fall into “either/or” errors, we should avoid doctrinaire “smallness,” ideological localism, and knee-jerk libertarianism. None can protect local communities from the ravages of market fundamentalist-driven globalization. Like it or not, we are all “glocal” now. Communities, like cells in the body-politic and the body, need boundaries or membranes to keep out elements destructive to the cell’s integrity. But all cell membranes are semi-permeable to allow needed elements, information and energy exchanges from the environment to pass through. In today’s information saturated world, communities need to understand anew which elements to reject and which to embrace. Wholesale rejection can lead to rigidity, xenophobia, and misreading of history. Wholesale acceptance of current unsustainable economic global trends will surely lead to loss of local culture and biodiversity and to resource-depletion. We humans have been adept at creating new scenarios and technologies that mirror our lack of systemic knowledge and foresight. From such social changes and unanticipated consequences, we must then learn and evolve—or suffer ecological collapse.

Hazel Henderson has authored many books since Creating Alternative Futures with Foreword by E. F. Schumacher (1978, 1996). She co-created with the Calvert Group, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, regularly updated at www.calvert-henderson.com. She serves on the Advisory Board of the E. F. Schumacher Society and often teaches at Schumacher College in Britain. She is currently writing (with co-author Simran Sethi) the companion book to her TV series, ETHICAL MARKETS aired on PBS stations nationally and on TV channels in Brasil and other countries. www.hazelhenderson.com.

In this short, but powerful article Dr. Pat Love, leading expert on love and intimacy, reminds us that in these challenging financial times it is easy to lose site of what is truly important and to visit our frustration, fear and confusion on those we love. As a result we can trigger relationship problems that compound our financial problems and, in the process we can sacrifice intimacy and the true abundance that relationship brings to us. By being more mindful and conscious of our lives we can avoid unnecessary trouble.

By Dr. Pat Love

Surely there’s not a person reading this who has not be challenged by the current economic environment. If you are fortunate enough to be financially fit to weather this imperfect storm, then you probably know someone not quite as lucky or well-prepared. When friends and family suffer, we suffer too. Financial hardship comes with its own brand of stress because it affects every aspect of our life, beginning with survival, and when survival is involved, there are no small issues. An unpaid bill becomes competition for your next meal; a child’s rudimentary school expense becomes a budget breaker. All this added strain can cause distance and disappointment in relationships. A man might feel like a failure because he doesn’t have immediate remedies for daily financial needs; a woman might fear not only for her own welfare but for her loved ones. Without awareness and forethought, shame and fear can drive a wedge in your relationship. Men may shut down or get angry; women may complain, longing for reassurance that’s difficult to guarantee.

The good news is: relationships are one of the strongest buffers against tough times. If you let the challenges bring you closer by putting two shoulders behind the same wheel, weathering this storm will make your commitment more seaworthy and your love more trustworthy. To use this opportunity to your advantage:

1. Make a plan together
2. Set aside time to assess and reassess your progress
3. Celebrate even small successes
4. Don’t forget to use children, family and friends as support
5. Share your love, because unlike money, the more you give away, the more you have

Distinguished professor, Certified Love Educator, Pat Love, Ed.D. is known for warmth, humor and commitment to learning. For more than twenty-five years, she has contributed to relationship education and personal development through her books, articles, training programs, speaking and media appearances. Visit Pat on the Relationships and Transitions pages and at www.patlove.com.

In this article, Amory Lovins, MacArthur Fellow, consultant physicist and Co-Founder of The Rocky Mountain Institute, offers us a clear, cogent and insightful overview on subject of capitalism, tracing its evolution from industrial capitalism to natural capitalism. Along the way he reminds us of two of the essential ingredients that have been missing from the contemporary valuation of capital and how the Next Industrial Revolution can lead us into a genuine dialogue on things that will make our lives more effective and our future more constructive. While of essential concern to people of all ages, these topics have special relevance to those of us who are Boomers, elders and GenXers who have been dramatically impacted by the financial crisis and who still have a number of vital years left to live. Here’s Part One of this two part series.

By Amory Lovins

Capitalism is supposed to be the productive use of and reinvestment in capital. But what is capital? There are several kinds, but industrial capitalism deals only with two: money and goods. There are at least two more, namely people and nature. Without people, there is no economy; without nature, there are no people – indeed there is no life – so leaving these two out is a very material omission.

The end of the twentieth century saw two great shifts in political economy. The one that historians noticed was the collapse of communism and the apparent victory of market economics or of capitalism (they’re not the same thing, and we’re not sure yet which one was the winner). Perhaps less noticed was the beginning of the end of the war against the earth and the rise of this different way of doing business that we call natural capitalism. Paul Hawken chose that phrase as the title partly to indicate that this kind of capitalism plays with a full deck, dealing with all four kinds of capital, particularly emphasizing natural capital. It turns out that you make more money with four kinds than with two. I think Paul also wished to indicate that industrial capitalism is a temporary aberration, is unnatural—not because it’s capitalist but because it defies its own logic by liquidating and not valuing its own largest source of capital, the natural world.

We are too well aware of the erosion of living systems. Everywhere in the world every major ecosystem is in decline. This matters to business. The importance of natural capital was re-emphasized almost a decade ago when a $200 million investment and a lot of good science went into Biosphere Two, a structure in the Arizona desert. Yet it failed to provide breathable air for eight people—one of the many nifty services that Biosphere One, outside those walls, provides free every day for six billion of us. All the bio-geo-chemical cycles of Biosphere One are vital to our existence. Scientists trying to figure out an economic value for these cycles typically come up with numbers at least as big as the Gross World Product. But whatever the right number is, we know it’s not zero, and as Peter Bradford reminds us, it’s better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.

No doubt one could spend decades, especially in the academy, debating what the right number is, and then more decades in Congress debating how best to signal that value in prices. I think it makes a lot more sense, especially given the present urgency, to figure out a way of doing business as if nature and people were properly valued, but without needing to know exactly what they’re worth or how that value would be signaled in the market. This is what natural capitalism does, and it is very profitable even today, when nature and people are valued at approximately zero.

Nature’s value comes less from resources than from ecosystem services, the dozens of services that we can’t live without and that are very mysterious, such as regulating the composition of the atmosphere and regulating the climate (until we started experimenting with it), cycling nutrients, and controlling pests and pathogens. We have no idea how to replicate these services, with very few exceptions. We do know, for example, how to pollinate plants—that’s good, because bees are dying around the world—but if you try hand-pollinating the world’s plants, you’ll find that it does become tedious. And then there’s the matter of assimilating and detoxifying society’s wastes, and so on. The trouble is that as these ecosystems go into decline, they fall behind on their delivery of the services we need to live. The human prospect is therefore becoming limited not by boats and nets, but by fish in the sea; not by plows but by fertile land; not by pumps but by fresh water; not by chainsaws but by forests.

The last time people in an industrialized country were seriously limited by a shortage of something was a quarter of a millennium ago at the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution. At that time, to oversimplify a bit, there weren’t enough people in England weaving cloth, for example, to make it affordable for most customers. Yet the notion of increasing labor productivity was unknown then. If anyone had gone into Parliament around 1750 and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll just make weavers a hundred times more productive,” nobody would have understood this idea, let alone thought it was possible. But that is exactly what happened as profit-maximizing capitalists teamed up with technological innovators, and soon a Lancashire spinner could produce the cloth that had previously required two hundred weavers. As that capability spread through one sector after another, creating a middle class and affordable mass goods and purchasing power and all the artifacts we see around us, we came to call it, rightly, the Industrial Revolution. Its logic was simple and correct, at a time when the relative scarcity of people was limiting progress in exploiting seemingly boundless nature, the obvious answer was to make people a hundred times more productive.

That logic of economizing on the scarcest resource remains perennially valid, but meanwhile the pattern of scarcity has quietly reversed. In the next Industrial Revolution, now underway, we’re dealing with abundant people and scarce nature. It is no longer people but nature we need to be using far more productively, wringing four or ten or a hundred times the work from each unit of energy, water, materials, topsoil, or whatever we’re borrowing from the planet.

That radical increase in resource productivity is the first of the four interlinked principles of natural capitalism. The second is the redesign of production along biological lines—with closed loops, no waste, and no toxicity. The third is the new business model that shifts commerce from intermittently making and selling things to providing a continuous flow of value and service in relationships that reward following the first two steps. Fourthly, you make a lot of money this way; so what do you do with the profit? Well, a capitalist is supposed to invest profit into productive capital, and the most productive kind of capital to reinvest in is typically the kind you’re shortest of—in this case, nature (and indeed human culture and community)—so that is something any prudent capitalist would know to do.

The First Principle of Natural Capitalism

Let’s start with the first principle—radically increased resource productivity. You’d think that after centuries or millennia of wringing out waste, there wouldn’t be much left. But fortunately we have learned that waste is an expanding and almost infinite source. In this country the amount of material we dig up and move around and process and use and throw away amounts to about twenty times one’s body weight per person per day, and that includes only water that’s returned contaminated, not water that’s returned clean. Worldwide, this flow, which is doing such harm to nature, is close to a half trillion tons per year—and yet only 1% of it is going into durable products; the other 99% is waste.

We’ve already cut out $300 billion a year’s worth of energy waste in the United States, but we’re still wasting $300 billion a year’s worth. The efficiency of converting fuel at the power plant into light in a room is about 3%; our cars use 1% of their fuel energy to move the driver; our power plants throw away as waste heat the same amount of energy that Japan uses for everything, and even their economy is not yet one-tenth as energy-efficient as the laws of physics permit. Fortunately, we now have very powerful techniques that can triple or quadruple the energy and water efficiency of existing buildings, while in new buildings the energy usage can be reduced by 90%, and the building then not only works better, it costs less to build.

We’ve already done quite a lot to reduce energy waste, but there is much more that can be done. For example, in 1976 I published an article in Foreign Affairs called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?”— so named thanks partly to my Amherst exposure to Robert Frost. In that article I contrasted with the official forecast, heading toward the northeast corner, the notion that U.S. energy use might actually stabilize and decline over the next half-century as we used less energy and enjoyed it more by wringing out a lot of the waste in converting, distributing, and using it. We would get the same or better services with less money, more brains, and smarter technology. That heretical prediction is what has actually happened so far. We’re not doing badly, and we now know how to do a great deal better than that original target and do it much more profitably.

Now let me give you a few examples of where the state of the art is. In fact, I’ll take you back a bit, to 1983 technology. I live in a passive-solar banana farm, 7100 feet up in the Rockies. There are basically two seasons: winter and July. The temperature there can on occasion go down to –47°F. You can get frost any day of the year, and we’ve had as long as 39 continuous days of midwinter cloud. Nonetheless, if you come in out of the snowstorm into the atrium in the middle of the building, you find yourself amidst the bananas and jasmine and bougainvillea. You then realize that there isn’t a heating system, because we don’t need one, and it’s cheaper up front not to have one. Our household electric bill would be $5 a month for 4000 square feet if we bought it all instead of making more than that with solar power.

If you were to ask most engineers how thick your insulation should be in a very cold place, you’d probably be told, “Just as much as will pay for itself over the years in saved heating fuel.” That seems to make sense—you don’t want to pay more than it’s worth, do you?—but it’s wrong, because it leaves out something important. I don’t mean the environment, though it leaves that out too. It leaves out the capital cost of the heating system: not just the furnace but the ducts and fans and pipes and pumps and wires and controls and fuel supply that have to be paid for before you can get any heat, and yet none of that is counted in the normal calculation. But when you put in enough superinsulation and superwindows and air-to-air heat exchangers, you don’t need the furnace any more, and these other features cost less to install than a heating system would have cost. This means we had money left over, which we reinvested, along with an extra $1.50 a square foot, to save half of the water use (we were not very ambitious in those days), 99% of the water-heating energy, and 90% of the household electricity—that’s how you get down to $5 a month. And by the way, the house had a perfectly normal construction cost for our area. All the efficiency improvements had a ten-month payback in 1983; today’s technology is much better.

With lower construction cost and better comfort, we’ve gotten rid of cooling equipment in houses in climates where the temperature goes up to 115° F. For example, we helped design an experimental house in California, near Sacramento, where the outdoor temperature can peak at 113° F. It’s an ordinary-looking house and even has a dark roof, required by the homeowners’ association. It was originally designed to use 82% less energy than those built according to the strictest standards in the country (California Title 24, 1992). Yet Pacific Gas & Electric Co. figured that if this design were widely built rather than a one-time experiment, it would be $1,800 cheaper than normal to build and $1,600 cheaper in present value to maintain, because it doesn’t have a heating or cooling system. Still, at the end of a three-day heat wave the neighbors were coming over from their houses, whose three- and five-ton air conditioners couldn’t cope, to take refuge in this one, which had good design and no air conditioner. The last seven improvements that got rid of the air conditioner, by the way, were justified by the savings in capital as well as energy costs, not by the savings in energy alone, so it’s the same methodology that I described earlier.

Similarly, architecture professor Suntoorn Boonyatikarn in Bangkok got rid of 90% of his air-conditioning energy in a very nice house at exactly normal cost. We know how to save 80% to 90% of the energy used by big new office buildings that build faster and cheaper and get better human and market performance. We’ve shown how to save three-quarters of the energy used by one of those big all-glass-and-no-windows office towers in Chicago by fixing it up at no more cost than the regular renovation that saves nothing. Our record so far is designing improvements to an office air-conditioning system in California that would save 97% of the energy with improved comfort and good economics.

Thus there is obviously something wrong with the economic theory of diminishing returns, which says that the more you save, the more and more steeply the cost of the next unit of savings goes up until it costs too much and you have to stop. This is sometimes true at the level of components, but it’s also often untrue at the level of components: for the most common kind of motor, for example, up to at least 300 horsepower there is no correlation whatever between efficiency and price. There should be, because the more efficient motors have more and better copper and iron, but even if they cost more to make, they’re not priced accordingly. I don’t know why, but I’ll take it. The same is true for many other kinds of equipment. Do not assume from economic theory that efficient products must cost more; if you shop around, they often don’t, so our motto is: “In God we trust; all others bring data.”

The way to make the diminishing-returns notion definitely untrue is by combining components artfully into systems, because then if you keep going and save some more, you can often make the cost come down to less than you started with, as when you get rid of the furnace. Then you have very big savings that actually cost less than small savings or no savings. Of course, instead of getting there the long way around, why don’t we just tunnel straight through the cost barrier to our design destination? Then we can profitably get rid of a great deal of muda, a wonderful Japanese word embracing all kinds of waste.

There are two basic ways to tunnel through the cost barrier. The first is to get multiple benefits from single expenditures. There are many opportunities to do this; in fact, the arch that holds up the middle of my house does twelve different things, yet I pay for it only once.

The second way is to take advantage of improvements you’re making anyway for some other reason, as illustrated by that big Chicago office tower I mentioned. The building is twenty years old, so the seals around the windows are failing. All that glass needs to be replaced, and normally you would use the same kind of glass that’s already there, which is so dark that only 9% of the light comes in. We found we could let in almost six times as much light and a tenth less unwanted heat by using a special kind of superwindow that would block the flow of noise and heat four times better. Then we could bounce daylight all the way into the building and use very efficient lights and office equipment, cutting the cooling load fourfold. The cooling system could be made four times smaller and four times more efficient for $200,000 less than renovating the big old one. This saving would pay for the better windows and the lighting retrofit, so you would end up saving three-quarters of the energy at no extra cost.

In industry the opportunities are, if anything, more impressive. There are 35 things you can do to a typical motor system to save about half its energy, not counting the machinery it’s turning. Typically, the after-tax return on investment approaches 200% a year. The reason it’s so inexpensive is that if you pay for the correct seven improvements first, you get 28 more as free by-products. We’ve gained similarly high returns on investment by fixing up microchip fabrication plants to save over half the energy they use to make chilled water and clean air. Other high-return examples include designs to save two-fifths of the energy cost in an already efficient refinery and 70% to 90% in a new supermarket. All these examples markedly improve operational performance.

There have also been radical changes in process design—for example, in microfluidics, an art that can fairly often shrink a large chemical plant to the size of a watermelon! Then there is the revolution in materials durability, longevity, re-use, and frugality: for 37 years I’ve carried in my pocket a little L. L. Bean folding cup of stainless steel, which by now has displaced a great many paper and plastic throw-away cups, and I suspect it will keep on doing so long after I’m gone.

There are often valuable side benefits to efficiency. When a typical office is made more efficient, people will be able to see better what they’re doing, hear themselves think, feel more comfortable, and breathe cleaner air. As a result they will do more and better work, by about 6% to 16%. A typical office pays 100 times as much for people as for energy, so a 1% gain in labor productivity would have the same bottom-line effect as making the energy bill go away, and we are actually seeing an effect from 6 to 16 times that big. There are similar gains in industry, such as 40% higher sales per square foot in well-daylit stores, as well as in education, such as 20% to 26% faster learning in well-daylit schools (we’re trying that now in Brazil). These kinds of benefits are typically one and sometimes two orders of magnitude more valuable than the direct energy or resource savings, and can be marketed accordingly.

When we start putting efficiency techniques together, they interbreed and make new ones. I drive a two-seat Honda Insight hybrid-electric car that gets 67 miles per gallon, but that’s just the beginning of an automotive revolution that can reach all market segments. A typical mid-size suburban assault vehicle recently designed by a little firm I chair, which you will find on the web at www.hypercar.com, is illustrative: the car could be any size, shape, and style you want, but Hypercar, Inc. just happened to start with a mid-size SUV. Unlike most concept cars, this one, called the Revolution, is manufacturable and production-costed. It can accommodate five adults in comfort, up to 69 cubic feet of cargo, or two adults and two kayaks. It can haul half a ton up a 44% grade, yet it weighs less than half as much as a normal car of this class, such as a Lexus RX 300, because it’s made of carbon fiber. This is so strong you could run the car into a wall at 35 miles an hour with no damage to the passenger compartment, or you could run it head-on into a Ford Explorer twice its weight, each going 30 miles an hour, and still be protected from serious injury. It also bounces off a six-mile-an-hour fender-bender with nothing bent.

This car can go from zero to 60 miles an hour in 8.2 seconds, and it gets the equivalent of 99 miles a gallon, which is from five to five-and-a-half times normal efficiency for cars of this class, but it doesn’t actually use any gasoline; it runs electric wheel motors on power from a hydrogen fuel cell, storing the hydrogen safely compressed in tanks that are on the market. It can go 330 miles on just seven and a half pounds of hydrogen. The reason it takes that little is not only that the fuel cell is several times more efficient than an engine, but also that the car is so light, and has so little drag in moving through the air and along the road, that it can cruise at 55 miles an hour on the same power to the wheels that the Lexus RX 300 uses on a hot day to run its air conditioner.

The only emission coming out of this vehicle is water, which tempts me to put a coffee machine in the dashboard. It has a very stiff body, fast all-wheel digital traction control, and a smart semi-active suspension, so it should be very sporty. It can be designed to have none of the top twenty causes of breakdowns in today’s cars, but all of the flexibility and customizability of a “computer with wheels,” where the functionality is in the software and you could do the diagnostics, tune-ups, and upgrades wirelessly in the background. The car can be designed for a 200,000-mile warranty; its body does not rust or fatigue. We believe it can be made at a competitive cost at mid-volume, using dramatically—even up to tenfold—less capital, space, assembly, and parts. So early adopters win.

Why does all this matter? First of all, such vehicles of all shapes and sizes worldwide will ultimately save as much oil as OPEC now sells, giving the United States the potential to save as much oil as Saudi Arabia currently sells to everyone. It’s like drilling in the Detroit Formation and finding an eight-million-barrel-a-day gusher. Such vehicles will also decouple driving from its present impact on both climate and air quality, although not from congestion, and it permits a rapid transition to a climate-safe hydrogen economy in a way that is profitable at each step, starting now. It also enables you to use your car when it’s parked, which is normally about 96% of the time, as a plug-in power plant on wheels that sells back to the grid enough power to pay for half or more of the cost of owning the car. It doesn’t take too many people doing that to put the coal and nuclear plants out of business, because a full fleet of such vehicles would ultimately have five or ten times as much generating capacity as all the power companies now own. About $10 billion has been committed to this line of development since I sneakily put the general approach into the public domain in 1993 and got the auto makers fighting over it.

If aggressively taken up by manufacturers, such cars could enter production in five years, dominate in ten, and put the old way of making cars out of business in twenty. This could be the beginning of the end for the car, oil, steel, aluminum, nuclear, coal, and electricity industries as we know them—but also the beginning of successor industries that are more benign and profitable and fun.

Of course, instead of running out of air, oil, and climate we would then run out of roads, land, and patience. This is a major problem unless we also drive less, which calls for real competition, at honest prices, between all ways of getting around or of not needing to—for example, already being where you want to be so that you needn’t go somewhere else.

The Second Principle of Natural Capitalism

Let me turn to the second principle of natural capitalism—to design production along biological lines, with closed loops, no waste, and no toxicity. The green architect Bill McDonough tells a nice story about this. A division of Steelcase asked him to redesign a cloth, used to cover the backs of office chairs, whose edge trimmings had just been declared by the Swiss government to be a toxic waste because of heavy metals and other toxins used in treating and dyeing the cloth. (That must be why it’s called “dyeing.”) Bill reports assessing 8,000 chemicals used in the cloth business, and rejecting any that could cause cancer, mutations, birth defects, endocrine disruption, persistent toxicity, or bio-accumulation. This left only 38 chemicals that were deemed safe! But those 38 made it possible to produce from natural fibers a cloth that looks better, feels better in your hand, lasts longer, and costs 20% less to produce. That’s because you are using ordinary, not exotic, chemicals, and with nothing left in the process that can hurt the workers and the neighbors, there are no longer any embarrassing conversations with regulatory agencies.

When the Swiss inspectors came back to the factory, they thought their measuring equipment must be broken, because it showed that the water coming out was a bit cleaner than the Swiss drinking water going in. That is because the cloth product was acting as an additional filter. This is an example of what happens, as Bill puts it, when the filters are taken out of the pipes and put where they belong—in the designers’ heads. This is also closed-loop production, because when you’re through with the cloth, you can compost it in your vegetable garden, or if you have a fiber deficiency, you can eat it.

At the University of Zurich, the introductory chemistry laboratory course was annually turning $6,000 of pure simple chemicals into $16,000 of hazardous waste disposal costs. Professor Hanns Fischer came up with the elegant idea of using the same lab techniques but turning some of the exercises around backwards: Why not separate the nasty toxic goo we made in the previous experiment back into the pure simple chemicals we started with? The students thought this was really neat; they volunteered so many nights and weekends to separate waste that they ran out of waste to separate. Waste went down 99%; cost went down $20,000 a year just in that one course. And those students will be very much in demand, because what they were learning from this new pedagogy was not once-through linear thinking but closed-loop cycle thinking, so now they can go out and save the chemical industry.

Another example is DuPont’s films division. Once almost bankrupt, it is now leading its market because the company gets back about $1 billion a year of used film from customers, using reverse logistics. It is made into fresh film cheaper than it could be from virgin materials. In addition, those clever chemists are dematerializing their product: every year they make the film a little bit thinner and stronger. Thinner means fewer molecules and lower production cost; stronger means higher value and higher price. With the cost going down and the price going up, profits go way up. Their then Chairman, Jack Krol, said, “We see no end to this process [of dematerialization].” Krol thought this trick could be kept up “indefinitely”—until, I suppose, DuPont is ultimately selling almost nothing but ideas.

What these various “bioneers” are doing is learning from the 3.8 billion years of Biosphere One design experience—a time of zany experimentation and rigorous testing in which the roughly 99% that didn’t work got recalled by the Manufacturer. There’s a wonderful book about this by RMI’s Director, Janine Benyus, called Biomimicry: Innovations Inspired by Nature, in which she asks, for example, “How do spiders make silk?” Spider silk can be stronger than steel and tougher than the Kevlar in bulletproof vests. Yet making Kevlar requires vats of boiling sulfuric acid and high-pressure extruders. Spiders don’t need that: they make silk in their bellies, at ambient temperature and pressure, out of digested crickets and flies. How do they do that? How do trees turn air and water and soil and sunlight into a sugar called cellulose, as strong as nylon but three times lighter? And then they turn that cellulose into a natural composite called wood, which can actually be stiffer and stronger than steel, aluminum alloy, or concrete—yet trees do not have blast furnaces, smelters, or kilns. How do they do that?

How does the abalone, in seawater at 4°C, self-assemble an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics? (The folks at Sandia National Laboratory have recently figured that one out. Now they can dip a silicon wafer into their magic goo for a few seconds, let it dry, and presto! It’s coated with hundreds or thousands of self-assembled clear layers up to seven times as tough as silica.)

Bioneering and biomimetic design are taking us to a world where the successful businesses take their designs from nature, their values from their customers, and their discipline from the marketplace. (This is exactly what the producers of genetically modified crops forgot to do, which is why their products failed in the market.) It’s a world in which conventional environmental regulation starts to look anachronistic, because so many of the firms that need it will already be out of business, having spent too much money and time making things that nobody wants—things that in the twentieth century we called waste and emissions. We now have a better name: we call them “unsaleable production,” which focuses us on the question, “Why are we making something that nobody wants?” Let’s stop producing it! Let’s design it out. That leads to very powerful innovation.

We typically achieve such innovation faster if we have good feedback. Systems without feedback are stupid by definition; but feedback is simple and powerful. For example, how clean a car would you insist on buying if its exhaust pipe, instead of being aimed at pedestrians, were plumbed back into the passenger compartment? How safe would you build your explosives factory if you also built your house next to it? (That’s what Mr. DuPont did in the old days, and his company has led in industrial safety ever since.) How do you suppose Admiral Rickover solved the problem of ensuring that welders would make extremely high-quality welds in the hulls of nuclear submarines? He told the welders and their bosses that they would all be aboard for the maiden dive.

In Part 2 we will look at the Third and Fourth Principles of Natural Capitalism and talk about how the four principles of natural capitalism fit together.

Amory Lovins, a MacArthur Fellow and consultant physicist, has advised the energy and other industries for nearly four decades as well as the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense. Published in 29 books and hundreds of papers, his work in about 50 countries has been recognized by the “Alternative Nobel,” Blue Planet, Volvo, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, the Happold and Benjamin Franklin Medals, nine honorary doctorates, honorary membership of the American Institute of Architects, and the Heinz, Lindbergh, Time Hero for the Planet, and World Technology Awards. He advises industries and governments worldwide and has briefed 19 heads of state. He co-founded and serves as Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org), an independent, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit think-and-do tank. Much of its work is synthesized in Natural Capitalism (www.natcap.org). RMI spun off E SOURCE (www.esource.com) in 1992 and Fiberforge, Inc. (www.fiberforge.com), which he chaired until 2007, in 1999.

Amory Lovins may be reached through Rocky Mountain Institute.

Rocky Mountain Institute is an independent, nonpartisan, entrepreneurial, nonprofit think-and-do tank in Old Snowmass, Colorado, founded in 1982. Its diverse staff of ~80 foster the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. Half of the Institute’s $10 million budget is earned through programmatic enterprise, chiefly consultancy for the private sector—an effort that advances the goals, refines the content, and spreads the concepts of natural capitalism. The remaining revenue comes from foundation grants and tax-deductible donations. RMI’s work is noted for technical depth, vision across boundaries, creative use of market forces, and engagement with commerce and community (far more than with government; RMI doesn’t lobby or litigate). In seeking new solutions to old problems, its people strive for faith, hope, and clarity; their hierarchy of needs is typically to save the world, have fun, and make money, in that order. RMI’s Annual Report, thrice-a-year Newsletter, and hundreds of popular and technical publications (many free) are available from:

Rocky Mountain Institute
1739 Snowmass Creek Road
Snowmass, Colorado 81654-9199
(970) 927-3851
www.rmi.org

In this article, George Cappannelli, co-founder of AgeNation and author of I Dream of A New America explores some of the challenges we face in America today and invites those of us the world calls Boomers, Elders and older GenXers to get up on our hind legs and bay at the moon of new possibilities. Civic engagement, active participation in determining our political future, using the power of our wisdom and experience to keep the democratic process strong and vibrant, these are some of the things he explores. This is also an essential part of the AgeNation mission and one of the reasons so many Boomers, Elders and older GenXers are choosing to become members of the AgeNation Community.

By George Cappannelli

Clearly the Arab countries are not the only place in the world where people who have been silent too long are waking up. Here in America citizens who share common concerns about the well-being of our democracy and about the abuses that are currently being perpetrated by the few against the many are beginning to find their voice. And frankly it is none too soon!

Spring and Summer saw significant outcries In Ohio and Wisconsin when their governors tried to turn the clock back on voter rights, union bargaining rights and more. Quieter but specific public reactions also occured in NY and California when the governors of those states proposed Medicaid cut impacting the elderly, the poor and disadvantaged children. Now the 99% movement is gaining momentun in cities and towns all across the country.

Amazing, isn’t it? Do you ever look out at the political mess that is unfolding in American and wonder how we got to this place when right and left appear to be permanently divided and far too many on both sides appear to have forgotten about right and wrong, about common decency and compassion, about fairness and justice for all? Do you also ever ask yourself why more of us have not been getting the message that there are some very serious folks out there who are intent on taking apart the last vestiges of the commons and reversing many of the most important advances in health care, social security, public broadcasting and other essential services (called the commons) that some among us have spent the last few hundred years putting in place?

Of course, these serious folks claim they are doing all this in the name of fiscal accountability. And, of course, who can object to the fiscal accountability? But a closer look discloses some serious contradictions in their motives. Of course, we are all in favor of fiscal accountability, but why is it that most of the major budget cuts being recommended by a very consevative miniority focus on programs this group has been trying to eliminate for decades: social security, Medicare and Medicaid, health care, planned parenthood, public broadcasting and more? And why, if they are really committed to fiscal accountability are we not seeing at least equally major cuts being proposed in defense spending, corporate subsidies, high income tax breaks or even, for that matter, in the operating budget for the House itself? Why have none among these serious folks called for a drastic reduction in the salaries and benefits of members of Congress, at least as drastic as those they want Federal and State workers to accept?

You see, there is something fishy about all of this! Having granted and now defended billions in unnecessary tax cuts to the rich, bloated tax incentives and subsidies for corporations who ship jobs and profits overseas and who do not pay their fair share of taxes, and having authorized billions for the conduct of unjustified wars, these same serious folks are now saying we don’t have the money to support the needs of our own citizens. And by the way, they are also saying we should eliminate collective bargaining and turn the social security fund into a bonus pool for those on Wall Street who have already proven they can’t be trusted.

As if this wasn’t already enough to ruin even a modest church social, these same individuals are also beginning to actually say there are simply too many old people in America and, if we don’t cut back on services to them now, they will bankrupt the system. Strange, isn’t it? Researchers have been warning us for decades that eventually more than 50% of our people will be over 50 years of age, just as they have been warning us about climate change, the dangers of our dependence on foreign oil and the wholesale pollution of our air and water, but these serious folks have obviously been too occupied having dinner with lobbyists and too busy watching their stock portfolios to notice?

So what are they really saying? Are they proposing that we euthanize these ‘too many older Americans’ so the wealthiest 5% can keep tax breaks they don’t need, corporations can continue to pay little or no taxes and Wall Street can run away with the rest of the store?

Give me a break! Or maybe that’s what all this is about? Maybe these serious people are trying to break our collective will so they can grab a larger share of the pie. Well, I say it’s time, in fact long past time, for those of us who have been sitting on the sidelines to get up on our hind legs and send a really clear message to those who would destroy this democracy. Let’s tell them that this is still America and that our America is about freedom and justice for all, not just for the privileged few! What do you say? Are you ready to get involved?

There are rallies going on around the country that could use our support. There are emails and calls that can be made to our elected representatives, especially to those who appear to believe they have a mandate to do whatever they want. There are op-ed pieces and letters to the editor of local newspapers that can be written. There are emails we can send and phone calls we can make to friends inviting them to pay attention and get involved.

Please remember, this is not about defending positions being advanced by the right or the left, this is about doing what is right. This is about continuing to keep the dream of America and democracy alive and well.

George Cappannelli is co-Founder of AgeNation and President and CEO of The Information and Training Company. He is an world-class consultant, author and expert on change. Over the last 25 years he has worked with hundreds of leading organizations, the people who run them and hundreds of thousands of individuals in the public sector. He books include: Say Yes To Change, Authenticity, It’s About Time, I Dream of A New America and the soon to be released, Do Not Go Quietly, A Guide To Conscious Living and Wise Aging in the 21st Century. For more information on consulting and coaching services visit www.agenation.com/consulting or www.georgecappannelli.com.

State Governments Moving To Restrict Voter Registration

Legislation already passed in Ohio could deprive nearly 900,000 citizens—mostly seniors, low-income individuals, students, the disabled and people of color—of their voting rights. A similar law was passed in Texas, and more laws are being considered in 20 other states.

With the 2012 election rapidly approaching, this kind of unconscionable behavior could prevent millions of people from exercising their right to vote. Call this Democracy? You’ve gotta be kidding!