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We must evolve our political systems to instill more transparency, more input from the public, and for more tamper-proof elections. We must eliminate the improper influence of money. The place to begin is campaign finance reform. Public financing of elections is the most effective way to remove special interest corruption. Once that happens, the stage will be set for the kind of transformative changes needed to properly address all of the big challenges that face humanity.
A truly democratic and transparent political system, with a robust firewall against improper influence is the best way to displace historically entrenched political dominance and exclusivity, with a new era built on cooperation, partnership, and opportunity of all.
Moving Forward Together
Staying on our current course will surely be disastrous. Settling for half-measure responses to these unprecedented challenges also will not do. For the first time in history, we face issues that are unequivocally global in scale. These issues require responses that are adequate to that scale.
Fortunately, we also are connected globally in unprecedented ways. Just at a time when humanity most needs to pull together, we also have the ubiquitous world-wide-web, and newspapers and print media that reach into every corner of the planet. Television news like CNN is available 24/7 in over 200 countries. We have the means for near instant communication to people everywhere. Though this ability to reach out on a global scale has an enormous upside, a potential dark side looms as well. Unlike the past when information and awareness traveled slowly or not at all, there days everybody in the world knows what everybody else is doing almost immediately.
The fifth of the world’s people in the developed nations consume 86 percent of the world’s resources and control an even greater share of its wealth. The other four out of five people on Earth must get by on the meager remains. The prosperity gulf between those that have and those that do not, for the first time in history, is visible for all to see. Greed cannot be justified, and it is becoming ever more difficult to hide. A new commitment to partnership and cooperation is not only the right thing to do, it is the only wise course. In the absence of reasonable resource equity, terror and violence will be the weapon of choice for the world’s angry, disenfranchised masses.
In 1992, at the NGO forum at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, a remarkable document, The People’s Earth Declaration, was spawned. Here is its eloquent mandate…We the people of the world will mobilize the forces of transnational society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing, we are forging our own instrument and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs.
This is the kind of transcendent inspiration that we as Earth citizens must embrace. This is the kind of transcendent motivation that can galvanize the massive global movement of engaged, life–affirming activists identified by Paul Hawken. We who are part of this movement must come together.
I believe our incoming President Obama fully recognizes the five great challenges presented herein. We must hope that the winds of change will be favorable and that he will shift our sails and take us on a course to a sustainable future. If Obama fulfills his promise and becomes the transcendent leader so many of us have wished for, we must respond vigorously by pulling our individual oars together with him in the same enlightened direction. With that kind of positive synergy, we can, we will shape the coming era and make it immanently worthy of our own uniquely human potential.
