What we need to do now is to create mature economics for the mature species. When we expand our awareness we see so many positive options for our common future. We are a 6 billion member human family and we are the most successful species on planet Earth. We have colonized the oceans and been to the moon. But we are consuming 40% of the planet’s photosynthesis and this cannot go on.

The new tasks for the 21st century are now to understand ourselves and to face up to our failures which are obvious in the poverty and the wars and conflicts we see. But I believe that we humans are not flawed. We are evolving and we are growing in our awareness. Let us celebrate the record of our cooperative achievements. We created the United Nations, the European Union, great corporations, and great cities like Tokyo. This could never happen without cooperation. And so the repertoire of human behavior is not only conflict but also cooperation and sharing. All of the social sciences study this full repertoire of human behavior. Only market economics focuses on competition and conflict and so we must expand economics.

We have a new roadmap in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The Human Development Report is now watching our progress as we try to address these new goals. We know that we have made some progress but there is much more work to do. For example, we still have very far to go with the tragedy of child mortality and this pricks the conscience of us all.

There is great downside as well. We see the negative trends today which are driving the evolution of our species: the poverty gap, the global epidemics, the climate change, the terrorist attacks—all symptoms of the consciousness that must expand our human awareness.

I believe we have to move beyond the Cartesian kind of scientific principles where everything was in small pieces and fragmented. And when we bring our awareness back to these holistic principles of interconnectedness at every system level, we go from redistribution, which nature does all the time, and from these hierarchies to heterarchies and networks. Then we work toward this complimentarity, and then we have to accept that the only certainty there will be in our lives is change, more and more change.

On the other hand, we see also many positive trends. We see the spread of democracies. The global NGOs are working together on the internet. Also, we are moving toward solar energy and the technologies of light waves. In fact, Japan is a world pioneer in developing these kinds of technologies.

We also have a new growing idea for corporations of global citizenship, which is being led by the United Nations. There are also changes in accounting and the growth of more socially responsible kinds of investments. I think we can look for hope when we see all of these citizens everywhere around the world which I call the ‘grassroots globalism.’ They meet in Brazil at the World Social Forum and all over the world now. It’s very exciting to see how fast these citizen organizations are developing and growing.

We have these new technologies of the Age of Light: photonics, fiber optics, solar technologies, and others. We have all the technological means that we need to make this mature kind of economy and we see different transition initiatives that are going on all over the world including this one right here hosted by the Goi Peace Foundation. We can expand all of these initiatives as we communicate with each other and network with each other.

I work all the time with business leaders and people in the financial community. Business leaders know that competition is always within a framework of cooperation. Whether it’s international law or agreements or infrastructure, no business can run without this cooperative framework. Yet our business schools still teach the old model, the old economics of competition. But now there are many business schools who are teaching the new curriculum. I am sure that there are many business schools in Japan that are teaching this new cooperative, sustainable way.

What we are finding is that scientific research from many fields is now invalidating the old economic theory where money was equated with wealth. We know this is wrong. We also find that the economic theory of human rationality: "maximizing self-interest in competition with all others” is of course a recipe for disaster. In many developing countries, people are now rejecting this model of economic development which they call the Washington Consensus. This is a recipe for continuing disaster.

The Gross National Product counts all of the pollution and the destruction as part of the useful economic activity. We have to change this model and we have to subtract all of the social costs and the environmental costs in order to know if we are really making progress or not. Until we change the model, we will continue to find the current economics in bankruptcy, creating poverty gaps, debt, digital divide, and financial crisis.

Many scientists from many different disciplines including physics and biology are now coming to this critique of economics. What we need to have in all of our universities and business schools is an interdisciplinary debate where the economists will debate with all these other scientists to understand what this new model that we need is.

When we look at what is happening with companies, we see new forms of accounting which we call the triple bottom line—not just the economic bottom line of profit but the social bottom line and the environmental bottom line. There are now 600 global corporations, which use this new model of the three bottom lines as their accounting.

When we look at the productive system of any industrial society, we can think of it like a cake—a layer cake with icing. The economists only look at the top two layers: the private sector and the public sector, because these are conducted in money and economists are only counting transactions conducted in money. They do not see that there are two lower layers of this cake of productivity. The love economy is half of all of the productive work which is unpaid. In many societies women do this work without being paid, and yet if this work were not done, then the whole thing would collapse. Then we have to look at the bottom layer of productivity namely nature. If we don’t respect and reward the productivity of nature, then the whole cake will collapse.

I have developed with a group in Washington D.C, the Calvert Group, a new indicator of progress and quality of life, which you can find on the web, calvert-henderson.com.

We have 12 aspects of quality of life which we cover and we use all disciplines—not just economics but all of the disciplines. We look at health and education and human rights and all of these areas in culture. When I see what is happening in Japan, I see that Japan is already moving to this quality of life model where it’s not necessary to keep having the GNP grow. What you want to see is the quality of life improves. Japan is doing just fine. So don’t let economists come from Washington and tell you to do it the old way because in Japan you are already coming to the new way.

When you think we humans really have three basic resources to work with: information, matter, and energy. And of course, among these, information is the most important: knowledge and growing awareness. This is what determines how efficiently we use our energy and our materials.

What is happening now, I think, is that we are beginning to adapt to what I call the Age of Truth. We have the information age now with all these wonderful communications and companies are realizing that if they don’t behave in a more socially and environmentally responsible way, their precious brands and their stock prices can be destroyed by the information which everybody in the world knows. It is becoming an Age of Truth.

We see today that many countries are ecological debtors. They are using more of the natural world than they have available for them. Many other countries, on the other hand, are the ecological creditors who have many more resources than they are actually using. We have all these new ways of looking at the world and we can now develop principles of how to do a sustainable world trade. This will be very different from what the World Trade Organization is talking about. We will have to teach the economists at the WTO what the principles of sustainable world trade are.

Today we are at this tipping point, which we have all spoken about. There are various crises that are happening and I think energy supply is the one, which is catching everybody’s attention. In my country we use energy very, very wastefully, whereas in Japan, the Japanese people use energy very, very wisely. They make twice as much use of the energy as we do in the United States. Also China and India are now coming up and using a great deal of the world’s fossil fuels.

So this is a crisis but also an opportunity where we can have a global dialogue. We can begin to realize that we must dematerialize our economies. It isn’t about energy and materials. It’s about what I call the "Attention Economy”—what we pay attention to. The more we pay attention to spiritual pursuits and self-development, the more we can build a healthy economy with fewer and fewer resources. Look at public opinion surveys all over the world. We ask ordinary people "What are the important things?” and they already know the answer. They want clean air and water. They want a healthy environment. They want opportunities, but unfortunately too often their governments give them weapons and crazy projects, which don’t really do any good.

I am a big supporter of the Earth Charter. We have many many models of how to move forward. For example, we have the new book from the International Labor Organization called ‘A Fair Globalization’ or the Global Marshall Plan. And there are some here amongst our group who are promoting a clean green ecosocial equitable economy. All of these are very do-able.

Hazel Henderson , born in Britain, is a futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, consultant on sustainable development, and author of many books including "Beyond Globalization." She is also the producer of the TV series "Ethical Markets" which redefines success with real examples of people and companies demonstrating the highest ethical and environmental standards while earning a profit. She is an advocate of a new "earth ethics" beyond "economism."