Pushing the Limits Interview with Thomas Homer-Dixon

It ain’t easy being green these days – especially if you’re an independent green business.

Millions of newspapers are printed and delivered every day – and likely thrown out the day after. Yet, no Canadian media firm prints a sustainability report.

Imagine knowing exactly what your friends think of you and say about you to others, and seeing who in your social network has the most influence over the opinions that frame these conversations. Thanks to the emergence of Web 2.0, which gives people and communities internet addresses with all the functionality to allow to them to interact as a community, and the chatter on websites and blogs, people are communicating and posting opinions in the virtual world like never before. Sites like Facebook and Friendster are altering social networks and fabrics.

“What poor people need most is a way to make money,” writes Martin Fisher, an engineer who lived in Kenya working on development initiatives for 17 years before plowing his accrued knowledge back into KickStart, the technology transfer organization he founded with partner Nick Moon. “One of the most fundamental lessons was that the poorest people in the world are also among the most entrepreneurial—they have to be just to survive,” he writes in the catalogue for Design for the Other 90% (DFTO90), a recent exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum that features products geared toward the billions of consumers with pennies a day, if that, of disposable income. “They do not want handouts,” Fisher writes. “They want opportunities.”