The New Elders

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Both have done the roadwork. Leider, founder and chairman of the Inventure Group, a coaching and consulting firm in Minneapolis, is co-author of Claiming Your Place at the Fire: Living the Second Half of Your Life on Purpose (Berrett-Koehler, 2004), which provides a road map for what he terms 'vital aging.'

Eric Utne, who founded Utne Reader in 1984, is co-founder and executive director of Earth Corps for Global Service (www.serveyourplanet.org), a project that aims to create 'a vast planetary force of college-age students, mid-life adults, and post-career retirees to address both human and environmental needs.'

After several casual conversations over morning coffee, the two entrepreneurs agreed to meet with Utne Reader to discuss mentoring, wisdom, and their generation's remaining potential.

Let's first dispense with the elephant in the room: Given the political, economic, environmental, and social failures blamed on the boomer generation, why would young people listen to what anyone over the age of 50 has to say?

Eric Utne: We are the generation that took human life on this planet to the brink and, given the specter of global climate change, may have already gone over the edge. We managed to destroy community, looked over the edge with nuclear energy, we've seen diseases rage across the planet -- HIV/AIDS, possibly avian flu in the wings.

If we have anything to offer, it's a cautionary tale: Don't live your life the way we did. One thing we have abandoned in this youth culture, this frenzy for modernity, is our rites of passage. A real acknowledgement that you're leaving adolescence, you're stepping into adulthood, and you have a place in the community. That you may have gifts to offer that you're not even aware of; that you have an obligation to contribute. So our work is to create opportunities for those encounters, for those rites of passage.

Richard Leider: For me it's a misnomer that the younger generation is awake and older citizens have somehow fallen asleep. We've all been asleep. We all need to wake up. The other thing is that [the boomers] have the money, the resources, and the companies. And people of all ages need to learn to work and play together, to make sure those resources are leveraged wisely.

So for knowledge to pass from generation to generation, everyone has to play an equal role?

RL: It's all about reciprocity. Younger people have information, older people have experiences, and you start to blend those together to get a new kind of wisdom, a new form of conversation.

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