ABSTRACT
In designing a new path to planetary health and well-being, economist David Korten and Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, and formerly one of India’s leading physicists, both refer to the need to transform our current economic system. They describe the virtues and necessity of a “living economy.”2 In such a new economy, both prosperity and poverty would be redefined since the measure of wealth is no longer confined to property, possessions, and accumulation of financial capital. “Because the most important forms of real wealth are living wealth,” explains Korten, “the term living economy is a synonym for real-wealth economy that mimics the organization of a healthy ecosystem. The measure of a living economy’s wealth is the vitality or creative life energy embodied in its people, relationships, and natural environment” (p. 109).3
