"I realized that I could have a different relationship with money, that I did not want many material things but rather the freedom to do what I want with my time." – when Jim recognized that the world is on a dangerous course he decided to devote himself to working on solutions that might help change it.

Jim Fournier, Founding-Partner & CEO, EPRIDA, Fairfax, California, USA

We visit Jim in his unique community house outside of San Francisco. It is surrounded by greenery and most of the inhabitants live in small cottages in the woods. The access is through a long, green driveway where the neighbor’s horses greet us. The view out of the window is so much more inspiring than from most city offices and the atmosphere makes us feel at home.
Jim Fournier is one of these rare multi talents, who – through hours of visualizing and meditating about the future – has a quite clear perspective on where the world could go and should go. He used to manage a successful luxury design company, he co-founded the first international conference on global ecology and information technology, and was engaged in a number of other initiatives. Currently Jim works on 12 projects, all evolving around positive contribution to a more environmentally sustainable development. At the moment Jim invests by far most of his time in the new start-up, EPRIDA, which offers a new sustainable energy technology that will allow removing CO2 from the air by putting the carbon into the topsoil where it is needed. According to Jim EPRIDA is what he has been waiting for the last 20 years. He is in the process of reducing all his other duties to make EPRIDA one of the companies that can save human kind from real catastrophes, especially the CO2 induced climate changes.

Enjoy Jim’s selected thoughts and statements from our discussion in the following lines. You may be able to read more about his fantastic work and different projects in our book “MyImpact”.

Jim Fournier’s selected quotations:
"I enjoyed my design business but I left it because it wasn't serving what matters in the world. Designing luxury goods was just too far from what I find important in the world. What I do now really matters."

"I gave a lot of thought to what I really wanted in life and money's place in it. I decided to shift my focus away from making money; it was never my motivation anyway."

"The only thing that was growing as fast as the global crisis was the internet. So, in May 2000 we organised a big conference, Planetwork, on global ecology and communication technology. It was a great moment, just after the Seattle protests and Y2K. Following this event a growing number of people continued to share in the network."

"I visualize things that need to change; however unlikely, what could happen that is not actually impossible. For example on global warming, I visualized how we might, not just slow it down, but reverse it. EPRIDA came into my life as if a direct answer to that intention I first set in my own mind."

"The two measures of how well we do in this lifetime will be how much of biodiversity we preserve for all future generations and how fast we build sustainable technology (that neither the developed nor the developing world has today). I believe the private sector is most likely to achieve the technology, but the preservation of life will require individual citizens and philanthropists to become more activated very fast."

"My vision is that we will ultimately evolve a level of technology that is as elegant as the solutions found in nature. In the future the economy will no longer be based on material growth."

"If you think with a long-term time horizon a lot of things need to be counted which are not counted in the current valuation system."

"The money system that we have now only works because it makes money scarce. It is good for concentrating capital to do an industrial revolution but we will not need this capability anymore. We will need a different financial system."

"Faced with the playing field that we have in front of us I tend to look for systematic approaches and solutions that others may not be looking at. I think of one big, interconnected mass and try to find out where I can tweak it."

"In the 70’s we were able to stabilize energy use per capita globally. Unfortunately, in the U.S. we largely used these gains to create more obese things, bigger cars, SUV etc."

"It is possible that migration from rural areas to cities will help save us; even for the urban poor, more children are costly, and this may be stabilizing global population faster than expected. It will also be easier to design energy efficient cities than rural areas, once we have the will and resources allocated to do it."

"It is, of course, possible that we could descend into violent anarchy. I am, however, optimistic that if we have imagined the right solutions in advance the moments of crisis we face can become great opportunities."

"When you change your point of view, what gets reflected back on you also changes."

"I share my home with a community of people who see themselves as being in service of the world. We are not activists in the sense of being angry. We want to show what's positive and possible in community."

"By the age of 20 I had some very powerful experiences with psychedelics. In more recent years I have gone more deeply into Buddhist meditation, especially Tibetan practices. My sense of values, mission and being in service of others has been influence by these spiritual experiences."

"If you are not taking up the challenge you don't actually see things. To be most effective one must discern the best plausible outcome that is not actually impossible, and visualize that. This can allow one to look at how bad things are with a very positive attitude."

"Most people are scared by money, by the fear of not having it, of being on the street, or at least of loosing the game. I feel this myself at times, but I choose not to live there. The danger is that you get hypnotized by the material level of wealth and only see things through that reality tunnel. Our society rewards some of our most creative people to hypnotize us to believe that we inherently want all this stuff. It’s called advertising, but look at what happened after 9-11, people quit shopping to spend time with their loved ones. They had to crank up the advertising machine to get even Americans to go back to shopping. This is an artificial situation. We are so hypnotized we don't have time to think about our real values and motivations."

Some background on Jim Fournier:
Jim is an entrepreneur, product designer, software developer and industrial ecologist. He left MIT in 1984 to found JLF Designs, an industrial design firm, which rapidly grew into an international consumer goods design and manufacturing company that he owned and operated for eleven years. He developed 3D software as a geometry partner with SGI in the early 1990's and retired from business to work full time on global sustainability in 1995. In 1998, he co-founded Planetwork which produced the first international conference on information technology and global ecology in May 2000. Since then he has produced several conferences and led a San Francisco based network using IT to address ecological and social issues, where he serves on the boards and boards of advisors of numerous organizations.
For the last several years Jim has focused on initiatives to create an Internet identity protocol to more effectively inter-connect global civil society. He is also involved with a number of projects related to strategic philanthropy, including Protecting the Family Tree of Life, an effort to catalyze a shift in societal denial to bring awareness to the fact that we will loose half the species on Earth within 100 years if we do not wake up and act to change course.

Some background on EPRIDA:
Eprida offers a revolutionary new sustainable energy technology that will allow removing CO2 from the air by putting the carbon into the topsoil where it is needed. The process creates hydrogen rich biofuels and a restorative high-carbon fertilizer from biomass, or a combination of coal and biomass, while actually removing net carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Eprida holds patent pending technology for a new carbon sequestration and utilization breakthrough in the thirty largest industrial and agricultural countries. The technology offers a solution for stabilizing, and eventually reversing, global greenhouse gas emissions. Initial R&D has successfully proven the technology and it is now a matter of scaling deployment.

If you would like to engage with the work of Jim Fournier or get to know more about EPRIDA please visit www.eprida.com,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.