The Clean Money Revolution:
 by Joel Solomon and Tyree Bridge • Vancouver, Canada

Humanity is on the edge of a precipice.

We know the headlines. Ecological emergencies. Mass refugee flights from failing states. The distortions of latestage capitalism eroding basic trust, tolerance, and hope. Common decency and respect is starting to seem anachronistic. Worship of money and celebrity rules the media, while our ties to land, loyalties, and love are severed.

Yes, it’s also “the best of times.” Many diseases have been eradicated or are manageable. Modern science and industry have brought sanitation, clean water, and industrial food to billions worldwide. Smart phones and the Internet give us access to unfathomable volumes of information.

There are competing trends. Decay and chaos on one hand, integration and regeneration on the other. As $100 trillion changes hands in the next twenty years, the question is, which future wins? Will this generational wealth transfer help us rebuild, or will it throw gasoline on the fires of rampant greed?

There are so many ways we can turn that money to transforming the world. We can rethink taxation to make it more fair. We can price carbon. We can create schools and hospitals for all. Feed the world sustainably. Make pollution and other externalities illegal and guard smart use of resources. What else could the clean money revolution accomplish with $100 trillion?

Thanks to the passion and wisdom of so many great leaders over the past fifty years, our basic ethical premises about self-interest, ecology, and life itself are starting to shift. We have further to go as a global culture that will only become more intertwined. Despite what some segments of our society would prefer, there’s no going back. What if we agreed that the meaning and purpose of life was not only to enjoy it, but to use our energies to ensure a liveable future for dozens of generations into the future? What if our Golden Rule and central religious belief was that we be responsible for leaving the Earth better than we found it, restoring it rather than degrading it?

Fiduciary responsibility has traditionally meant making the highest return rate for owners, exclusive of the damage such investments cause. That mindset must be reinvented. It must change to include the long-term health of the whole planet. Anything else is a form of blindness, and insanity. It is not just imprudent to make extra money by poisoning water, people, or future generations. It’s immoral, and should be illegal. These pools of capital must begin moving 50, 75 or 100 percent of their endowments and assets into the emerging clean economy.

Pension funds can’t continue investing in ways such that retirement becomes more dangerous. Foundations need to direct assets to restoration and fairness, not degradation. Universities should invest in their local communities and a safer future world for their graduates, along with the economic stability of their workers’ families.

As Peter and Jennifer Buffett of Novo Foundation say: “The most radical way to advance meaningful change is to shift economic, social, and cultural power to those who don’t have it.” This is a crucial part of the needed equation. With a stroke or two of a pen, those of us in the 20 percent can shift our money away from terrible mischief. Examine whether “highest return rate” is the true test for your wealth. If you need high return rates, narrow the field to drivers of the clean money transition. Decide how much is enough, and do that first. We can no longer morally justify “as much as I can get” as a reasonable or ethical answer.

Do you have a well--developed intention for how you intend to use the “more than enough” part of your money for the good of others? Will you risk passing excessive wealth to your family assuming it will make them better, happier, more realized people? Might the ownership gift you are giving instead cause suffering to them, and to those affected by how they use the money? Be sure they understand how money is created, down to the source of who and where is impacted.

I invite you to make your own journey of discovery. If you have wealth, use what you need for your own evolution, personal and financial. Look at the origins and supply chains you profit from. You are smart and have smart people who can help. Do a study of your financial transactions, your investments, your stock portfolio. Look into who worked for what wages, under which conditions, for the low-cost materials needed to earn your profits.

As Gandhi pointed out, history will judge us for how justly we act toward those who are most vulnerable. It’s the unborn who are most vulnerable of all. “Intergenerational justice,” like “rights of nature” or reparations for colonialism and slavery, remains obscure. These concepts are moving toward the center, as other once-- ignored and now obvious truths have done.

The change is happening. We are now past the vision, invention, and seeding of these ideas. We are in the early growth stage. Social entrepreneurship, enlightened investors, the questioning of conventional wealth management assumptions, and the emergence of a new generation of valuesaligned leaders are combining into a powerful formula.

Inspiration Everywhere

The clean money revolution is gaining credibility, proof of concept, and momentum toward mainstream acceptance. Wealth managers feel the trend via pressure from clients. They’re struggling to provide comprehensive, satisfactory solutions. Firms now highlight their efforts in these directions. New products are being launched. Wealth management firms that understand this demand, its value to the world, and how to relate to clients that want it, will grow robustly.

I return to the incredible example of organic food. Decades of early adopters persevered with businesses that grew, processed, manufactured, distributed, and retailed organic foods. They worked in virtual obscurity. Only a small committed consumer helped this early stage. Organics then began to show up on mainstream grocery store shelves in the 21st century. Growth has seen doubledigits, outpacing conventional food. In the United States, what was a $3.6 billion dollar market in 1997 was valued at over $39 billion in 2014.

Organic food remains well under 10 percent of North American food sales, but it will grow ever larger. The common sense of healthy food, people, and ecosystems is too compelling. As Campbell’s Soup executive Denise Morrison admitted, Big Food is on the defensive, trying to overcome “mounting distrust.” An entire agricultural and manufacturing system that jeopardizes health, worker safety, rivers, topsoil, and other areas is now facing the threat to reform or die.

The $100 Trillion Question

The same cycle is steadily evident in renewable energy, efficient transportation, green buildings, carbon pricing, regulations to protect the commons, worker’s rights, taxation reform, and many other areas.

Young entrepreneurs are eager to build businesses that make a better world. Incubators, accelerators, investment funds, professional advisors, and universities are waking to the crisis and eager to help move those businesses faster. Forward-thinking entrepreneurial mayors are recalibrating cities like Vancouver, Paris, Stockholm, and Portland. They are thinking longer term, taking sober looks at coming challenges, and acting boldly now to prepare for soft landings.

Spiritual leaders like Pope Francis, the Reverend Lennox Yearwood, and Joan Halifax are speaking truth about the pickle we have created, making a call to action to put our intellect and resources into a global movement for a safer future.

Every sector of the economy needs overhaul. Yes, clean energy will be massive. But so will clean transportation, clean buildings, clean water, clean air, clean food, clean mining, clean logging, clean clothes.

Do any of us deserve to make gigantic profits because we own distribution systems? Because we are clever at selling things people don’t need? Because we can take advantage of regulations, corporate welfare, tax loopholes, or the exploitation of impoverished people who have no choices about their own labor?

For this transformation to root permanently, we need awakened spirits, healed emotional bodies, examined lives. We need clarity of meaning and purpose. We need we: all of us. Those with wealth and power are lucky we still get the choice to step into this movement. We’ve been fitting into norms we have been taught are correct. We need to step up as visionaries, leaders, honorable citizens, and world-changers. Let’s do it while we still have the chance.

Billionaires of Love

This is written in the hope that people like you will help push the clean money revolution forward— joyously, successfully, and pleasurably as you can. There is grave seriousness aplenty. I hope you find your own way into the positive revolution around the meaning and purpose of money, in all its dimensions. Be driven by love whenever possible, and by tough love when needed.

The wealthy can model what is needed by moving assets, personal or financial, toward the grand planetary effort needed today. We have a job to do. We must fulfill our generational responsibility to the future. Accumulating infinite wealth, with no higher purpose, is naked greed at worst, selfimposed banality at best. It’s simply not right.

It is imperative that all of us, at our own scale, with or without money, use our power and passion to bust open the truth about what money is doing right now, and to change that story. The time is now. We can now move money further and faster, toward a safe, resilient, soft landing for the future of civilization.

True security is a strong peace, where a fair, regenerative economy thrives. True love is love of the future, of the whole. Let’s be billionaires of good deeds, billionaires of love, billionaires of meaning and purpose. The return on that investment will be a great blessing.

Dying with the most money is pointless. It’s about what we do to help those who will follow us.

Remember the land.
Remember the future.
Remember love.

Joel Solomon is Chairman of Renewal Funds, a $98-million mission venture capital firm. He has invested in over 100 early-growth stage companies in North America, delivering above-market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change. Solomon spent ten years building businesses in Nashville’s deteriorating urban core, where he co-founded Village Real Estate, CORE development, and the Bongo Java chain of coffee houses. Solomon is a founding member of the Social Venture Network, Business for Social Responsibility, Tides Canada, and is Board Chair of Hollyhock. He a Senior Advisor to RSF Social Finance in San Francisco.

Tyee Bridge is a Vancouver-based writer whose work focuses on progressive change-makers, ecological issues, and the power of story. His writing has received many honors, including four National Magazine Awards and seven Western Magazine Awards. He is the founder of Nonvella, which specializes in short works of literary non-fiction, and of Arclight, a custom publishing firm for values-aligned leaders and businesses.