The Pinchot Perspective

Why Do I Blog?

The theme of this blog is dreams, large and small, of a positive future. The beat, in the newspaper sense of the word, is the future of business, the economy, civilization, and living systems of our planet.

I am interested in plausible positive visions of the future because they are much needed and in short supply. By plausible positive visions I mean visions of a future worth living that take into account the evidence that civilization is on a path to disaster. To steer our way to a decent future we must embrace challenges such as climate change, the growing distance between rich and poor, future natural resource shortages, racism, toxic build up and loss of genetic diversity. How can we find the courage to do so? 

According to Rollo May in The Courage to Create:

We are called upon to do something new, to confront a no man’s land, to push into a forest where there are no well worn paths and from which no one has returned to guide us… this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent…

This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is rather the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

I live with the knowledge that the path our civilization is on threatens the life support systems on which we rely for our existence. And yet I have hope that there is much we can do both to reduce the climate changes and to mitigate their effects. Let us imagine a plausible future worth living. Then we will find the energy to work aggressively towards its realization. 

The human race is failing to act boldly to address critical challenges that we must address to guarantee the continued existence of a peaceful orderly society. It is time to act, otherwise, as we run out of resources and habitable lands, humanity will descend into barbarism, widespread starvation and continual war punctuated by frequent terror attacks. In the future, even more than now, social justice and the environment are part of a single system.

Why, for example, do we not act to stop catastrophic climate change? It is not for lack of information pointing to the problem. Is it because most people, short of giving up most of what they believe makes them happy, do not see a alternative to going on more or less as we are.

I will be seeking a future that spreads the benefits of society more broadly to all members. We need this not only because it is fair but because the power of the disenfranchised through terror is increasing. We can’t afford to steal from others to the same degree that we have done in the past.

This blog is a creative exploration of more positive ways to face the future. I hope the conversations this blog participates in will contribute to what I believe is one of society’s major creative challenges: the creation and sharing of new visions that attract people in their lifesyles, politics and businesses to move joyfully toward a future that can work for future generations.

This blog will contain:

• Designs for small parts of a future worth living
  • Product and service designs that point to a happy future
  • Social and cultural patterns and institutions
• Larger system visions
  • Economic system ideas
  • Geopolitical dreams
  • System conditions for long term viability, ecosystem health and human happiness
  • Design principles for a happy future
• Discovery of leverage points for large system interventions to get us moving toward positive futures. See my blog post Where to Intervene in a System.

Who is Gifford Pinchot?

I have been an author, an entrepreneur, a consultant, a husband and father, a blacksmith and a school founder. I am best known as the author of Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur and as a founder and President of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI), a #1 rated school of socially and environmentally responsible business.

Currently, in addition to facilitating the growth and evolution of BGI, I am writing my fourth book, enjoying my new granddaughters, being a husband, a father of adult children and chairman of both Sustainable Business Transformations and Pinchot & Company.

And yes, I am related to the Gifford Pinchot. Being his grandson, I was sheep dipped as a child in concern for the environment, a dislike of the concentration of power and wealth and a love of adventure. My grandfather was not just a conservationist and a forester, he was a trust buster, a fearless explorer and a proponent of public electrical power. He fought the corruption in which the rich and powerful dominated the agenda of government. He built roads to “get the farmers out of the mud.” I embrace my family's goals of conservation and social justice, but am struggling to lighten up and find more playful ways to pursue them.

I believe in fun and the playfulness for their own sake and as needed for creativity. To make the innovations needed to save our civilization, change makers will have to be less serious and more fun. People will only give up the status quo if they imagine themselves as happier living the new paradigm.

In my youth I wanted to be an inventor. My first success at age 8 was an underwater diving apparatus using a bicycle pump, a garden hose, a giant pot and a bag of stones. It worked nicely as long as my younger brother pumped. I liked it at the bottom of the pool.

In college I studied physics, social relations and economics, but bad grades led me to take a year off, during which I was a civil rights worker with CORE and SNCC.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on alternative ways of measuring the performance of an economy using Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development as a rough measure of the benefit provided by an economy. I used historical evidence of the impact of slavery on the slaves’ ability to move beyond the struggle for autonomy as an example of how economic systems affect psychosocial development. The economics department accepted my thesis for honors and told me I was not an economist but rather a sociologist. In sociology graduate school the first major paper I wrote was on the evolution of altruism, starting with the ants and working forward to marriage customs, group size and patterns of conflict in humans. The sociology department told me I was not a sociologist, but rather a biologist.

I ended my academic studies in neurophysiology when the department told me that given my desire to understand consciousness, I was clearly a philosopher. I decided it would be best to make an honest living, because an academic career was not going to work. I became a blacksmith, dairy farmer and leader of an intentional community in upstate New York.

Since then I have built and sold the ironworks, launched a consulting firm that provided creativity, innovation and intrapreneuring services to half the Fortune 100, and helped found and later became CEO of an internet security software firm. Fearful of the tech bubble, we sold that firm in 1998. My wife and I used the money from that sale to build the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

What I stand for is building a world that works for all, as soon as possible and in the future. I stand for the responsibility and opportunity of business to play a major role in making it so. I stand for those who believe they have enough talent to make a living making the world better. I stand for freedom and creativity and the social systems that make it profitable to trust people to be freer and more creative. I stand for helping intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs to seize the opportunity to create products, services and productive relationships that move us toward the world that needs to be.

By a world that works for all, I don’t mean just that everyone has enough to eat and a place to stay, though we are a long way from that. What I work toward is a world in which most people have meaningful lives filled with joy and a sense of accomplishment. I realize that given desertification, sea rise and population increase this may be an unrealistic goal, but I still am moved to work in that direction. We must adapt to what will be regardless of the difficulties.

I am seeking examples of what the world could be like. I am seeking visions of whole societies, designs physical and social, new ways of thinking, inspiring goals, system interventions, promising technologies and new ways to meet people’s physical, psychological and spiritual needs without destroying the planet or exploiting others.

Though this blog I am hoping to connect to people who are also thinking and writing, designing and living these issues. Please comment and send me to other places where I can learn.

(photo credit: William Hertling 2006 )