Changing the Course of History

  In my newsletter last month I mentioned the forthcoming launch of the FourYears.Go initiative where I have been spending a fair amount of time lately. Since late January, I have been hosting introductory conference calls as well as reaching out to organizations I know and inviting them to join us.  In mid-March the launch finally happened and, with the website up and rich with information, the questions are getting fewer while the number of people learning about the initiative is growing exponentially.

The initiative adds urgency to the need to turn the tide of the various crises facing us (climate change, social justice, shortages of clean water, fish and other species declines, institutional gridlock, dialogical polarities, the ever widening between rich and poor, etc.) by setting February 14, 2014 as the deadline for this turning to occur.  If you haven’t yet heard of the initiative, here’s a video explaining what it is.

Our goal was to have 100 organizations on board as allies, endorsing the initiative and incorporating this deadline into their missions before we launched. At launch we had almost 500 allies on board.

Coincidentally, while I was hosting calls several days a week, I learned from another Fellow in the Global Collaborators’ Alliance that a three-day online public jam was to take place March 29-31th, hosted by the USAID, and that the FourYears.Go team could play a role in it. The public jam – one of those wide open online discussion forums - was the direct result of an initiative by the Obama administration to make the U.S. government more transparent and open to public input.

GlobalPulse2010 attracted over 15,000 logins from people in more than 150 countries over the three days, focusing on ten discussion threads on subjects of great concern to the entire world - not just the U.S.  I had the privilege of facilitating one of the threads, “Inspiring a New Generation: Developing Global Citizens of the 21st Century” – which turned out to be the third most active during the three days. Here’s a radio interview of an USAID representative aired prior to the jam:http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=19&sid=1911173.

Coincidental to these two events over the past month, I received a copy of John Peterson’s 2008 book, A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change. He might as well have been writing this book for the FourYears.Go initiative. Peterson is a well-credentialed futurist who has held positions of responsibility at the White House, various Cabinet staff positions, and a stint as National Security advisor. His book is even endorsed by Newt Gingrich and a former CIA director. He writes:

    "I believe we are entering one of those punctuation points in the evolution of our species that will rapidly     propel us into an unimaginable new era. This new world won’t work at all like what we currently find             familiar. Because this shift is so fundamental and acute, the most positive option will not make sense at     all from this vantage so early in the transition. In the face of almost certain uncertainty, our job is to rise     to the occasion, to evolve - in our thinking, our perspectives, and in our commitment to make this             transition as positive as possible. We will probably become some kind new kind of human at the end of     it all — it is that big and important."   

I’ll close with an excerpt from the Earth Charter which Peterson reprinted in the backmatter of his book:

    "As never before in history, common destiny beckons us to seek a new beginning…..Let ours be a time     remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the     quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life."  

As Peterson states, we can become “a new kind of human at the end of it all,” which makes significant that we emerge from this transition ready for this “unimaginable new era” that he writes about. This is also the theme of my forthcoming magnum opus, The New Human: Consciously Evolving to Civilization 3.0. I’d like to think we’re on the glide path to that transformation as a species but, like many shifts of such magnitude we could be in for one helluva ride before we arrive.

 

 
[See John’s newsletter for April at www.renesch.com/newsletters/aha141.htm]