nuance intelligence

One of the best articles I have found on this big, great transition we are experiencing is Hazel Henderson’s The New Financiers.  In this piece, Henderson, the founder of Ethical Markets and thought leader for a group of progressive investors and people using money as leverage for change, talks about how consciousness and social capital will balance out the ego-driven money grubbing that exemplifies Wall St, and inform a new group of leaders.

Henderson leads off her piece, “the new financiers will be the high-level information and knowledge brokers – and they will aggregate the new research on global change processes and lead in structuring the deals now creating the growing green economy.  Today information and media drive markets.”

Then she gets to the bottom of the connection, “The new deal-makers value the role of honest, well-managed currencies that remain dependable stores of value and mediums of exchange.  Money is a special kind of information, not a commodity in itself, but rather a brilliant invention of the human mind.  When backed by real-world goods and service, as well as strong contracts, money can accurately track and score human ingenuity, productivity and transactions interacting with the natural wealth of resources of our home: Planet Earth.”

I think this is probably the most eloquent description yet of the change I have been contemplating for nearly a decade.  … and that’s not even the point.  ; )

Deeper in the piece, she talks about the epochal transition we are in, “high-level information and knowledge brokers who understand our Information Age and the great transition from the fossil-fueled Industrial Age to our new Solar Age.”  Wow.  The Solar Age.

As I recount the impact that this piece has on me — and it’s profound, as an elegant telling of the story of my evolving thought — I always talk about the wisdom in the concept of The Solar Age.  The funny thing is, I took so much more way from those three little words that she wrote.  In my memory, there are paragraphs about this concept, but in the actual article, it’s just three little words.  I took so much away from it.  Consider:

• Energy: not only will the sun provide us with more energy in the future, when you realize that oil is really compressed organic matter from v-e-r-y long ago, the sun has always been providing us with our energy. Human life is inextricable from photosynthesis. Realize also, that the sun really is one huge nuclear reactor hanging in the sky.
• Air: as we consider the sun in the sky, it draws our attention to the space between here and there, specifically the atmosphere, a metaphor for the increasing pollution we keep dumping there, reducing our most-important life sustaining force.
• Physics: Wall St. bankers self-aggrandizement to the contrary, neither New York, the USA, nor the Earth are the center of our greater human systems.

• Systems Thinking: as we contemplate the inter-connected nature of things, the role of the sun helps us appreciate the dynamic nature of living systems, and just how big and complex the models really are.

• Awareness: as we contemplate the sun, we realize how small our economic challenges are in relation to the ecology of our lives.
• Consciousness: in the stillness of silence, we find our connection to the light.

All that from three little words.

Now, a quick Google search turns up about 13 million references to The Solar Age, so it’s clearly not something brand new.  But it was new for me, and represents another important puzzle piece — maybe even an anchoring corner — for the map we are just beginning to build about where our society goes from here.

Please read The New Financiers and tune into Ethical Markets.  We’re on that path, and hope you will join us.