The Washington Forum will continue to emphasize the urgency of global warming and the fact that each and every one of us must become climate leaders. For the first time in our lives, indeed for the first time in history, all of us must take responsibility for our climate, whether at the individual, community, company, institution, state, or national level. We are all responsible for global warming. We must all share in the leadership required to solve it, for nothing less than the fate of human civilization is at stake. The crisis is that stark, the choice is that clear, the leadership required is that urgent.
If we rise to this challenge, if we take climate leadership, we will generate climate prosperity and climate justicebecause it is precisely our capacity to solve our greatest crisis that affords us our greatest opportunities for growth within the context of sustainability and alignment with natural systems.
Action Plan
The Washington Forum will continue building the global Climate Leadership network charged with thinking through and articulating what exactly needs to be done in order to accomplish by 2020 what our governments are currently negotiating for 2050.
In considering how this can be accomplished, we have partnered with Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the seminal work Plan B 4.0. If there is one person in the world who understands our global predicament from the point of view of its solvability, Lester Brown is that person. Lester knows the complexity and urgency of the escalating effects of global warming and understands the relationship between ecology and economy. In Plan B, he recommends numerous solutions, including reducing our carbon emissions by 80% by 2020, which if implemented would shift the basis of our economies from fossil fuels to alternative energy. Lester is convinced, as many are, that climate change is now endangering human civilization itself and that we must act decisively and immediately to solve the crisis.
We will also be drawing from other seminal thinkers and organizations such as the Presidential Climate Action Project that has done very comprehensive work in suggesting how President Obama can begin to tackle the issues of climate change; the Apollo Alliance that has mapped out powerful long term initiatives that will contribute to the greening of our economies; the work of Friends of the Earth on the carbon tax; Global Urban Development, which has created a worldwide network of cities working on developing green economies; and the Asian Foresight Institute which advises governments, corporations and institutions on climate change, among many others.
We will hear from Rajendra Pachauri, Head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; James Hansen, Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Bill Becker, Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project; Brent Blackwelder, President of Friends of the Earth; Mary Otto-Chang, Consultant with the UNICEF Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean for Children and Climate Change; Richard David Hames, strategic thinker and author; Ervin Lazslo, Founder of the Club of Budapest; Karen O'Brien, Chair of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security at the University of Oslo; Jerome Ringo, Chairman of the Apollo Alliance; Hunter Lovins environmental activist and author; Sandra Postel, Director of the Global Water Project; and Herman Wijffels, Member of the Office of the Executive Director at the World Bank, among others who will be added as we develop the agenda.
A Global Perspective
The 09 Forum will be distinctive in that we will investigate how other crucial domains besides government action, business transformation and reducing carbon emissions will be needed in order to accomplish our goals. To deal effectively with climate change and the collapse of financial systems, our entire societies need transformation. In order to generate the political will for what so urgently needs to be done we must be prepared to change our personal and cultural lives as dramatically as we green our economic and political structures. Only then will we attain the solutions we all seek.
What this requires is for us to embrace a number of big ideas:
• First, we must understand that we are confronted by a planet-wide problem and we are all in the same boat together. There is no us versus them on this one.
• Second, we will need to involve an amazing variety of populations across the world and the full spectrum of every kind of organization in every sector of the economy, governance and civil society in order to succeed.
• Third, we cannot treat anyone or any group in isolation, trying to solve one problem at a time, because we are all linked together as the planet starts to become one world for the first time in history. Planetary integration is our next industrial revolution. This presents us with both a grand opportunity and a tough challenge. All of us -- as individuals, communities, organizations, and governments are, or are becoming, part of one planetary network of systems.
• Fourth, practical success at getting things done will be helped by making strategic and integrated use of all of our technology, all of our leadership, all of our plans, and all of our individual and collective values and actions. Greening our economies therefore requires a complete shift in thinking, values, actions and intentions.
An Integral Approach
To assist us in developing an effective way to organize the information available to us and to integrate the various aspects of our humanity that must be brought together, we will draw upon integral thinking as the organizing framework for the process. Ken Wilber, the leading integral philosopher of our time and founder of Integral Life, has thought through more comprehensively than anyone we know how to organize human knowledge, specifically how our values and actions interact and mutually affect one another. We will be using his integral framework as the operating system for the Forum, as a tool to organize information and develop approaches for understanding how best to proceed. This is an approach that combines facts and values -- what people do in relation to what they believe -- in a profound synthesis that enables holistic thinking and effective decision making and values-based leadership.
In developing an integral perspective, we will draw upon the powerful work in the field of social artistry by Jean Houston, an expert in human capacities, who has trained emerging leaders from all over the world; from Caroline Myss, best selling author, who has explored very deeply how to overcome humanity’s troubling tendency toward denial and habituation to the suffering of others; Monica Sharma, who has worked throughout the global south with the UN, and has a powerful perspective on how values and culture affect human empowerment; and Rob Work, who has spent decades working internationally and from an integral perspective to empower leaders and communities in the art of resilience and creativity.
We will examine the contributions of social psychology, cultural development and personal growth and how they can inform and guide us in developing the leadership qualities and best practices required to succeed in actually accomplishing the tasks at hand. By the end of the Forum, all of us will have a deeper sense of both what needs to be done and what we can personally and collectively do to implement the goals we seek to achieve.
A Rising Tide of Cultural Creativity
In this regard, the Forum will highlight new data on a fundamental shift taking place in global values. The latest research shows that “new progressives” now constitute the largest single voter constituency in the United States and which strongly supports moves toward a green economy. Similar trends can be seen in Europe, Japan and in cities and constituencies throughout the global south. Research conducted by sociologist Paul Ray shows that roughly one third of the public is now “culturally creative” and that over 70% supports decisive action on global warming, among other ecological concerns. The important conclusion from this research is that politicians who are willing to speak to progressive values and take decisive action on global warming can win elections.
Focusing on the relationship between leadership, ecology and economy, using Plan B, along with other suggestions, as the basis of a ten year plan to green our economies, utilizing integral approaches to seeing how we can personally as well as collectively develop a restored moral basis of our lives, all support the central focus of the 09 Forum, which will be on how to galvanize the public support necessary for the kind of political action required.
A Call to Engage
It is remarkable that just as global warming threatens the world and our financial and economic structures are collapsing, endangering our political institutions and our way of life, new social values are emerging along with the appreciation, skills and technologies that can shape a future sustainable and resilient enough to meet the challenges besetting us. The implications of this emerging wave of change are as profound as the threat of global warming is imminent.
We are in a time of enormous transition, when the present is crumbling right from under our feet, but the future is not quite clear enough for us to grasp. What is needed is imagination and a sense of possibility to bridge the gap between present and future.
The State of the World Forum is committed to working with partners worldwide to catalyzing the imagination needed and the collaboration required to both envision and implement the world we must fashion as humanity moves beyond the War on Terror into the next phase of human development. Joining together to make this commitment can generate a veritable renaissance of international solidarity and good will.
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