STATE OF THE WORLD FORUM
Networking Creativity to Solve Global Challenges: A 2020 Vision

November 9-15, 2009
Washington, D.C. Hilton Washington

$1,999 - Early Discount through December 31, 2008
Includes all plenary speakers and workshops, plus
all keynote lunches, dinners and receptions.

There is nothing more critical in the world today than to bring people together from around the world to work together to solve our mounting and ever more critical global challenges. State of the World Forum, in partnership with a range of organizations and individuals, is convening a new State of the World Forum in 2009 designed to catalyze the innovative ideas, action oriented people, and enabling technologies required to shape constructive change. The 09 Forum will have three central themes:

1. Our lack of action on global warming is now threatening human civilization itself. James Hansen, Chief Scientist for NASA, has stated in an article in Science magazine that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen details six irreversible tipping points, including massive sea level rises and dramatic changes in rainfall patterns, that we will soon pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by the recent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice, may already be behind us.

Add to this the statement of Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."  He said this in December 2007.

Nothing is more urgent than a mass mobilization of people and ideas that can compel our governments and international institutions to confront head on the challenge of global warming and the reformation of politics this implies.  Working with Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the seminal book Plan B 3.0, we are inviting a range of scientists, policy analysts and systems thinkers to focus attention on the single overriding fact of our time:  human civilization is now at stake and decisive action must be taken.

2. There is a new cultural group emerging in the United States, Europe, Japan and around the world that understands the gravity of the multiple crises confronting the planet and which holds values consistent with positive visions of the future. Sociologist Paul Ray pioneered the initial studies of this group and is currently completing a new one, the findings of which will be released this July. He has coined the term Cultural Creatives to describe the people comprising this new culture. The conference will feature studies from France, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Sri Lanka indicating that this emerging culture is in fact becoming a global phenomenon.  Related studies will be featured showing that a high percentage of the new Millennium Generation (young people aged 15-25) shares these values, suggesting that this phenomenon is not only global and cross cultural but also cross generational.  A political analysis of this data shows that 53% of the American public now embraces progressive values and that 70%-80% of the over-all public is aware of and supports decisive action on global warming.

The study in the United States is being conducted under the aegis of Wisdom University’s Institute for the Emerging Wisdom Culture, directed by Dr. Ray, which is also developing the global network of similar studies around the world. 

3. We are not in a crisis with no solution. We are in a crisis because we are not implementing solutions already here. Complimenting the emergence of new values around the world is the emergence of the enabling technologies that can solve our global crises. The Forum will profile the visionaries and activists developing cutting edge solutions, both technical and social.  The people selected will be those who can frame our current crises within the context of their solvability. The emphasis will be on the “bright green” and “Veridian design” environmental approach to dealing with global problems and will focus on integral thinking and systems analysis. The goal is to link the emerging population that understands the need for urgent and constructive change with the innovators of the enabling technologies that can implement that change. The purpose is to catalyze people, solutions and resources into a movement of global activism.

At the heart of the Forum will be the launch of 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.

In this spirit, the 09 Forum will highlight and network the technical and social aspects of the solutions we need to implement at a global level. A double helix of solutions -- one technical and one social, both emphasizing innovation – will be profiled, designed to enable people the world over to share ideas, compare experiences, and come together to build solutions to the challenges we all face. 

The urgency of our time and the imminence of the crises that could undermine human civilization itself make decisive and constructive action imperative. The data on the Cultural Creatives supports the hope that a new critical mass of people and ideas is emerging that can turn the tide.  Leaders who speak with authenticity about the future rather than moving cautiously to the center can galvanize enormous support among people who have been waiting for years for someone to speak to the values they really care about.

Rough Cut Productions is producing a documentary film that will highlight the dramatic emergence of the cultural creatives as a new global social force and the historic opportunity to solve our global challenges with a combination of the enabling technologies, a new value proposition, and a willingness of our political leaders to take action in accordance with the urgency of our time.  The documentary will be featured at the 09 Forum.

The 2009 State of the World Forum will be comprised of plenary sessions, workshops, networking, opportunities for dialogue, and will provide a structure for individuals, non profits and green companies to show their materials and breakthrough technologies. The proceedings will be streamed live on the Internet. The Forum is being produced by Michael Olmstead and his production company e2k.

The strategic intent of this endeavor is to build a global coalition that will endure over time and expand as it refines the values it seeks to embed in society as we shape our common future.

The Critical Need of Our Time

“The world is getting better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster.” This observation from Tom Atlee succinctly describes what most of us intuit: we are living at a time when the world situation is developing within tighter and tighter constraints as major forces are coming into increasingly turbulent interactions, both positive and negative, with synergistic effects that are being felt by everybody everywhere. And the whole process is speeding up.

As we look around us, the tsunami almost all of us see coming is the consequences of global warming, the effects of which have already begun and which are expected to intensify in the next three to five years. Along with and in many cases connected to global warming, there are another twenty or so other global crises, ranging from water scarcity, fisheries depletion, acid rain, destruction of the rainforests, species extinctions, over-population, massive poverty, peak oil, growing numbers of failing states, etc. None of these crises are being solved. All are chronic, some are acute, many are metastasizing into collective cancers for major portions of humanity.  Instead of dealing seriously with any of these challenges, our governments and major corporations are busily exploiting earth and people alike with reckless abandon, guided by policies that, for the most part, rely on deception, violence and coercion.  This is the “worse and worse” part of our lives and world situation. 

At the same time the world is getting “better and better.” Enabling technologies are coming online that could solve each and every one of our crises, if only the governments would apply them and the private sector would invest in them. Through the Internet we have unparalleled access to information and networks.  We actually know what to do. We are also in a world in which power, information and communication is being radically democratized. Energy conservation, solar energy, wind power and hydrogen can replace our present deadly addiction to oil and coal. People almost everywhere can know what is happening virtually everywhere else and be in touch with counterparts anywhere to develop networks of common vision and purpose. We have entered the most democratic, information-rich, and freest time in the history of the world. We have therefore unprecedented space for possibilities, and in fact the opportunities for positive change are accelerating.  Almost quite literally, we are in a time when whatever we can imagine can come to pass—for good or for evil. 

The most exciting part of the “better and better” aspect is that social and values surveys show that there are now hundreds of millions of people in the United States, Europe, Japan and around the world who both recognize the “worse and worse” dynamics of the current world situation and who also embrace new values and worldview that affirm all the possibilities available in the “better and better” aspects. These are the people we call Cultural Creatives, people who are ready to envision and create a fundamentally positive vision of the future. These people have emerged as a global phenomenon over the past fifty years, steadily increasing in numbers and potential power. They now constitute the wave of creativity moving through this country and the industrial world.

The single greatest predictor of whether a person is a Cultural Creatives or not is how well informed they are. The Cultural Creatives are some of the best-informed people on the planet. The odds are that the reason you are reading these words is that you are one of them. They are committed to technology and economic prosperity but not at the cost of the environment or community. They understand the world holistically and in a larger perspective, and most want a non-ideological politics emphasizing practical solutions. They are often deeply committed to personal growth and development, yet not dogmatically religious. They have made a double departure in their lives: from the traditional beliefs and values held by religious fundamentalism, and from the modern materialist worldview held by much of the scientific and business community. Not since the Renaissance, when the modernist worldview began to emerge in the midst of an all-encompassing traditionalism, has there been such a profound realignment in fundamental human values. Today, like then, wisdom is on the move, advocating a larger view of human potential.

The implications of this emergence are significant, and it is our intent through profiling the growing numbr of studies, producing the documentary, and convening the 09 Forum to delineate just how momentous this emergence is, not just in the United States, but in Europe and around the world. Part of the significance grows out of the way people get to be Cultural Creatives. They do it by engaging their conscience, and their consciousness, with the ideals, values, information and critical concerns of most of the new social and consciousness movements that have appeared over the past fifty years. They are the people who care. They are not only well-informed, but actively engaged, and they want to succeed at that engagement, to have it make a difference.

The urgency around the Cultural Creatives coming into their power lies in the simple but absolutely profound observation of Einstein, that you cannot solve a problem with the same consciousness that created the problems in the first place. At the base of the growing crises around us and the inability of our prevailing institutions to solve any of them, most importantly global warming, is the fundamental fact that many of our governments, corporations, scientific and religious institutions, and media are in the grip of the focus on power and money that created the problems in the first place. They literally cannot see the new technologies or social developments for what they are – solutions to our most critical problems -- because they cannot allow themselves a consciousness that does so. So rather than focusing on planetary solutions and building environmental stability, they are committed to maintaining and profiting from militaristic policies and massive and systemic environmental exploitation. They see obviously potent enabling technologies and new social inventions as merely “alternative stuff” that they can put down as “flakey” or “pie in the sky.” After all, someone else will benefit from them.

This is not a matter of being conservative or liberal. It is a matter of one’s basic worldview.  There is an intimate relationship between the forces resisting doing anything about global warming and the forces that have created the conditions for global warming. Einstein was right: there is a synergy between creating the problems and being unable to solve them without a fundamental change in consciousness. In the same way, there is also a close relationship between the enabling technologies, new social inventions, and the emerging wisdom culture represented by the Cultural Creatives. Both the “worse and worse” and the “better and better” dynamics of our current world situation grow out of choices derived from radically diverging perceptions about what is real in the world.
 
How you see the world conditions what you do in the world. Essential to the cultural creatives’ new worldview is a recognition of enabling technologies as something beyond the small view of what gives power and profits to established organizations. They are enabling technologies that can solve huge emerging planetary problems. Thus the mobilization of the cultural creatives and what we call the “political north” is a matter of acute social and moral urgency. Without them there is little hope for real solutions. Their challenge is that while they are numerous, they are not yet aware of their size or the power they could wield if they were organized. The central mission of the 09 Forum is to begin the process of catalyzing the Cultural Creatives as a self conscious moral and political movement.

The prevailing institutions, both governmental and corporate, cannot and will not solve our problems on their own.  But people can.  Working together, inspired and informed citizens the world over can come together through the Internet and find common solutions to global challenges. They can work together to put pressure on the prevailing institutions to join with the solutions that must be put in place before we run out of time, which is where the “faster and faster” part of the equation come in.

 “Faster and faster” pertains to the fact that our lives are speeding up in ways undreamed of by even our parents, to say nothing about our grandparents and our forebears before them.  Alvin Toffler called it “future shock” back in the 1970s -- the phenomenon of time speeding up since the end of the Second World War. Since the advent of personal computers and the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, our lives have speeded up even more. We are going more places, spending more money, getting more information, making more decisions, doing more transactions in a month, sometimes in only a few weeks, than our grandparents did in a year, and the pace is accelerating almost daily, and not just for us in the industrial world but for people around the planet, and not just in the realms of politics and economics but also in the realms of science, technology, culture, lifestyles and spirituality. This gives both opportunity and danger.

Everyone everywhere and in all categories of human endeavor are experiencing this common phenomenon – life is getting better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster. And, with instant communication, and a shared self-awareness, we can observe this happening while it is actually taking place. We are living in extraordinary times: we can witness history even as we are making it. We feel it speeding up, and we can also reflect on this fact. As social research gives us new images of ourselves, and feedback on what is unfolding, we consciously participate in a historical process that now moves fast enough for us to recognize what is happening, and think about ourselves as actors.

This means that we have the opportunity to shape the world in ways not conceivable only a generation ago. Historically, only elites could try to shape society, but now the process is open to all those who are conscious of what is going on around them. The process of globalization has in fact democratized power. Now voluntary networks, along with governments and corporations, can wield power and exert influence.  More than ever before, politics is now a struggle over who controls ‘change.’

The 09 Forum will present exciting new research showing how the shape of a new politics is emerging to support constructive change. There will also be a focus on the new “bright green” environmentalism, also called “veridian design,” which emphasizes systems approaches to solving global problems and actively incorporates innovations from the corporate sector.

One thing is certain: You cannot speed up faster and faster while getting worse and worse and better and better simultaneously without some major systems going “Pop!” That “pop” point, the experts tell us, and most of us can sense intuitively, lies just over the horizon around the years 2012-2015. Whether it is scientists predicting the beginning of the escalating effects of global warming, or engineers talking about the extraordinary possibilities of myriad enabling technologies, most experts venture that it is in the next five to seven years that we will come to what Ervin Laszlo calls a “Chaos point,” a juncture of history when all the trains will come into the station at once and great collisions of colossal forces will come to pass.

What would constitute an imaginable “pop” point?  Something entirely conceivable, in fact predicted by many scientists, would be for the Greenland icecap to slide off into the north Atlantic, causing seas to rise five to fifteen feet—not only inundating Holland, 40% of which is already below sea level, protected by dikes, but most seaports of the world. What would the response of the world’s governments and international institutions be then? Would they declare marshal law?  Would they have any choice if coastal cities the world over – from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, London, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Singapore -- were slowly drowning in rising tides?  What would the world populations demand in such an eventuality?  Such a scenario would indeed make the world go “pop.”

There are other equally conceivable scenarios. The “pop” point could also come in the form of dirty nuclear weapons attacks by terrorist groups from an imploded Pakistan, the Sudan or one of the other seventy failing states, or from more ‘resource wars’ as Iraq will come to be called, or it could come from a combination of multiple environmental and social crises interacting and triggering a crescendo of calamities. There are many plausible scenarios, all with dramatic and dire consequences to an unconscious humanity and planet. But then we must ask, in the face of the Internet and global communications, is our past degree of unconsciousness necessary, or even likely?  With an emerging new culture, maybe not. Anticipating this from the view of Modernism, it would be nasty, but from the view of the Wisdom Culture we can see positive scenarios.

What the emerging culture could offer us is an enabling new value proposition, and new enabling leaders, capable of enabling us to solve our problems before they consume us. This is where the Cultural Creatives come in. Potentially, they are a new carrier population which can take us to where we all want to go.  The 09 Forum is thus mostly about them: what they value, how they live, and, most importantly, how they can work together to shape the future they envision. If you are one, it’s about what you can do.

Cultivating a new global culture is the most fundamental need of our time.   It lies at the heart of the approaching chaos point and choice point.  We must either establish a new culture or we will do irreparable damage to our way of life on planet Earth.  If we do not deal immediately with global warming virtually everything humanity has so painstakingly built over the past 10,000 years of civilization will come under direct and dire threat. In this sense we are truly coming to a time of apocalypse, a time when life itself is pervasively threatened and thus a new “revelation,” which is what the term “apocalypse” really means, will come about.  The 09 Forum seeks to understand the positive future implied by the revelation lying at the heart of the approaching apocalypse. It is an exploration of wisdom as the world is about to hit a chaos point.

If the “pop” point lies just ahead, then in many ways, we are, right now, in the calm before the storm. We are at a time just before the great reckoning when we have just enough time to make fundamental evaluations and calculations about what is most judicious to do under the current circumstances. We are in a moment when what we value and how we decide will effect very directly how successfully we will navigate through the increasingly deep waters engulfing us.  More than ever, we need to examine our fundamental assumptions and take a long hard look into the future and decide what kind of world we want, not only for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren. 

What we will discover is that how we look at the future, and what we decide we want for our progeny, becomes a great attractor. Visions of the future are not neutral. They carry power, almost like a magnet, and if embraced on a mass scale can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Who we believe we are, and who we aspire to become, determines to an overwhelming degree, the persons and the culture we eventually will become.

In this sense, it is the future that is the organizing principle interweaving the studies, the documentary, and the 09 Forum. They are not predicated on answers or dictums, but on questions to be asked, ideas to be explored, innovations to try. They are being convened in a spirit of inquiry and open mindedness, inviting discussion and debate. Ultimately, it is based on the conviction that ordinary people can do extraordinary things if only they are well informed and empowered to take their destiny in their hands. The survival instinct is strong in all of us. Let us allow this instinct to guide us now. Nothing less that the fate of our earth is at stake.