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Networking Creativity to Solve Global Challenges:
A 2020 Vision

There is virtual certainty that the cumulative effects of global warming are creating synergies in the global climate and ecology that will soon spin out of control if we continue to engage in what Rajendra Pachauri, Head of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, calls “tragic inaction.”  Human civilization itself is at stake, he says, and if we do not take decisive action by at least 2012 we may well lose any capacity to control events.

Several national leaders, including Barack Obama and Al Gore, as well as organizations such as the Apollo Alliance, have called for ten year plans to deal decisively with this crisis.  State of the World Forum and Wisdom University are supporting this effort through a 2020 Vision that seeks to build a global movement of people and values between now and 2020 that can support decisive political action. This 2020 Vision is comprised of the following components:

  1. Dr. Paul Ray has conducted a major new study on the values of the American public with a particular focus on the implications of values on politics. Early analysis indicates that 53% of the American electorate are now progressive in their basic values and between 70% and 80% of the over-all electorate understand the gravity of the global warming crisis and are prepared to support decisive political action.  This New Political Compass is part of a larger study on the Cultural Creatives being conducted by Dr. Ray through his Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture at Wisdom University. It is also in conjunction with similar studies conducted in Europe and Japan, all of which indicate that roughly one third of the public has now adopted progressive values.  We are actively working with these international partners to share information, use common language, and plan integrated mobilization strategies.
  2. State of the World Forum has initiated a New Political Compass Public Education Campaign to influence leaders in the media, politics, finance, business, academia and entertainment, as well as the American public at large, that there is in fact a new progressive force in American politics that can win elections. The new Progressives have now reached critical mass so we must organize accordingly. We are no longer on the margins. As the largest single voter constituency, we now constitute the emerging center of gravity for politics, values and culture.
  3. At an international level, the Forum has issued a Global Call to Action which is a worldwide petition calling for support for Al Gore’s challenge to source all of our electricity from renewable energy within the next ten years.  This strategy makes as much sense in Namibia, Peru, Germany and Hong Kong and thus allows both extensive public education on the critical issue of global warming as well as common political action across a range of continents and countries.
  4. State of the World Forum is also beginning work on a Global Solutions Wiki that will enable people the world over to share ideas, compare experiences, and come together on line to build solutions to the challenges we all face.  The Global Solutions Wiki would attempt for global problem solving what Wikipedia has done for information. Relying exclusively on careful moderators and people wanting to participate, Wikipedia has gathered information from multiple sources and constructed an encyclopedia that rivals Encylcopedia Britannica in both scope and accuracy and has done so at a fraction of the cost. Similarly, our Global Solutions Wiki would invite experts, lay people, and interested parties from all over the world to begin to self select and self organize around critical crisis areas such as global warming, poverty, deforestation, water scarcity, etc. to build solutions and tackle common problems.
  5. All these activities will be brought together at the 2009 State of the World Forum November 9-15, 2009 in Washington D.C. on the themeSaving Civilization: An Integral Approach to Climate Change and the Global Commons. The intent of the 09 Forum will be to begin building the global coalition of people, institutions and values that can both provide an integral and compelling vision of the future and begin generating cross cultural, cross generational and cross continental collaborative dialogue and activity on the great challenge to our civilization that global warming represents.

While this may seem ambitious, the urgency of our time and the imminence of the crises that could undermine human civilization itself make it imperative. What is as hopeful as the threat of the global warming is urgent is the growing global influence of the Cultural Creatives who now constitute fully one third of the public in the United States, Europe and Japan.  The implications of this emerging cultural group are as profound as the consequences of global warming are imminent. What makes this phenomenon doubly significant is that our research shows that this value system is embraced by the Millennium Generation, those young people aged fifteen to twenty five. This means that the wave of cultural creativity shaping our future is both cross cultural and cross generational. A critical mass of ideas, organizations and innovation is in formation.

The central fact about these new constituencies from a political perspective is that they are a population and not yet a group. They are comprised of individuals who hold progressive values, but they are not mobilized into a coherent political force. They represent the largest single values group in the country and constitute a majority of voters but they have little presence in the current political debate. It is to work with a range of collaborative partners to mobilize them into a global movement that our 2020 Vision and all its component parts are directed.