In preparation for the opening vision session tomorrow, June 12, at the BALLE Conference, we asked thought leader, author, and founding BALLE board member David Korten a few questions about his perspective on the local economy movement and the need for social movements to come together.

BALLE: What is the significance of having you, as a founding board member of BALLE, as a vision speaker 14 years after the organization’s inception?

David: It is important periodically to revisit the founding BALLE vision of a global system of community based local living economies working in balanced relationship with their local ecosystems and working together to meet the livelihood needs of all. This vision grew out of a growing recognition that the only legitimate purpose of business is to serve the community in which it is located. Businesses that are locally owned by real people with a personal stake in the health and well being of their community, neighbors, and natural environment align naturally with this purpose. Businesses with absentee owners interested only in extracting as much profit as possible from the community do not.

BALLE: How has BALLE changed since those early days and how has BALLE stayed the same?

David: When we launched BALLE, the idea of local economies comprised of locally owned business seemed a rather novel–even quaint–idea. Now it is an idea with a substantial following at the leading edge of responsible business and new economy thinking. With regard to BALLE itself, the ideal was always to have a diverse and inclusive “we are in-this-together” membership. It took a long time to make even a beginning toward that vision. There is still a long way to go, but the progress is encouraging. Many of us were interested from the beginning in advancing a local economy movement on a global scale. In the early days, however, the challenges of building an organization largely crowded out attention to movement building. I am very excited to be part of a session focused a convergence of social movements connecting the local economies movement with a diverse range of social movements, including the Black Lives Matter movement, that together have the potential to achieve an essential global social and economic transformation. What remains the same, is the essential BALLE vision.

BALLE: What is your earliest memory of being an advocate for local living economies?

David: I grew up in one of the most beautiful small towns in America; Longview Washington. It had a great civic spirit and vibrant main street community life. My family had a major music and appliance retail business with a strong community service orientation in a large modern commercial building my dad owned located on the most desirable corner in the heart of the business district. Over the years, I watched with dismay as box stores and strip malls populated by corporate chains sucked the life out of our downtown and disrupted the community social fabric. The downtown is now a lifeless collection of pawnshops, payday loan shops, 2nd hand clothing stores, bars, and vacant storefronts. My brother took over the family business and ran it for several years until box stores and Amazon-type online retailers drove him out of business. The once proud building stood vacant for years until my brother finally found a buyer at a giveaway price less than the value of the average home in the community in which I currently live. My passion for local economies populated by community oriented local businesses has deep roots.

BALLE: Why is being an active proponent of local economies important towards fixing the overall destructive, inequitable economic system?

David: Our plight as a species is summed up by the title of my first major trade book When Corporations Rule the World. We will be launching an updated 20th anniversary edition at the 2015 BALLE conference. We live under a system of rule by what I describe in the new edition as money-seeking corporate robots that are systematically destroying the lives of people and the rest of nature to make money for those who already have far more than they could ever put to any beneficial purpose.

The system functions beyond human control. Global financiers and the CEOs of oligopolistic transnational corporations appear to be in charge. They are in fact are only well-compensated servants of a rogue system that drives toward inevitable economic, social, environmental, and governance collapse. We appropriately call it a suicide economy, as it is destroying the foundation of its own existence.

A new economy featuring economic democracy–broad participation in community based ownership by real people with strong community roots–is essential to human viability.

BALLE: How does BALLE’s work connecting leaders, spreading solutions, and attracting investment towards local economies intersect with your personal mission and vision?

David: BALLE’s work goes to the heart of my personal mission and vision. It is the dream that drew me to participate in the founding of BALLE.

BALLE: In your personal experience, what’s your favorite local economy success story?

David: My favorite local economy story remains Bellingham, Washington, and the BALLE network Sustainable Connections built by Michelle and Derek Long. From the beginning it defined our BALLE local economy vision, as Judy Wicks and the White Dog Café defined the iconic BALLE business. I’ve since added Paul Saginaw’s Zingerman’s Deli to my list of iconic BALLE businesses.

BALLE: What do you see as some of the biggest challenges businesses face in supporting the transition toward an economic system that works for everyone?

David: The most formidable barrier to the essential economic transformation is a morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt economic ideology that would have us believe that money is wealth and destroying life to make money brings prosperity for all. This ideology supports destructive economic policies, subsidies, and international corporate rights agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership that favor predatory transnational corporations at the expense of local businesses and economies that provide good jobs and quality, healthful, products and services to meet the needs of living people and communities.

BALLE: What was your favorite past BALLE Conference, and why?

David: They have all been wonderful, because they bring together people who share a passion for actualizing a shared vision of a world that works for all.

BALLE: What are you most looking forward to about the conference?

David: I look forward to reconnecting with friends I’ve not seen for a long time, meeting the new young leaders that BALLE brings together, and discussing the convergence of social movements with Adrienne Marie Brown and Van Jones.

BALLE: If conference participants walk away from the conference knowing one thing about you and your work what would it be?

David: That I worked in international development for 30 years and resided for 21 years in Africa, Asia, and Latin American immersed in the wondrous diversity of the world’s people. This experience is the source of my global vision of a world in which all people control and manage their own resources in alignment with their own needs and values. A distinctive focus of my current work is raising awareness of the extent to which we humans live by stories. When we get our stories wrong, we get our future wrong. We are in deep trouble as a species because we have forgotten the essential truth our early ancestors understood well, but we have forgotten. We are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth, itself born of a living universe. And that changes everything. This is a defining theme of the book I launched this past January, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth.

Watch David Korten’s Vision Session Presentation here, and read it here.