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February 22, 2022 Recording – The Impossible Dream: Bending the long arc of growth and profit toward social benefit at a time of climate emergency
February 22, 2022 @ 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Speaker: Merle Lefkoff, Phd,
Founding Director, Center for Emergent Diplomacy Santa Fe, New Mexico
Event Summary:
Dr. Lefkoff will examine the reasons why “sustainable investing” (sometimes called impact investing or environmental, social, and governance investing, ESGs) is hastening the exponential race toward global climate collapse, even as CEOs like Larry Fink of BlackRock, the most prominent investment leader in the world, promotes companies like BlackRock as the best hope for a more sustainable version of capitalism. Here’s the question she will address: Is it possible to be a good socially responsible citizen, while at the same time carrying out the fiduciary responsibility to make the most profit possible for the shareholders of a corporation?
Merle Lefkoff, PhD
Recently returned from facilitating a workshop at COP26, Merle is a social change entrepreneur whose passion and practice is devoted to the application of nonlinear complex systems thinking to surviving climate change on a much-altered planet. Merle holds a doctorate in Political Science from Emory University and has been a mediator, facilitator, and leadership trainer in active conflict zones around the world. She received a research appointment as Guest Scientist and Affiliate of the Center for Nonlinear Studies, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she worked on computer simulations exploring a range of negotiation strategies in the search for coexistence among competing adversaries. She led the planning group of NGO leaders at the United Nations launch of the Gross National Happiness index and is a member of the Integrative Peacebuilding Network in Ottawa, Canada.
A year earlier, former chief of the Australian Defense Force Admiral Chris Barrie, in his Forward to a policy paper analyzing climate-related security threats in Australia wrote, “our intelligence and security services have a vital role to play, and a fiduciary responsibility, in accepting this existential climate threat, and the need for a fundamentally different approach to its risk management, as central to their considerations and their advice to government. The implications far outweigh conventional geopolitical threats.”
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