By Lavinia Weissman, Founder of WorkEcology
August 19, 2009
Hazel, in 2007, you called me to tell me you would be joining others in Brussels to launch a new economic thought leadership called Beyond GDP. As you know, I personally took this to heart because it is tied so much to the work of my thought leadership I describe as WorkEcology. I am writing you today to ask your help to make public my view and vision and let me draw from the many people who have gathered to learn and act on your messages contained within EthicalMarkets.com.
During the past 3 months, I have worked more aggressively, picking up pace with my own outreach to only encounter a politic of obstruction and a resignation at the places I travel. This suggests that the global society cannot leap beyond the harm of the way of the consumptive economy to discover sustainable methods within markets, pass legislation through government and empower people to join to form educational communities of learning and action.
I have given this much thought in the last few weeks, as I watch people in the CSR community stay focused on their personal agendas and in some instances gather to discuss the economy, climate change and seek solutions or build new tools. Yet today, the most precious view of how our economy stays ecologically balanced through health is continuously ignored because of the emotions that rise in these discussions or due to resignation that this, even more than global warming, is a frontier no one seems to be able to tackle.
As a person who has impossible dreams every day, I refused to believe this. I have been campaigning to win votes for a grant competition sponsored by NAU that Ethical Market’s executive director, Rosalinda Sanquiche, nominated me for at Grant for Change. To join the WorkEcology Grant for Change campaign, people can go directly to the WorkEcology voting site or to www.nau.com.
And, I will be giving more voice to WorkEcology in a live broadcast convened by Peter Deitz, Founder of SocialActions.com on August 24th at 2PM EST. To register and join a live audience with Peter Deitz and myself to learn more about the new metrics of health, people can register here: Lavinia-Weissman-of-WorkEcology on Social Actions radio.
University of Maryland- based Economist Herman Daly has outlined a basis for economic ecology that provides a framework of understanding where markets, open access, intellectual property and public goods co-exist simultaneously. When there is an imbalance in any one sector in the ecology of any aspect of an economy, the capacity of an economy’s citizens is obstructed or greatly challenged. This thought leadership was the basis for the establishment of a new professional society, the International Society for Ecological Economics. I am a member of this society.
In establishing my membership with ISEE, I was asked to meet with Gary Flomenhart, Faculty and Associate of the Gund Institute, University of Vermont. At this time, Gund Institute does not have an initiative with health. In my dialogue with Gary this summer, I explained my work re: health so we could establish an opening with Gary’s thoughts on public assets and taxation from an ecological view. Gary then provided me background from his years of study with Herman Daly.
From my perspective, Daly’s thought leadership provides an open door to my thought leadership on the ecology of health. The cost of resources to sustain health vastly exceed in times of illness the capacity of what any one person can generate. This is particularly the situation for any person or family living with chronic illness. The market place no longer provides a 100% guarantee that any one person can afford the cost of market-based resources of health.
The ecology of health economics is further challenged by the conflicting and confusing format and methods of which a person has to gather education on health in this country. This is further confused in the Open Access Domain with a belief that freely accessible information and programs is sufficient to sustain the knowledge and education on healthy practices. It is often not clear how valid the information is at the time it is obtained. Translating conflicting sources of information from credentialed resources often builds more confusion rather than providing an education and knowledge from which people can see the choices they have and work with the right expert to sort through that knowledge in the present moment without doing harm.
The United States to date, tracing back to when Theodore Roosevelt first spoke about health care reform in 1912, has been unable to legislate through its political system an economic stabilization plan that addresses the rapid inflation of medical resources covered by insurance. The status quo challenges people to parcel wages and sustain themselves for resources they need outside of the health care delivery system to sustain their health, e.g. quality food, clean air, clean water, alternative medicine and housing with healthy infrastructure.
In the United States, where “survival of the fittest” is a societal value and way of life, we are learning harsh lessons now that we have been ignoring for years. In the United States, our mechanical dedication to the belief that our economy can sustain a full employment model that assures every citizen access to health benefits and sustainable wages to assure housing, food and other resources that assure health living is now being challenged beyond the imagination of emotionally stable people who do live making wise choices for their health from how they eat, seek treatment and create a lifestyle and condition of health.
The current state of how academics, scientific researchers, government, legislators, commercial business and citizen groups relate reflects a post modern environmental movement that is based on protest, debate and assumption that intelligent behavior in any form will create change. We have not constructed a political and economic environment out of fear of creating socialism which gives power to unique communities of practice that gather to find their own solutions that embrace imagination and empower innovation.
The economics of health is a practice that requires the most high degree of consciousness that will insure dignity for the people who seek to exercise precaution with respect to health by examining all practices that serve health – from the way we work, live and serve people at times where they cannot be independent and care for themselves from cradle to death.
This type of health ecology cannot be found through institutional systems of thought that are driven from a system of decision making that is not person centric and goes beyond how we define the GDP to factor in the most precious elements of ecology that contribute to any economy, the conditions of living in the public domain – reflecting the quality of the air we breath, infrastructure that protects people from environmental hazards and toxins and protection of nature and the environment that ultimately protects people.
For the past 15 years, I have worked diligently on the thought leadership I describe as WorkEcology to develop an international education and research center that redefines health from an ecological view by the way we live, work, and sustain.
In the past six months when no one of any diversity and view can hide from the global challenges we now face, I have been grappling with mechanistic responses that stand as obstacles in my way. Anyone these days who reaches out new ideas often encounters a response of no action, e.g. I am too busy, this is too visionary, no way in these times.
So I invite anyone to contact me who wants to join with me and others to act. WorkEcology and our project, WeCareHealth will be an extraordinary center of thought leadership and education through which communities of people can learn to act in building a caring economy of solutions for health. That is my promise. We will be a web- based infrastructure that is community centric through which people can build trust and build the emotional intelligence to build a system that is people responsive and finds new pathways beyond today’s economic obstacles in markets, public domain, and chaotic information resources through open access.
In recent weeks, while I track my progress and increase my leadership capacity to absorb more negativity, as I gain a wider audience for my thought leadership from which we can build a new ecology for health, in meditation I join with the souls of people who taught me “nothing is impossible.”
This includes Christopher and Dana Reeves, my dad, Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Mother Teresa. Come join WorkEcology to build the infrastructure to empower change for healthy communities or simply to pray and meditate to build a powerful movement of change where people take time out to organize into communities of change and move beyond resignation or waiting for political solutions that may never happen.
WorkEcology will launch its first leadership dialogue as part of our fellowship program in the late fall in London. My colleague, Lilly Evans and I will lead the first day long program to future members of our faculty and an audience drawing from all sectors that lead programs that are part of the ecology of health to begin to build a new practice leadership of communities and impossible dreams in action internationally that will link through the new WorkEcology website infrastructure that we are now building.
Please join me Monday for our first live broadcast and stay tuned here at EthicalMarkets.com and with other partner sites to learn more.