Turning information into usable knowledge Supporting the many communities that work for a healthy planet Facilitating community-building for a peaceful future Standing for equality, justice, diversity, and inclusion
The myth and stories that have guided humanity over the last few centuries have separated us from Earth and led us on a path of degrading the Earth's life-suport system dramatically. The dominant ideas of today threaten the viability of Earth. Our governance system that are built to facilitate a destructive, growth-addicted economy aiming at wealth (and power) creation for the few, are incapable of tackling the challenges we are facing.
A New Story is needed
Humanity needs a story about a new governance for an ecological civilization where economy has the purpose to meet the needs of the present while safeguarding the Earth's life-support system, on which the welfare of present and future generation of both humans and non-human animals depends. New dominant ideas need to be adopted, and the our perception of ourself within the planetary system need to evolve, so that we integrate the systemic nature of the interdependence of humanity and Earth into our emotions and reasoning.
The Old and New Ideas of Wealth
The current official purpose of economy is the creation human wealth. Here, the wealth idea is one of individuals amassing property and gold. In the current thinking and economy, wealth is directly associated with power, power to make decisions impacting other and to exploit others for more of the same wealth.
By allowing individuals to amass property in form of land, buildings, and production units - and in very recent times - knowledge, and by replacing (limited) gold by (unlimited) paper money - and most recently - numbers in computers, humanity entered into what could turn out to be a death spiral (Goethe in “Faust” saw it as the pact with the devil in which Faust gave his soul in exchange for unlimited wealth).
The new idea of wealth must be linked to a quality of life that doesn't result from possessions and power but rather from being embedded in a system where the basic needs of all are met, where justice and equality prevail, where empathy drives the reasoning for our actions and is at the base of how we organise our socities and structure our governance systems.
This new idea of wealth actually is a very old one. It is how wealth and purpose was understood in many culture long before the modern materialistic concept of wealth was developed in the European culture and forcefully imposed on the rest of the world.
What We Are Aiming For Here
Here we are developing a comprehensive platform to facilitate the dialog about the new story and new governance. The platform will provide structured access to the vast amount of work being done and information and knowledge being created.
Our Forum
A Global Dialog of the Young for a Peaceful Future
By Hans-Peter Plag, Barry Clemson, Jon Walker, Brett Buzzanga
Published Dec. 18, 2021
There is an urgent need to facilitate a dialog of the young, the Gen-Z generation, about the future they want. This dialog must include the ways the young can ensure that those in power make decisions that benefit the future for this generation and others to come. A new social media platform is needed that can enable this global dialog, a platform developed conceptually by those who are going to use it.
The Earth Viability Center [6] will initiate the development of a platform for the global dialog of the young. The platform will be non-profit, owned and governed by the user community.
Looking at the planet through the eyes of an alien ecologist, who, of courses, would be a systems thinker, Home sapiens is just another species in the planetary ecosystem, depending on many reciprocal relationship with other humans, animals, plants. But Homo sapiens very recently turned into a deadly virus, killing of other species, even whole ecosystems, and changing the physiology of the planet dramatically to an extent that pushes the planet to a potentially extreme state shifts in the planetary biosphere.
The catalyst for this transition of Homo sapiens from being a valuable member of the global biosphere to a virus is in the official purpose that humans gave economy in the 16th to 18th century of their time system: creation of human wealth with no consideration of, and for, the planetary wealth. This purpose deviates very much from the purpose of a healthy and long-term stable economy: meeting the needs of the present while safeguarding the Earth's life-support system, on which the welfare of present and future generations of all human and non-human animals depends.
One of them, Stafford Beer, realized the fundamental truth that “The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does” (POSIWID). Here, the purpose refers to the de facto purpose of the system. If the “official purposes” deviates far from this de facto purpose, the system is very likely going to be manipulated in an unsustainable and potentially catastrophic way.
This is what happened to Home sapiens' economy, which has the de facto purpose of providing to the community. By giving it an official purpose far from this, everything went awry.
The current governance forms they adopted, the global ruling class (GRC) that emerged, the education systems that developed all are a result of this official purpose of economy: creating human wealth in the hands of a few requires a ruling of the oligarchs, an education that creates the mass bees easily enslaved in a mindless and heartless industrial machine, unethical economic rules and laws that ensure there is inequality, injustice, and - above all - more wealth concentration in the hands of the GCR. It is amazing to see how successful the GCR was in building a global beehive with the GCR in the center and everybody else in the layers around obediently striving relentlessly to feed the wealth of those in the center.
Changing the current trajectory pointing towards increasing global catastrophic risks requires to overcome the current dominant ideas - not just about economy, but also about how humans see themselves and others, how they see the planet, and how they should interact with the planetary life-support system. For the alien ecologist, it is obvious that Homo sapiens embedded in the global ecological system needs to rebuild a reciprocity with this system. By adopt new ideas that bring the official purpose of economy closer to the de facto purpose this could be achieved,