Aired 12/24/08 TERRY McNALLY on AIR AMERICA RADIO sitting in for RACHEL MADDOW and interviews BILL DRAYTON. BILL DRAYTON has pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship. He is the CEO and founder of ASHOKA, a global organization which selects individuals tackling society's most pressing problems with innovative, entrepreneurial solutions. Since 1981, ASHOKA has elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries. Through ASHOKA, DRAYTON has introduced the world to a fundamentally new model of how ideas can change social systems across the globe, improving the lives of millions. As a management consultant with McKinsey & Co, he gained wide experience serving both public and private clients, and built his understanding of how organizations work. He also served briefly in the White House, and taught both law and management at Stanford Law School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is a graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Universities. Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else. Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers-a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything. Over the past two decades, the citizen sector http://www.ashoka.org/citizensector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur. Just as entrepreneurs change the face of business, social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss and improving systems, inventing new approaches, and creating solutions to change society for the better. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale. Learn more at http://ashoka.org

Aired 12/24/08 TERRY McNALLY on AIR AMERICA RADIO sitting in for RON REAGAN and interviews STUART KAUFFMAN. STUART KAUFFMAN is the director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, Investigations and his newest, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. With economic and communications globalization, some form of a global civilization is beginning to emerge. Just as we confront the challenges of global warming and peak oil, and the likelihood of growing hunger and resource wars, our diverse cultures are being crushed together. One response is a retreat into fundamentalisms, often religious, often hostile. Clearly there is an urgent need for new thinking. STUART KAUFFMAN says that's why he wrote Reinventing the Sacred. Rooted in hard science, the book - and it's passionate author -- aims for nothing less than a revolution in how we see the world, reality, God, and our role in it all. Learn more at http://www.edge.org

Aired 12/23/08 Charities may operate with the noblest of intentions - but according to DAN PALLOTTA, they are hampered from the very start by an irrational set of rules and assumptions. By barring or discouraging charities from wielding the most effective tools of capitalism, he insists, we limit their ability to fight the social problems they were formed to tackle on a truly significant scale. UNCHARITABLE goes where no other book on the nonprofit sector has dared to tread. Where other texts suggest ways to optimize performance inside the existing paradigm, Uncharitable suggests that the paradigm itself is the problem and calls into question our fundamental canons about charity. Pallotta argues that society's nonprofit ethic acts as a strict regulatory mechanism on the natural economic law. It creates an economic apartheid that denies the nonprofit sector critical tools and permissions that the for-profit sector is allowed to use without restraint (e.g., no risk-reward incentives, no profit, counterproductive limits on compensation, and moral objections to the use of donated dollars for anything other than program expenditures. http://www.danpallotta.com

Aired 12/23/08 Prohibition has failed -- again. Instead of treating the demand for illegal drugs as a market, and addicts as patients, policymakers the world over have boosted the profits of drug lords and fostered narcostates that would frighten Al Capone. "Harm reduction," a smarter drug control regime that values reality over rhetoric, is rising to replace the "war" on drugs. Reducing drug use is not nearly as important as reducing the death, disease, crime, and suffering associated with both drug misuse and failed prohibitionist policies. With respect to legal drugs, such as alcohol and cigarettes, harm reduction means promoting responsible drinking and designated drivers, or persuading people to switch to nicotine patches, chewing gums, and smokeless tobacco. With respect to illegal drugs, it means reducing the transmission of infectious disease through syringe-exchange programs, reducing overdose fatalities by making antidotes readily available, and allowing people addicted to heroin and other illegal opiates to obtain methadone.

Aired 12/16/08 After 3.8 billion years of R&D, failures are fossils. The conscious emulation of life's genius is a sustainable survival strategy for the human race. Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. Studying a leaf to invent a better solar cell is an example of this "innovation inspired by nature." The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. We are learning how to grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone, create color like a peacock, self-medicate like a chimp, compute like a cell, and run a business like a hickory forest. Learn more at www.biomimicryinstitute.org and www.asknature.org Janine Benyus' luscious 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature is unique and profound. In the book, she not only invents a new field that she has named biomimicry, but she inverts the way we all think about design - the alchemy that turns intention into action. Benyus draws her design inspiration from nature's wisdom, not people's cleverness. Some 3.8 billion years of evolution have exposed the design flaws of roughly 99% of nature's creations - all recalled by the Manufacturer. The 1% that have survived can teach powerful lessons about how things should be built if they're to last. For example, nature's design genius has led to the creation of bat-inspired ultrasonic canes for the blind, synthetic sheets that collect water from mist and fog as desert beetles do, and paint that self-cleans like a lotus leaf. Little plastic-film patches have been designed using adhesiveless gecko-foot technology, so that carpet tiles can be stored in a big roll, but also easily removed. Equally promising, we'll soon make solar cells like leaves, supertough ceramics that resemble the inner shells of abalone, and underwater glue that mimics the natural as forests. Biomimicry isn't biotechnology. Biomimicry learns and emulates how spiders make silk; biotechnology transplants spiders' silk-making genes into goats, then sorts silk from milk and hopes the genes don't get loose. Biotechnology is smart kids in an oil depot with matches; biomimicry is wise adults in a rain forest with flashlights. Biotechnology is pure hubris; biomimicry is luminous humility - treating nature as model and mentor, cherished not as a mine to be stripped of its resources but as a teacher. Steering this design revolution is a centered, gentle, funny, lovely lady who lives in North America's Montana Rockies, observes deeply, writes with rare beauty, and lectures breathtakingly. By reorganizing the biological literature around function not organism - to reveal which organism knows how to solve your design problem - Benyus and her colleagues at the Biomimicry Guild and Biomimicry Institute in Montana are starting to help the world of the made work like, and live harmoniously with, the world of the born. This will change your life. And it may save the world. -- Amory B. Lovins, chairman and chief scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute