Fran Korten

Fran Korten is former executive director, publisher and contributing editor for YES! Magazine. She answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

We’re up against the huge power of the fossil fuel industry; the extraordinary ideological opposition to the federal government doing anything important; money going into disinformation campaigns that people readily bought into. And it’s still going on.

In 1986, at the age of 26, Chuck Collins, the great-grandson of meatpacking giant Oscar Mayer, gave away his trust fund.

Elinor Ostrom was an unusual choice for the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.