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The economy was bound to tank. Not just because greedy corporations rigged the system or because government helped grease the wheels for them. But because the dominate way that we’ve come to do business — profit at the expense of all else — is simply incompatible with the planet we’re living on. It’s an economy that Marjorie Kelly would call “extractive.”

Kelly, a fellow at the Tellus Institute and co-founder of Business Ethics magazine, wrote the just-released book, Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution (Berrett-Koehler, 2012) that helps provide an antidote to the extractive, money-at-all-costs economy. She calls it the “generative economy,” and her book is proving to be a great contribution to the growing New Economy movement.

“Our minds have been so colonized by the paradigm of industrial-age capitalism that we’ve lost the ability to imagine other ways of organizing an economy,” she writes.

 “My sense is that there is an alternative, and that the reality of it is farther along than we suppose. When we can’t see this, it’s because we’ve left no room for it in our imagination. If it’s hard to talk about, it’s because it doesn’t yet have a name. I suggest we call it the generative economy. It’s a corner of the economy (hopefully someday much more) that’s not designed for the extraction of maximum financial wealth. Its purpose is to create the conditions for life. It does this through its normal functioning, because of the way it’s designed, the way it’s owned — like an employee-owned solar company.”