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Future History 3.10
Summer/Autumn 2002

Dear Reader,

Ten years have passed since Rio 1992.  It is encouraging to see the broadening concern not only for environmental issues, but for humanist issues as well.  We are becoming aware that the consciousness of every species that lives and breathes on this fragile blue-green planet is important in the balance of life.

Notwithstanding, the nature of our world has changed considerably in recent times.  Science has radically altered our physical environment — but has it broadened our conceptual landscape?  The transition to global sustainability still requires urgent attention, and the failure to reach a consensus in Bali (2002) underscores the seriousness of this year’s (2002) UN Global Summit in Johannesburg.

Planetary change is not new.  Our planet has experienced repeated cycles of global warming,  ice ages and geological cataclysms.  Scientists are now realizing that past geological history may give us clues to a larger future history which can be roughly charted through new fields of paleobiology and evolutionary biology.  What is also being acknowleged is that the profound environmental changes we are seeing will affect the very survival of humankind during the next fifty years.

From a global perspective, it is clear that the human future on planet Earth depends crucially on three simple things, first and foremost of which is our relationships with the environment and its resources (the managerial perspective).  This connection is intertwined with our relationship to the world around us (the global perspective) and, just as important, our relationships with our “selves” and each other (the human perspective).

We are beginning to grasp the many forces that surround us, yet new paradigms are still required. The challenge of the quantum shift will be to re-orientate individuals and social organizations to consciously undergo the positive change that is even now giving birth to the next important extension of life.  The potential of our collective brains is probably infinite. In fact, many of us already sense the emergence of the “thinking” and “feeling” environmental changes which seem to be pulsating their way into more and more individual psyches around the globe. The degree of our success will depend on our intent as critical mass. Today’s concerns about a sustainable development of the biosphere and life in space are part of a long philosophical tradition found in arcane texts and written about by the prophet Daniel, who prepares us with the words: “Knowledge will speed up” and righteous humanity can be “numbered with the thinking stars of higher intelligence”.      
 

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