Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Imagine Green Future (IGF) Project Glossary

"We are connected inexorably to one another. We are all part of an interconnected whole, and any energy we spend putting up walls is swimming upstream against nature, and is going to cost us in stress, pain and the quality of our lives. It is non-judgmental respect or "unconditional love" for all employees that allows organizations to make major strides in fulfilling their vision. For those who insist on clinging to traditional ways of looking at the world, change will continue to come so fast and in such unexpected forms that the future will no longer be a desirable place. But for those who are willing to move ahead with conscious awareness of the natural laws of change, the future offers unparalleled opportunity to reshape our lives, our organizations, and our world, into what we want."
~George Land, Breakpoint & Beyond - Mastering the Future Today
http://www.speaking.com/articles_html/GeorgeLand_526.php



A Glossary to assist your understanding of IGF as a comprehensive vehicle for social and economic transformation.
http://tinyurl.com/46679lr

B-Corporations

Certified B Corporations are a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. B Corps are unlike traditional businesses because they:
Meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards;
Meet higher legal accountability standards;
Build business constituency for good business
http://www.bcorporation.net/

Breakpoint & Beyond - Mastering the Future Today
by George Land

The survival and success of a business depends on its ability to adapt to its changing environment. How can we equip ourselves and our organizations to deal with the world that is transforming right before our very eyes? The key is to understand the NEW rules of change. Today`s change is not just more rapid, more complex, more turbulent, and more unpredictable. Today`s change is unlike any encountered before. The surprising fact is that change itself has changed! By looking to our greatest teacher, Mother Nature, we can understand the natural change process. The ceaseless process of change takes on unique characteristics at different points in time. The rules governing change shift dramatically and almost without notice. These "Breakpoint" shifts follow the same master pattern whether they occur within a single atom, one`s personal life, or an entire organization.
http://www.speaking.com/articles_html/GeorgeLand_526.php


Bridge People
Daniel Jacob

My Dear Friends:

Now. Now is the timing. We have said it before, and we are saying it once again. And now your expanding consciousness is also beginning to speak these words--like a mantra, over and over, so that the rest of your slumbering planet will have their message amplified. It is all here, it is all now, and it is all YOU.

Your own human vehicle at this time is your way of enjoying this wonderful transition from being something to being everything. And the only change needed is in your perception. It's all around you. It always was. We have shown this, in our transmission entitled "Levels of Self." Surrounding your First Person symbol of physical being, there are fragments of yourself playing out, in detail, very important components of your inner world. This enables you to see them clearly, and understand yourself more completely. All you need are the eyes to notice it.

You are forming an Astral Bridge between the you that exists here, and your manifold alternative "selves" that exist in countless other dimensions and contexts of reality. The way you live your life, which often runs so counter to the way you are told to live it, is your own means of building this portal--your own way of actually BEING this portal. The guilt and shame that sometimes visits you, because you do not "measure up" or "conform" to the ways of this world, is simply grist for the mill of your own inner process of fermentation and alchemical change. The more you push yourself, the more the "other side" of your transforming being will dig in. When one "side" of you finally lets go, they all do.
http://www.reconnections.net/bridge_people.htm

Cause marketing From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cause marketing or cause-related marketing refers to a type of marketing involving the cooperative efforts of a "for profit" business and a non-profit organization for mutual benefit. The term is sometimes used more broadly and generally to refer to any type of marketing effort for social and other charitable causes, including in-house marketing efforts by non-profit organizations. Cause marketing differs from corporate giving (philanthropy) as the latter generally involves a specific donation that is tax deductible, while cause marketing is a marketing relationship generally not based on a donation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_marketing

Counter-Economics From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Counter-economics is a term originally used by Samuel Edward Konkin III and J. Neil Schulman, radical libertarian activists and theorists. Konkin defined it as "the study and/or practice of all peaceful human action which is forbidden by the State." The term is short for "counter-establishment economics". Counter-economics was integrated by Schulman into Konkin's doctrine of agorism, to form what they call a revolutionary variant of market anarchism.

The term counter-economics is also used in a separate but arguably compatible sense to refer to addressing social justice and sustainability concerns in a market context, although one more generally counter-establishment rather than explicitly illegal. In both senses, it can include non-monetary forms of exchange, such as a barter economy or a gift economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-economics


Distributed generation
Distributed generation, also called on-site generation, dispersed generation, embedded generation, decentralized generation, decentralized energy or distributed energy, generates electricity from many small energy sources. Currently, industrial countries generate most of their electricity in large centralized facilities, such as fossil fuel (coal, gas powered) nuclear or hydropower plants. These plants have excellent economies of scale, but usually transmit electricity long distances and negatively affect the environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_generation


Economic Democracy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that suggests an expansion of decision-making power from a small minority of corporate shareholders to a larger majority of public stakeholders. While there is no single definition or approach, all theories and real-world examples of economic democracy are based on a core set of fundamental assumptions.

Proponents generally agree that modern economic conditions tend to hinder or prevent society from earning enough income to purchase its output production. Centralized corporate monopoly of common resources typically forces conditions of artificial scarcity upon the greater majority, resulting in socio-economic imbalances that restrict workers from access to economic opportunity and diminish consumer purchasing power.

As either a component of larger socioeconomic ideologies or as a stand-alone theory, economic democracy promotes universal access to common resources that are typically privatized by corporate capitalism or centralized by state socialism. Assuming full political rights cannot be won without full economic rights, economic democracy suggests alternative models and reform agendas for solving problems of economic instability and deficiency of effective demand. As an alternative model, both market and non-market theories of economic democracy have been proposed. As a reform agenda, supporting theories and real-world examples include democratic cooperatives, fair trade, social credit, and the regionalization of food production and currency.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_democracy

Economic Secession From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wendell Berry described “economic secession” in his 1991 essay Conservation and Local Economy:

"If we are serious about reducing government and the burdens of government, then we need to do so by returning economic self-determination to the people… we must do it by fostering economic democracy. For example, as much as possible of the food that is consumed locally ought to be locally produced on small farms, and then processed in small, non-polluting plants that are locally owned. We must do everything possible to provide to ordinary citizens the opportunity to own a small, usable share of the country. …I acknowledge that to advocate such reforms is to advocate a kind of secession - not a secession of armed violence but a quiet secession by which people find the practical means and the strength of spirit to remove themselves from an economy that is exploiting them and destroying their homeland". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_secession


Emergence From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Green chemistry From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Green chemistry, also called sustainable chemistry, is a philosophy of chemical research and engineering that encourages the design of products and processes that minimize the use and generation of hazardous substances.[1] Whereas environmental chemistry is the chemistry of the natural environment, and of pollutant chemicals in nature, green chemistry seeks to reduce and prevent pollutionat its source. In 1990 the Pollution Prevention Act was passed in the United States. This act helped create a modus operandi for dealing with pollution in an original and innovative way. It aims to avoid problems before they happen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_chemistry

Humanistic Economics From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Humanistic economics is a school of economic theory identified with E. F. Schumacher. Proponents argue for "humanity-first" economic theories as opposed to the ideas in mainstream economic theory which they see as putting financial gain before people.

"Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be uneconomic you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper."
~E. F. Schumacher

Humanistic economics has been defined as "a perspective that leans heavily on humanistic psychology, moral philosophy, humanistic sociology, and last but not least, on common sense. In more formal terms, contemporary humanistic economics seeks to both describe, analyze and critically assess prevailing socio-economic institutions and policies, and provide normative (value) guidelines on how to improve them in terms of human (not merely "economic") welfare. Basic human needs, human rights, human dignity, human equality, freedom, economic democracy and economic sustainability provide the framework".

Humanistic economics focuses on human economic activity as being social and altruistically constructed, not just individualistically and selfishly derived. The importance of the ethical individual living within a vibrant local community, not merely as a lone wolf nor as a consumer of mass culture and production on a global scale, is often stressed. The importance of accounting for externalities (items not always put on the economic balance sheet like pollution or loss of biodiversity) are other key concepts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanistic_economics

Inclusive Democracy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fotopoulos describes inclusive democracy as “a new conception of democracy, which, using as a starting point the classical definition of it, expresses democracy in terms of direct political democracy, economic democracy (beyond the confines of the market economy and state planning), as well as democracy in the social realm and ecological democracy. In short, inclusive democracy is a form of social organisation which re-integrates society with economy, polity and nature. The concept of inclusive democracy is derived from a synthesis of two major historical traditions, the classical democratic and the socialist, although it also encompasses radical green, feminist, and liberation movements in the South”.

Starting point of the ID project is that the world, at the beginning of the new millennium, faces a multi-dimensional crisis (economic, ecological, social, cultural and political), which is shown to be caused by the concentration of power in the hands of various elites. This is interpreted to be the outcome of the establishment, in the last few centuries, of the system of market economy (in the Polanyian sense), Representative democracy, and the related forms of hierarchical structure. Therefore, an inclusive democracy is seen not simply as a utopia, but perhaps as the only way out of the crisis, based on the equal distribution of power at all levels.

In this conception of democracy, the public realm includes not just the political realm, as is usual in the republican or democratic project (Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, Murray Bookchin et al.), but also the economic, ‘social’ and ecological realms. The political realm is the sphere of political decision-making, the area in which political power is exercised. The economic realm is the sphere of economic decision-making, the area in which economic power is exercised with respect to the broad economic choices that any scarcity society has to make. The social realm is the sphere of decision-making in the workplace, the education place and any other economic or cultural institution which is a constituent element of a democratic society. The public realm could be extended to include the "ecological realm", which may be defined as the sphere of the relations between society and nature. Therefore, the public realm, in contrast to the private realm, includes any area of human activity in which decisions can be made collectively and democratically.

According to these four realms, we may distinguish between four main constituent elements of an inclusive democracy: the political, the economic, 'democracy in the social realm' and the ecological. The first three elements form the institutional framework, which aims at the equal distribution of political, economic and social power respectively. In this sense, these elements define a system, which aims at the effective elimination of the domination of human being over human being. Similarly, ecological democracy is defined as the institutional framework, which aims to eliminate any human attempt to dominate the natural world, in other words, the system, which aims to reintegrate humans and nature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Democracy

Industrial and Organizational Psychology From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Industrial and Organizational Psychology (also known as industrial-organizational psychology, I-O psychology, work psychology, organizational psychology, work and organizational psychology, occupational psychology, personnel psychology or talent assessment) applies psychology to organizations and the workplace. (In December 2009, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology plans a vote to either retain its name or to change it to the Society for Organizational Psychology (TSOP) to eliminate the word "Industrial". Any such change might cause many American researchers, practitioners and educational programs in I-O psychology to change over to the new name to describe their field.) "Industrial-organizational psychologists contribute to an organization's success by improving the performance and well-being of its people. An I-O psychologist researches and identifies how behaviors and attitudes can be improved through hiring practices, training programs, and feedback systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_organizational_psychology

L3C: A More Creative Capitalism By Jim Witkin | January 15th, 2009
During his 2007 Harvard commencement address, Bill Gates, now the world’s best funded philanthropist, called on the graduates to invent “a more creative capitalism” where “we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”

It doesn’t take a Harvard grad (or Harvard dropout like Gates) to understand that traditional market forces mostly work against the notion of a socially beneficial enterprise (one that seeks social returns first and financial second). Existing for-profit corporate structures demand a higher financial return than a social enterprise can usually deliver; while non-profit organizations have limited access to capital and a tax-exempt format that limits a strong profit orientation. If the social enterprise field is to evolve and grow, what’s needed is a hybrid of the two forms, a structure that supports a “low profit corporation.”

Enter the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a new corporate structure designed to attract a wide range of investment sources thereby improving the viability of social ventures. In April 2008, Vermont became the first state to recognize the L3C as a legal corporate structure. Similar legislation is pending in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina. But if the L3C seems like the right choice for your social enterprise, you don’t have to wait! L3Cs formed in Vermont can be used in any state.
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/01/the-l3c-a-more-creative-capitalism/

Libertarianism From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Libertarianism is a political theory that advocates the maximization of individual liberty in thought and action and the minimization or even abolition of the state. Libertarians embrace viewpoints across a political spectrum, ranging from pro-property to anti-property (sometimes phrased as "right" versus "left"), from minarchist to openly anarchist.

All schools of libertarianism declare a strong advocacy for the rights to life and liberty, though there is disagreement on the subject of private property. Some sources indicate that the term "libertarian" outside of the US, generally refers to anti-authoritarian anti-capitalist ideologies. However, some American and English sources claim that the most commonly known formulation of libertarianism supports free market capitalism which in contrast to libertarian socialism does not limit property to active personal use; advocating instead for private ownership of the means of production. Other features of right-libertarianism include minimal government regulation of that property, minimal taxation, and rejection of the welfare state, all within the context of the rule of law.

Some call the pro-property view propertarian, and some pro-property libertarians believe a "propertarian philosophy" is a weak basis for libertarian morality. A number of countries have libertarian parties which run candidates for political office. Anarchist communist Joseph Déjacque, main author of the first libertarian journal Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York, which ran between 1858 and 1861, was also the first person to describe himself as a libertarian.

Libertarian socialists, unlike right-wing libertarians, oppose structures of authority and hierarchy in personal relations and the larger social order. This extends beyond the state, to authoritarian gender relations and the social relation they call "wage slavery". These libertarians believe in the abolition of property not intended for active personal use and may be called non-propertarian or anti-propertarian. Anti-authoritarianism, in their view, entails a society where worker self-management is easy to pursue as a choice. This requires dismantling the boss-authority concomitant with private ownership of workplaces, in favor of participatory worker and community controlled associations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

Liberty From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liberty is the concept of ideological and political philosophy that identifies the condition to which an individual has the right to behave according to one's own personal responsibility and free will. The conception of liberty is influenced by ideals concerning the social contract as well as arguments that are concerned with the state of nature.

Individualist and classical liberal conceptions of liberty relate to the freedom of the individual from outside compulsion or coercion and this is defined as negative liberty.Social liberal conceptions of liberty relate freedom to social structure and agency and this is defined as positive liberty. In feudal times, a liberty was an area of allodial land in which regalian rights had been waived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty

The Philosophy of Liberty
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I
Maslow's hierarchy of needs From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation.[2] Maslow subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans' innate curiosity. His theories parallel many other theories of human developmental psychology, all of which focus on describing the stages of growth in humans. Maslow studied what he called exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."[3] Maslow studied the healthiest 1% of the college student population.[4] Maslow's theory was fully expressed in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs


Moral Development and Moral Education: An Overview
Moral education is becoming an increasingly popular topic in the fields of psychology and education. Media reports of increased violent juvenile crime, teen pregnancy, and suicide have caused many to declare a moral crisis in our nation. While not all of these social concerns are moral in nature, and most have complex origins, there is a growing trend towards linking the solutions to these and related social problems to the teaching of moral and social values in our public schools.

However, considerations of the role schools can and should play in the moral development of youth are themselves the subject of controversy. All too often debate on this topic is reduced to posturing reflecting personal views rather than informed opinion. Fortunately, systematic research and scholarship on moral development has been going on for most of this century, and educators wishing to attend to issues of moral development and education may make use of what has been learned through that work.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~lnucci/MoralEd/overview.html


Network Effect From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good orservice has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases as more people use it. The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externalitybecause a user may purchase their phone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case. Online social networks work in the same way, with sites like Twitter and Facebook being more useful the more users join.

The expression "network effect" is applied most commonly to positive network externalities as in the case of the telephone. Negative network externalities can also occur, where more users make a product less valuable, but are more commonly referred to as "congestion" (as in traffic congestion or network congestion). Over time, positive network effects can create a bandwagon effect as the network becomes more valuable and more people join, in a positive feedback loop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects

Public Sphere From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The public sphere is an area in social life where people can get together and freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. It is "a discursive space in which individuals and groups congregate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment."[1] The public sphere can be seen as "a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk"[2] and "a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed".[3]

The public sphere mediates between the "private sphere" and the "Sphere of Public Authority",[4] "The private sphere comprised civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of commodity exchange and of social labor."[5] Whereas the "Sphere of Public Authority" dealt with the State, or realm of the police, and the ruling class,[5] the public sphere crossed over both these realms and "Through the vehicle of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of society."[6] "This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state."[7] The public sphere 'is also distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling."[7] These distinctions between "state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations...are essential to democratic theory."[8] The people themselves came to see the public sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state.[9] The study of the public sphere centers on the idea of participatory democracy, and how public opinion becomes political action.

The basic belief in public sphere theory is that political action is steered by the public sphere, and that the only legitimate governments are those that listen to the public sphere.[10] "Democratic governance rests on the capacity of and opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened debate".[11] Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere

Self-Actualization
Maslow loosely defined self-actualization as "the full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, etc. " (Motivation and Personality, p. 150). Self-actualization is not a static state. It is an ongoing process in which one's capacities are fully, creatively, and joyfully utilized. "I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a full human being with dampened and inhibited powers and capacities" (Dominance, self-esteem, self-actualization, p. 91).

Most commonly, self-actualizing people see life clearly. They are less emotional and more objective, less likely to allow hopes, fears, or ego defenses to distort their observations. Maslow found that all self-actualizing people are dedicated to a vocation or a cause. Two requirements for growth are commitment to something greater than oneself and success at one's chosen tasks. Major characteristics of self-actualizing people include creativity, spontaneity, courage, and hard work.
http://www.abraham-maslow.com/m_motivation/Self-Actualization.asp

Social Ecology From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The philosophy's "social" component comes from its position that nearly all of the world's ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, social ecologists maintain, present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. They argue that apart from those produced by natural catastrophes, the most serious ecological dislocations of the 20th and 21st centuries have as their cause economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others.

Social ecology is associated with the ideas and works of Murray Bookchin, who had written on such matters from the 1950s until his death, and, from the 1960s, had combined these issues with revolutionary social anarchism. His works include Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, and a host of others.

Social ecology locates the roots of the ecological crisis firmly in relations of domination between people. The domination of nature is seen as a product of domination within society, but this domination only reaches crisis proportions under capitalism.

In the words of Bookchin:
The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man… But it was not until organic community relation … dissolved into market relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. … The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital
—Bookchin, Murray, Post Scarcity Anarchism, p.24–25

Beginning in 1995, Bookchin became increasingly critical of anarchism, and in 1999 took a decisive stand against anarchist ideology. He had come to recognize social ecology as a genuinely new form oflibertarian socialism, and positioned its politics firmly in the framework of communalism. Since the founding of Social Ecology, its evolution has been considerable. Now it is involved in research and instruction and “Is informed by and contributes to knowledge in the social, behavioral, legal, environmental, and health sciences. Social Ecology faculty apply scientific methods to the study of a wide array of recurring social, behavioral, and environmental problems. Among issues of long-standing interest in the School are crime and justice in society, social influences on human development over the life cycle, and the effects of the physical environment on health and human behavior. While the field of ecology focuses on the relationships between organisms and their environments, social ecology is concerned with the relationships between human populations and their environments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecology


Social Enterprise
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A social enterprise is an organization that applies capitalistic strategies to achieving philanthropic goals. Social enterprises can be structured as a for-profit or non-profit.

Many commercial enterprises would consider themselves to have social objectives, but commitment to these objectives is fundamentally motivated by the perception that such commitment will ultimately make the enterprise more financially valuable. Social enterprises differ in that, inversely, they do not aim to offer any benefit to their investors, except where they believe that doing so will ultimately further their capacity to realise their philanthropic goals.

Many entrepreneurs, whilst running a profit focussed enterprise that they own, will make charitable gestures through the enterprise, expecting to make a loss in the process. However unless the social aim is the primary purpose of the company this is not considered to be social enterprise. The term is more specific, meaning 'doing charity by doing trade', rather than 'doing charity while doing trade'. Another example is an uncorporation, which may pursue social responsibility goals that conflict with traditional corporate shareholder primacy, or may donate most of its profits to charity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise

Social Entrepreneurship From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Social entrepreneurship is the work of social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change (a social venture). Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur focuses on creating social capital. Thus, the main aim of social entrepreneurship is to further social and environmental goals. However, whilst social entrepreneurs are most commonly associated with the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors [1], this need not necessarily be incompatible with making a profit. Social entrepreneurship practiced with a world view or international context is called international social entrepreneurship.[2] See also Corporate Social Entrepreneurship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entrepreneurship


Take-Back Programs
Take-back programs give manufacturers the physical responsibility for products and/or packaging at the end of their useful lives. By accepting used products, manufacturers can acquire low-cost feedstock for new manufacture or remanufacture, and offer a value-added service to the buyer.

Most take-back programs in the U.S. are voluntary, while legislation in many European countries require manufacturers take responsibility for waste costs incurred by products and packaging.
http://www.pprc.org/pubs/epr/takeback.cfm

Transformation Theory From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transformation theory, first explained by Dr. George Land [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] (also George Ainsworth Land and George T. Lock Land) (1927-) is a description of the structure of change in natural systems. Land's research, detailed in his seminal book Grow or Die [6] ), illustrates change as a series of interlocking S-curves, each interspersed with two breakpoints. Breakpoints are the moments in time when the rules of survival change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_theory

Transition Towns From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Transition Towns (also known as Transition network or Transition Movement) is a brand for environmental and social movements “founded (in part) upon the principles of permaculture” [1], based originally on Bill Mollison’s seminal Permaculture, a Designers Manual published in 1988. The Transition Towns brand of permaculture uses David Holmgren’s 2003 book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. [2] These techniques were included in a student project overseen by permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins at the Kinsale Further Education College in Ireland. The term transition town was coined by Louise Rooney[3] and Catherine Dunne. Following its start in Kinsale, Ireland it then spread to Totnes, England where Rob Hopkins and Naresh Giangrande developed the concept during 2005 and 2006.[4] The aim of this community project is to equip communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. The Transition Towns movement is an example of socioeconomic localisation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns