No, Robert Graves fans, I don’t mean to suggest that 2008 was as bad as trench warfare during WWI. But it was an undeniably dismal year in the world of business and sustainability. We had the financial crisis, the depressing recession, plummeting stock prices, shrinking 401-k’s, Wall Street shenanigans (to put it mildly), the train wreck known as Bernie Madoff, auto companies on the brink, the worst year ever for journalism, an average gasoline price of $1.61, and mass layoffs (including my own) that made “job security” into the newest oxymoron.

2009, bring it on!

Being a chronic optimistic, I’m going to bid 2008 goodbye by finding a few silver linings in the events of recent months, beginning with the obvious and moving on to the not-so:

1. Barack Obama. Still hard to believe that America elected an African-American president, who also happens to be really smart, thoughtful, a good listener and a problem solver. I’m really impressed by his enviro team and by the new education secretary, Arne Duncan. And did you know that Obama is an exercise nut? My favorite post-election Obama story is this one from the Washington Post, reporting that he has worked out for at least 90 minutes a day for 48 days in a row. Next time someone you know says he or she doesn’t have time for a workout, send them the link. At least when it comes to exercise, my plan for 2009 is to be like Barack.

2. The recession. Because it will lead to a stimulus package which, if we are smart as a country, will provide long-lasting and long-overdue benefits. If we spend money on energy efficiency (see my friend Matt Wald’s New York Times article on weatherization), renewable energy, rebuilding the electricity grid and mass transportation, we’ll be investing in a more sustainable future for America.

3. The Wall Street meltdown. But only if it leads to corporate governance reform, probably the single biggest problem that cries out for fixing in corporate America. One of the very big questions raised by the failures of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and AIG, as well as the woes of Citi, Merrill Lynch and others is this: Where were the directors? The WSJ editorial page  got this issue exactly right in an editorial on Citi:

“Citi never sleeps,” says the bank’s advertising slogan. But its directors apparently do. While CEO Vikram Pandit can argue that many of Citi’s problems were created before he arrived in 2007, most board members have no such excuse. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has served on the Citi board for a decade. For much of that time he was chairman of the executive committee, collecting tens of millions to massage the Beltway crowd, though apparently not for asking tough questions about risk management….

Chairman Sir Win Bischoff has held senior positions at Citi since 2000. Six other directors have served for more than 10 years — including former CIA Director John Deutch, Time Warner Chairman Richard Parsons, foundation executive Franklin Thomas, former AT&T CEO C. Michael Armstrong, Alcoa Chairman Alain Belda, and former Chevron Chairman Kenneth Derr.

When taxpayers are being asked to provide the equivalent of $1,000 each in guarantees on Citi’s dubious investments, how can these men possibly say they deserve to remain on the board?

How, indeed? The single best thing the new SEC can do is allow shareholders to directly nominate directors of the companies they own. Until then, “shareholder democracy” will remain a joke.

4. Bernie Madoff. What on earth were people thinking when they entrusted this guy with their money? Here, too, there is a lesson that can be learned: It’s long past time for nonprofits and foundations (not to mention the rest of us) to align their investing with their mission. Here’s an interesting albeit lengthy report on the topic from the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, complete with case studies on how some foundations have pursued what the report calls “missing-related investing.”

5. Cheap gas. I fear this will lead to a resurgence in SUV sales but I hope it provides a political opening for one of the simplest and most effective responses to the problem of climate change and the quest for more energy security: a gasoline tax. The other day in The Times, Tom Friedman argued for a gas tax in a column headlined Win, Win, Win, Win, Win. So did Arthur Laffer, in an op-ed touting An Emissions Plan Conservatives Could Warm To. Laffer put it simply:

We need to impose a tax on the thing we want less of (carbon dioxide) and reduce taxes on the things we want more of (income and jobs).

Charles Krauthammer has a long, thoughtful piece, making the arguments in more detail, in The Weekly Standard.

On a personal note, I’ve learned in the four weeks since losing my job at FORTUNE that I have a lot of friends and even a few fans—and that as one door closes, others will open.

I’m genuinely excited about 2009. Happy new year, everyone!

How could smart people be so dumb? That’s the overarching question raised by the Bernie Madoff-with-the-money affair. But because the decision to entrust one’s entire fortune to a black-box operation like Madoff’s is a triumph of greed over common sense, it’s hard for me to get worked up about the suffering of the Palm Beach society types who invested millions with Madoff.

Far more troubling are the losses suffered by foundations and nonprofits—because they raise important questions about how these institutions invest their money. Among those that have been forced to shut down are The Picower Foundation and the JEHT Foundation (the name stands for justice, equality, human dignity and tolerance) and the Fair Food Foundation. Others that have suffered substantial losses include The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, the Ramaz School, Yeshiva University, Stephen Spielberg’s Wunderkinder Foundation, Hadassah and the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, according to this roundup in The Washington Post.

There is lots to say about all this. See, for example, this excellent story in The New York Times about the campus debates at Yeshiva University, about the scandal and Jewish values. But the screamingly obvious lesson, to me, is that nonprofits and foundations have been woefully deficient when it comes to aligning their investments with their broader purpose. This problem extends well beyond Madoff.

Think, for instance, of that JEHT Foundation, which supported such human rights groups as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First. You’d think a group like that would want to invest its money only with companies that respect human rights by, for example, refusing to do business with Sudan, or pressing for freedoms in China. But there’s a disconnect between the way groups like JEHT invest their money and how they give it away.

The same goes for Jeanne and Kenneth Levy-Church, who were behind the Fair Food Foundation, a group that had generated lots of buzz in the sustainable food world. You would think the couple would want to make sure that their money was invested in companies that respect the environment. Instead, they turned it over to Madoff, and like everyone else, had no idea how he made his money.

This isn’t a new issue. You may recall that a few years ago the Los Angeles Times looked into the investments of The Gates Foundation and found that some of the companies it was supporting undermined the purposes of the foundation. For example:

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

More generally:

The Times found that the Gates Foundation has holdings in many companies that have failed tests of social responsibility because of environmental lapses, employment discrimination, disregard for worker rights, or unethical practices.

You can read the long L.A. Times series here.

Steve Viederman, the former president of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, has for years been calling upon foundations to align their investments with their mission. Foundations, he has noted, tend to be passive investors. They rarely throw their weight around when it comes to shareholder resolutions aimed at getting companies to be more socially and environmentally responsible. Here’s an essay by Steve about the issue.

Another who has sounded this alarm for years is the shareholder activist Robert A.G. Monks. Monks has griped that university endowments manage investments that are entirely unrelated to their values and missions. See, for example, To Harvard With Love, a letter that Bob wrote to Larry Summer, who was then the president of his beloved alma mater, back in 2003. He wrote:

Harvard has become an “owner” of virtually all of those enterprises whose collective functioning impacts life on earth perhaps more than any other institutions. The question is the extent of Harvard’s responsibility as owner. What is Harvard doing now? Does she ensure optimum value? What should she do in the future?

The fact that people like Steve Viederman and Bob Monks and a group called the Sustainable Endowment Institute have been making this argument for so long and getting so little traction is, among other things, a reflection of the weakness of the socially responsible investment industry. SRI investment pros have simply failed to make the case that values-driven investing is the best way to invest.

If there is any benefit from the Madoff scandal, it will be that nonprofits and  foundations pay a lot more attention to how and where their money is invested. They can’t just be responsible donors. They need to be responsible owners as well.

Bob Metcalfe is a colorful character and Internet pioneer. He invented the Ethernet, founded a big tech company called 3Com and even has a law named after him: Metcalfe’s Law says the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its connected users, an interesting notion but one that strikes me as unprovable.

In any event, Metcalfe is now a venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners focused on clean technology, and he’s been traveling around giving a slide show, drawing lessons from the Internet that can be applied to clean tech. His ideas are the subject of today’s Sustainability column at fortune.com.

Here’s how the column begins:

Back in the 1960s, when Bob Metcalfe was in college, he would drive to MIT in Cambridge, Mass., from his home in Brooklyn, call home once he arrived, allow the phone to ring three times and hang up, to let his mother know he’d arrived safely.

“The long-distance call was so expensive that mom didn’t want to pay for it,” Metcalfe recalls. “She loved me a lot — but not that much.”

Today, of course, phone calls cost nothing on evenings and weekends and, using Skype, you can call anywhere in the world for free or just pennies a minute. Information — phone calls, baseball scores, this column, Wikipedia — has become cheap and easy to find because of the telecom and Internet revolutions, which created an abundance of low-cost bandwidth.

Metcalfe helped drive those revolutions, and now, as a venture capitalist with Polaris Venture Partners in Cambridge, he wants to help engineer another revolution, this one in energy.

Metcalfe is a provocative thinker. You can watch his slide show here. And you can read the rest of my column here.

Here are a few words from Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, about U.S. energy policy:

Shame on us. This is our third energy crisis. And we still don’t have the fortitude as a nation to do anything about it. And we’re going to earn a fourth.

We need a real energy policy and it’s going to have to include taxing people on energy so that energy costs stay up and people buy smaller cars and smaller homes.

This is not just a financial issue. This is a geopolitical issue. We are arming the people who want to kill us. That’s what we’re doing.

What the hell is wrong with us?

If you’re a reporter, you’ve got to love Jamie Dimon. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks. In a world where most big-company CEOs choose their every utterance with care, and where many are carefully managed by their media relations people, saying what you really think turns out to be not only endearing, but a surprisingly effective way to communicate. Imagine that.

You hear a lot about the importance of transparency these days in the corporate world, but you don’t hear a lot about candor. Maybe that’s because candor is in such short supply in the executive suites. I can think of only a few CEOS I’ve interviewed over the years who I would describe as open and candid—Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines comes to mind, as does Ted Turner. T.J. Rodgers of SunPower is a great interview, and Jack Welch could be blunt. But it’s a short list. Jamie is a more restrained that Herb or Ted or T.J., but not by much.

Jamie delivered the remarks above recently at Yale CEO Summit, which gave him a leadership award. (You can watch the entire video here.) Jamie also did a couple of great interviews with Charlie Rose last summer, available here. I’ve never written about Jamie, but I had a chance to see him in action a few years ago at a company retreat in Deer Valley, Utah. (His vice chairman, Bill Daley, the former commerce secretary, invited me there to talk about corporate responsibility, shortly after the publication of my book, Faith and Fortune.) At the time, Jamie expressed outrage about the Enron and Worldcom scandals and how much damage they have done to corporate America.

This has been quite a year for Dimon. Yale give him a leadership award even though J.P. Morgan Chase’s stock is down by close to 30%. That tells you what kind of a year it’s been on Wall Street. J.P. Morgan Chase appears to be one of the very few companies that have emerged stronger from all the turmoil, by acquiring Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual as they were about to collapse.

At the Yale event, Dimon talks a fair bit about the financial crisis, taking some blame for mistakes at J.P. Morgan Chase. What I found most interesting, though, were his observations about corporate culture, both at Bank One (where he used to be CEO) and J.P. Morgan Chase. (They come about 35 minutes into the video.) He talks about trying to take the politics out of big companies, and about finding people who have strong opinions and personalities but understand that, in the end, they are working for a company and its clients, and that they need to see themselves as part of a team. Interestingly, when my FORTUNE colleague Shawn Tully did a cover story about Dimon and his “swat team” last summer, Dimon insisted on being photographed with the bank’s other senior execs.

“Business is more Shakespearean than MBA,” Dimon says. “Look at these companies, with these neurotic bursts of energy and firings and mass changes and it doesn’t work. You can compare any industry. In the best companies, things get better. Wal-Mart. GE. Others are blowing up, people are being fired, boards are bringing in new mgmt teams, which is a Hail Mary pass, unless you really know the person.”

Investment decisions matter, he went on, but in the end the job of a CEO is to find the right people and create a climate in which the right decisions get made. “The best thing I can do for JPM leave with place with high integrity, high powered people, who are always learning, always changing. That DNA will set the company forward for a hundred years.”

That’s another benefit of a candid CEO: The people around him are likely to speak their minds, too.

Rick Warren is one the most likable people I’ve ever met. We traveled to Rwanda together back in 2005, and spent time at Saddleback Church. I came away impressed with his big heart, his passion, his smarts and his long-running effort to broaden the political agenda of evangelical Christians to include the issues of global poverty, AIDS and the environment.

But Barack Obama made a mistake by selecting Warren, the nation’s most influential religious leader, to give the invocation at his inaugural. The choice has rightfully angered gay and lesbian Americans. People who care deeply about abortion rights are pleased either.

As it happens, I don’t think Rick’s views on abortion should disqualify him from speaking at the inaugural. As Obama said, while defending the choice at a press conference earlier today, “it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues.” Fair enough—we can agree to disagree respectfully about abortion, as much as our views are strongly held. (You can read Obama’s full answer here.)

The gay rights issue is different. Having Rick Warren give the invocation, at an event that should be a celebration for all Americans, is an insult to tens of millions of LGBT people. I don’t believe that Rick is a bigot, or that he holds any personal animus towards gay people. But his interpretation of the Bible, which he believes to be the word of God, has led him to believe that gay and lesbian relationships are fundamentally wrong.

I quoted him to that effect in my FORTUNE story, Will Success Spoil Rick Warren?, as John Cloud of TIME noted in an excellent column published today:

About three years ago, a reporter at Fortune asked Rick Warren — the successful pastor whom the President-elect has asked to pray at his inauguration — about homosexuality. “I’m no homophobic guy,” Warren said. His proof? He had dined with gays; he has a church “full of people who are caring for gays who are dying of AIDS”; he believes that “in the hierarchy of evil… homosexuality is not the worst sin.” So gays get to eat — sometimes even with Rick Warren! Then they get to die of AIDS — possibly under the care of Rick Warren’s congregants. And when they go to hell, they won’t be quite as far down in Satan’s pit as other evildoers.

But Warren did have a message of hope for gays: they can magically become heterosexuals. (He didn’t explain how, but I suspect he thinks praying really hard would do it, as though most of us who grew up gay and evangelical hadn’t tried that every night as teenagers.) Homosexuality, Pastor Warren explained in the virtually content-free language of the dogmatist, is “not the natural way.” And then he went right for the ick factor, the way middle-school boys do: “Certain body parts are meant to fit together.”

When Rick and I discussed the issue—always at my request—I never felt he was mean-spirited. But I told him that his position provided cover for bigots, even for those commit acts of violence against gays. He replied by reminding me, accurately, that he has argued for years that evangelical Christians should talk a lot less about the hot-button social issues and a lot more about problems around which all Americans can unite, like poverty or the environment. “I’m a bridge builder, not a divider,” he likes to say.

The trouble is, religious differences can’t easily be bridged. The world’s religions “totally contradict each other” and are “mutually exclusive” is how Rick put it to me back then. When we explored this further, he told me, cheerfully, that he thinks I’m going to hell because I haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as my savior (I’m Jewish), but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Trust me that he’s a hard guy not to like.

The controversy over Obama’s choice got me wondering: Is there any religious figure in America today who could give the invocation at an inaugural without making some people unhappy? I called my friend Donna Schaper to ask her. Donna’s the senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, a liberal Protestant, progressive in her politics, and a gifted writer, speaker, gardener and mother. (I know this because she’s married to my friend and college roommate, Warren Goldstein, a historian and the biographer of the Rev. William Sloane Coffin.) Donna said that it’s possible to construct an ecumenical invocation, but very hard to find a single person to deliver the prayer who could appeal to all Americans.

When Donna leads prayers at public occasions, she talks about

God, whose name we do not and cannot know, whom some call Allah and some Spirit, whom some call Ruach and others Yahweh or Adonai, some call Jesus and some call Christ, others know only as Breath or Ruach, still others understand as energy or force, Thou who are nameless and properly so, draw near….

Rick, if you’re reading this, there’s an approach for you.

Donna has also been to events where four religious leaders—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim– deliver prayers. “Then, of course, the Buddhists and Sikhs and others would be left out,” she says.

Because she’s an Obama fan, I asked Donna what she thought of the choice of Rick Warren. She admitted disappointment. “I’m still very pro-Obama, and he must have his reasons, but in addition to insulting women and gays, he missed a big opportunity,” she told me. “He lost the chance to do something positive, and imaginative.”

I agree. It’s fine for Obama to invite Rick Warren to the White House, to enlist his help dealing with AIDS and to honor his work in Africa. Just don’t put him on the podium on Jan. 20, a day that is supposed to belong to all Americans.