Every year, to much less fanfare, the "real" Nobel Prizes are preceded by the Alternative Nobel Prizes, formally known as the Right Livelihood Awards.
Think of it as the Nobel Prize for Love.
This year's winners are typical: relatively unsung heros of planetary transformation, champions of sustainability, democracy, and justice.
There's Walden Bello and Nicanor Perlas, two Philippine intellectual activists who have been building an extraordinary body of work over many years that defines an alternative, indigenous framework for development, as opposed to, say, Thomas Friedman's "Golden Straitjacket" of globalized industrialism.
There's the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice in South Korea, described as "South Korea's first fully-fledged citizensÂ’ organization and ... now one of its most influential," with thousands of members in dozens of chapters pushing for economic justice, environmental protection, democratic and social development and reunification of the divided Korean peninsula.
And finally this year, there is SEKEM, a successful program to develop extensive biodynamic farming in Egypt, and return the profits to community development. It's a new business model founded on "the economics of love."
The "real" Nobel Prize winners this year are led, in Woldchanging terms, by J.M. Coetzee, whose must-read fictions move the reader to think the world anew, even as we must face up to the evil, indifference, and stupidity that degrade us as human beings.
But the Right Livelihood Award winners deserve equal acclaim. They are physically changing the world, making it tangibly better ... and inspiring us to join them in loving it into betterment.
