So Who’s This Peter Wege? And What In Heck Is Economicology?

March 24, 2010 A rain forest in Costa Rica is named for Peter Wege. The New York Times featured the world’s first newly built clean-energy art museum and attributed its origin to him. Saving the Great Lakes has turned into a hot media topic and a $20 billion federal law because the same man called a meeting at Steelcase Inc. in 2004 and started the Healing Our Waters Great Lakes Coalition.

Grand Rapids, Michigan native Peter M. Wege, son of Steelcase Inc. founder Peter Martin Wege, started The Wege Foundation to honor his father and his mother Sophia Louise. For more than four decades Peter has devoted his energy, assets and passion to performing good deeds for the environment. So how else would he celebrate his 90th birthday in February 2010 than by writing a new environmental book?

ECONOMICOLOGY II pulls together a variety of writers to support Wege’s advocacy for economicology: striking a balance between our economy and our ecology. As with its predecessor, ECONOMICOLOGY: The Eleventh Commandment, published in 1998, Wege’s new book refers to the experts on sustainability who have influenced him in his work and his philanthropy.

The experts featured in the book run the gamut. From his early hero John Gardner to one of today’s most familiar environmental personalities, Thomas Friedman. From H.G. Wells to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As he did with his first book, Wege hopes ECONOMICOLOGY II will encourage readers to read these experts’ books. ECONOMICOLOGY II is now available at The Wege Foundation web site with proceeds going to the Center of Economicology, City High-Middle School, a Grand Rapids Public School. (Did we mention the new species of butterfly named Porphyrogenes peterwegei? It’s pictured on page 108.