[Book review] Retiring to a higher cause

from the Financial Post

Boomers take a radical approach to changing the world

Andre Ramshaw, Financial Post Published: Saturday, March 08, 2008

We Are the New Radicals: A Manifesto

for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World

Julia Moulden

McGraw-Hill

256 pages, $26.95

On a remote Scottish hills ide somewhere north of Dumfries, a friend of mine sits quietly wai ting for his prey. He is armed with a clipboard and binoculars and a flask of tea. There he sits, for the better part of a day, counting birds. Every avian visitor that passes over his patch of misty heather and moss will be recorded and noted.

My friend doesn't know it, but he is a New Radical.

Well-educated, he left a stressful and poorly paid job as a librarian in central London to pursue his love of the outdoors --and a strong sense of environmentalism -- to conduct freelance birdlife surveys as part of the assessment process for wind-power farms. He's turned a hobby into a new role that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

It is just the sort of life change Canadian author Julia Moulden chronicles in her book, We Are The New Radicals. Divided into innovators, entrepreneurs and activists, these socially aware citizens are united by a desire to make the world a better place.

She didn't have to look far for case studies. From Bill and Melinda Gates and their philanthropic foundation to Muhammad Yunus, the man behind the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh, Ms. Moulden profiles the rich and the powerful -- and the ordinary -- who have resisted going quietly into the twilight of retirement.

It's a Boomer thing. "We're feeling at the top our game," the speechwriter-turned-midlife coach writes of the 80 million Baby Boomers in North America. "But now we want something more from our work. We want it to reflect our values and to help us make a difference in the world."

The Boomer generation has played a major role in profound social movements such as women's rights, Ms. Moulden writes, yet "in some circles, we get credit only for becoming yuppies, driving SUVs and inventing non-fat chai lattes."

But isn't Radicals a bit, well, radical? The book urges readers to think not of extremes but rather a continuum between mild and wild. In other words, changing the world needn't involve carrying the world on your shoulders.

Dr. Ed Sutt is a case in point. Spurred by the devastation wrought by major storms such as Hurricane Katrina, the engineer reinvented the nail to withstand the rigours of a hurricane. "A lightbulb didn't go off for me," he reports, but nonetheless his simple invention, which adds about $15 to the cost of building a house, has made the world a safer place.

The book taps into the growing social entrepreneurship movement, harnessing business practices to effect change, but Ms. Moulden admits not everyone can see beyond a certain "do-gooder" stereotype.

She relates one tale of a seasoned executive, fired up by the possibilities of New Radicalism, who approached a hospital with ideas for changing the world -- and was offered a post as a candy striper.

All New Radicals face their share of adversity.

London Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, for instance, was widely vilified when he first introduced a congestion charge to the British capital. Today it is an environmentally effective transport levy studied and copied in cities across the world.

In Canada, former Toronto Police Detective-Sergeant Paul Gillespie, overwhelmed by the images of child abuse he faced daily as a lead investigator with the city's sex-crimes unit, was instrumental in creating, with the assistance of Microsoft, the Child Exploitation Tracking System, a database that allows detectives to share information on child-porn crime. The database is now being expanded worldwide. Mr. Gillespie eventually left the police and now oversees the nonprofit Kids' Internet Safety Alliance. He has no regrets about leaving his old life. "To be honest, I just couldn't look at the images any more or listen to the children screaming. I knew I wanted to continue working on these issues, and this seemed like the natural next step."

The global connectivity of the Internet that has allowed the spread of child pornography has also fed our shift in consciousness, Ms. Moulden argues. Coupled with the sense of vulnerability wrought by 9/11, it has driven the Boomer generation to embrace giving over getting.

Perhaps the biggest example of this shift is Bill Gates himself. When he announced in 2006 that he would be leaving the controls of Microsoft to concentrate on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it was spun in the financial press as a sure sign Microsoft had lost its way in a rapidly changing Internet universe. Ms. Moulden suggests the world's richest geek simply "wanted to spend more of his time doing good."

What a radical thought.