the internal combustion engine of the capitalist economy. They are where it hits the ground and goes. And where it spins out of control. As Fritjof Capra put it, Its an alarming thought that organizational systems are now the main driving force of ecological systems.In the short run, profit-maximizing companies can help in a rapid transition to an ecologically cleaner economy. But in the somewhat longer run, that transition might represent a brief moment in time. If human civilization and planetary ecosystems are still functioning well 50 years from now (not a small if), what about the next 50 years? And the next 100 or 200 or 1,000 years beyond that? What kind of economy will be suited for ongoing life inside the living earth? Will it be an economy dominated by massive corporations intent solely on earnings growth? That doesnt seem likely. When you take the long view, the question turns itself about:Can we sustain a low-growth or no-growth economy indefinitely without changing dominant ownership designs?That seems unlikely. Probably impossible. How, then, do we make the turn? How can we design economic architectures that are self-organized not around profit maximization, but around serving the needs of life?After my sojourn in England, this question set me on a journey in search of answers. I had seen, over many years, how extractive design the quest for endless extraction of more and more financial wealth was at the root of many of our ills. I began a quest to find alternative designs. And I was heartened to find they were everywhere, emerging in largely unsung, disconnected experiments all over the world.I visited wind farms in Denmark that had been started and owned by wind guilds, groups of small investors who joined together to fund and own wind installations, with no corporate middleman. Denmark now generates one-fifth of its electric power from wind, more than any other nation. And this success is widely credited to the grassroots movement of the wind guilds. Its an ecological success story made possible by the community-rooted ownership designs behind it.I studied the community forests of Mexico, where the rights to govern and profit from the forest have often been granted to local communities, many of them indigenous tribal peoples like the Zapotec Indians of Ixtlan de Juarez in southern Mexico. At Ixtlan, the problems that bedeviled other forests in Mexico, like deforestation and illegal logging, have become relatively unknown. The reason is community members have incentive to be stewards, because forest enterprises employ 300 people harvesting timber, making furniture, and caring for the forest. These are living forests, communities of trees and humans, where the purpose is to live well together. Worldwide, more than a quarter of forests in developing nations are managed by local communities. In Mexico, community forests represent more than 60 percent of all forests. Yet they remain virtually unknown, even in Mexico.On Marthas Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, I visited South Mountain Company, an employee-owned design and build firm specializing in sustainable construction, which has made a deliberate choice to slow down its growth.