Harnessing the Evolution of a Planetary Consciousness

  Martin L. W. Hall, Ph. D.

The more that people organize in groups, the more that we have to find new ways to do things. The explosion of travel and world wide information access is creating a world where the bounds of nations are becoming increasingly murky. While the potential for human development is great, it also creates a tension as nations try to understand what is to survive in this future. While the gains for humanity could be incredible, turf wars are going to one of the dangerous components that we need to wrestle with.

We also need to realize that achieving a Planetary Consciousness is something that does not happen overnight. We need to think far into the future and try to put into place meaningful steps that can take us along this path. At best we can hope to be a guide. If we complete some baby steps, we might actually make a difference.

Creating Global Sustainability

A majority of the world’s population does not have the minimum amount of food to eat. One of the imperative steps is that a majority of the planet must have the basic needs for survival met. While this maybe quick, we need to do this with in 2 generations. This is a tall order but one that really needs to be done if we are to have any hope of seeing ourselves as one planet rather than several nation-states.

The development of human consciousness requires that the minimum elements of survival be met. If these are not met then engaging in even the most basic human interaction is difficult if not impossible. How can you be in a position to demand a minimum change for the better if you are constantly scrambling just to stay alive. Assuming for the moment that we have the capability and the capacity to deliver food, warmth and shelter to those that want and require all over the globe? What would it take to create an environment where this was not just desired by most but a moral requirement. What we are talking about is installing a world-wide meaning system. With subtle shifts in global cultural priorities, this can be achieved. Some places it may be easier than others.

For this, we need to look at the development of the human being, the group and the planet. The levels of consciousness of the human being are going to get mirrored in the way we organize from this to how we operate as a planet. In some ways, we need to imagine what does the basic sustainable human being look like, what is the meaning system that puts this person in the best place for accessing their potential for fulfillment.

From Survival to Self Worth to Being

Being is about arriving at a place where a person has the best understanding of how to actualize their own personal fulfillment. Developmentally, this not an easy place to get to. However, there are basic components that must be in place before we can even think about this. A totally evolved planetary consciousnes would have all the people in the world with the potential of getting access to their own being. But we are still talking about baby steps.

The cornerstones of this journey are Survival, Self Worth qnd (Self) Awareness. I cannot hope to progress as a human being if I am not getting my basic needs met. But I also cannot progess if I do not feel that I am worthy of this food, or of a better life. This is true of a starving child in Ethiopia as it is to the drug addict on the streets of New York. It is these two items (survival and self worth) that must be part of the foundation of this planetary consciousness. In human terms, the planet is not meeting its basic needs so there is arrested develpment.

Creation of a planetary consciousness requires that we build up the self worth of the individual. They must feel that they are worthy of the respect of being provided with basic human necessities. This is easier said than done. Self worth is often expressed culturally. Therefore, their needs to be a common framework for establishing self worth but it should take into account the issues in a given culture.

Awareness is also important. If I know what is going on around me, I can make informed decisions.If I know how friends and peers feel, I will likely not feel alone.

Leadership and Accountabilty

Awareness is important for the person. But awareness is also about being explicit. When things are no longer hidden, when they are explicit it is harder for those in power to ignore the needs of the many. Being explicit about the needs and desire of the populace is an important way for leaders to be held accountable. Their actions are measured against.the wishes of the people and culture. Leadership without accountability creates a misuse of power. The planetary consciousness needs to create good leadership.

This awareness also creates a framework of systemic ethics. When intervening to create new planetary consciousness, the development of this system needs to provide for the needs of the whole. Awareness is essential to this.

From Clan to Global-State

Throughout history, man has had a tendency to create relationships in order to get more and more complicated things done. You started with the family or the clan (or in more modern terms a team or group). Man had to learn how to best organize this to accomplish goals such as killing a mastadon. As these tribes grew, and people became more specialized, and citys and towns developed. Each time these occured, it took time for the man to adapt and work these relationships. These groups would also get a sesne of self. A sense of ownership of the group. You progressed to the city-state and then to the nation-state. The sense of self at the level of the nation-state is what we call patriotism. It is good for creating a sense of group-self but it can create differences with other such groups.

The evolution to the global-state is going to be key to the development of an evolutionary consciousness. We need to think of ourselves as one planet, and not a planet divided into groups. We must move from Us vs. Them to We.

The global state needs to see itself as entity worthy of existing. To do this we need to evolve human development to the evolution and development of the whole. To the planet as the reflection of the holographic image of all its occupants.

Copyright © 1993-2002 Dr. Martin L.W. Hall

Reposted from Systems and Values

Save Millions of Lives Around Bengal
and make that region prosperously productive

  Win Wenger, Ph.D.

The northern end of the Bay of Bengal shallows in such a way that any major storm pushes a massive storm-surge of floodwaters over the low-lying, heavily populated, adjacent areas of Bangla-Desh and India.

Every year or so, a tropical cyclone comes into the bay at just the right angle to push a surge over these areas, killing thousands of human beings. From time to time, the toll is in the millions instead.

There is no good way to prevent the millions of desperately poor and starving human beings from going right back into the flood-ravaged areas hoping to scratch some sort of living for themselves and their families. The land is fertile, their desperation is extreme, and no physical or societal infrastructure to speak of exists to give them escape mobility or to improve their desperate conditions.

Preventing disasters, building prosperity

This brief tells how to prevent these disasters – material and human – from happening. It also tells how to turn the greatest region of dire poverty on Earth into productive prosperity. You can help greatly with little effort, simply by talking the idea of this project over with one or two other people and so helping the idea to get into circulation where it might stand a chance of gaining consideration on its merits.

Here is what could be built across the northern third to half of the Bay of Bengal, for no more than two to four billion dollars over several years, with bulldozers, manual labor, and the Beachbuilder device described on this website.

• A series of alternating strips of (barrier) farmland and (fish-farming) lagoon water, running mostly east-west across most of the bay.
  
  
• The southernmost island or so to be a forested and reinforced barrier island.
  
  
• An orderly system of bridges connecting all the strips of land for quick evacuation in the event that an approaching storm is so large as to threaten to overwhelm the main barrier island. In that event, each of the dozens of other strips of farmland would act as barrier islands intercepting the surge before it could make its way onshore.

What makes the construction of all this economical is, simply, the above-cited beachbuilder device. Just up-current of where you want the next layers of land to form, lay lines of perforated hose or pipe with an air compressor driving air through them. The resulting “bubble curtains” trip up the currents passing over them, especially during storms, forcing them to lose speed and drop their load of sediments. Between storms and at low tides, men and bulldozers can scrape up and mound up to higher levels the rich soils accumulated from those rich Bengali sediments.

Several years ago, we at Project Renaissance gave this Beachbuilder invention as a gift to the world, described in some detail for you or anyone to use freely, in the Inventions section of this website. The device is yours to use freely to protect shorelines and beaches wherever, whenever, no conditions or restrictions other than those of your own local jurisdictions.

These east-west running strips of land, acting as back-up barrier islands, will be very fertile for agriculture and, as economic conditions improve, for tourist resorts. The huge economic benefits from all this, however, will be from the lagoons between those strips of land, to be operated as fish farms. What is now the greatest major region of poverty on all the Earth will become able to meet not only its own protein needs but those of much of Asia.

A small portion of these economic benefits can, in turn, be used to reforest those deforested hills in the north which are the other major source of terrible flooding in the region.

Infinitely more important than these and other economic benefits will be the saving of millions of living human beings from the next major cyclone which comes up the Bay of Bengal.

Can we also use the other bubble-blower invention we’ve suggested, Hurricane Stopper, among the several inventions we’ve given freely to the world? …The one that turns warm surface waters under and brings colder waters up from underneath as a means to starve hurricanes and typhoons and cyclones of their energy? I’ve not yet studied conditions in the southern part of the Bay of Bengal (does it have cooler waters under?) or in its approaches to see if this could work there. If it should turn out that it does, that added measure of protection would bring up to nearly 100% the security (and opportunity to build toward a meaningful future) of millions of human beings now in stark prospect.

How might such a project get financed and organized?

1. The quickest and in some ways easiest way would be as an American government-led coalition project.

2. It could be the first of a possible series of major United Nations projects which were not focused entirely on either war or emergency public health. And/or:

3. It could be put together by a consortium of corporations, foundations, agencies, governments, and possibly popular subscription. I like the idea of such a widely popular subscription because it would visibly broaden people’s stake in the well-being of other people.

Before any of these avenues can open, though, the idea of this project has to reach enough discussion and public awareness to have some chance of advancing on its merits. If the beachbuilder device makes sense to you, and/or if this project idea makes sense to you, talk it over with one or two other people.

To move toward so positive and constructive and human-supportive an endeavor would be a wonderful way to sustain hopes and aspirations toward a better human future. Please let us hear from you.

 Project Renaissance

Comments to: Win Wenger

Comment on John Robb’s New Economy

I emphatically agree with Business Week in thinking that this pricing environment will hurt corporate profits and the stock market. In fact, I would go even further and say that the New Economy’s pricing pressure and labor mobility will result in little market growth over the next 15 to 20 years. We are extremely likely to see a Dow of ~11,000 in 2015! During a similar period 1964 and 1981, we had GDP growth of 370% but we entered and left the period with a Dow of ~875. It is possible to have growing economy without rapid increases in corporate profits and a healthy stock market.

Ecological Footprints of Nations

Mathis Wackernagel, Larry Onisto,
Alejandro Callejas Linares, Ina Susana Lopez Falfan,
Jesus Mendex Garcia, Ana Isabel Suarez Guerrero,
Maria Guadalupe Suarez Guerrero
  Center for Sustainability Studies

Ecological footprint: the biologically-productive area required to continuously provide resource supplies and absorb wastes of a particular population given prevailing technology.

Though nations use discontinuous and scattered areas due to international trade, calculations can be made by computing ecological-services consumption and then calculating the necessary area (at world average productivity) to provide these services.

A series of compatible approaches to calculating carrying capacity, from energy-flow to ecological space to footprint, have been developed, but are largely “compatible” and therefore synergistically strengthen each other in formulating appropriate sustainability tools.

• Fossil energy land: valuable CO2-absorption capacity being foregone in favor of unreplenished fossil-fuel use and generation of unsustainable waste products/pollutants.
  
  
• Arable: 1.35 billion ha under cultivation, but 10 million/year abandoned due to degradation.
  
  
• Pasture: less productive, and plant-animal conversion efficiencies reduce biomass energy potential by a factor of ten; also encroaches on valuable forest land.
  
  
• Forest: secure a huge range of ecological services, but productivity is decreasing.
  
  
• Built-up areas: because they occupy the most fertile areas, these lead to a loss of arable land.
  
  
• Oceans: though large areas, these have generated limited food gains despite high harvesting.

Considering available resources according to this division, we arrive at an ecological benchmark figure of 1.7 ha. of land per capita for comparing ecological footprints; it is to this figure that human use of biologically-productive space must be reduced.

It is worth noting that the report does not cover the use of fresh water (often diverted from ecosystem to artificial uses at high energy and environmental costs), or contamination (capable of significantly reducing productivity); thus, the present study is an underestimate of human uses.

Results

A New Economy ?

John Robb

Did the Internet enable a new economy?  I think the latest evidence says that it has.  But it isn’t the new economy corporate America expected.

Since 1993, the economic statistics for the US economy have been wonderful.  Productivity is way up and accelerating, wages are up and increasing, and inflation is down and declining.  We are getting more competitive, more leveraged, and wealthier – while the cost of goods has remained static.  The only “bad news” is in corporate profits. 

During this entire time, corporate profits have remained stagnant.  There is even reason to believe, given the current accounting scandals and strident calls for accounting reform, that corporations actually experienced a massive decline in profitability over the last 8 years.  Standard and Poors estimates that corporate profits would be 25% lower if currently popular accounting gimmicks where negated. 

So, what happened?  All previous booms handsomely compensated corporate America’s managers and investors.  In fact, the expectation was that corporations would be able to leverage the Internet to make more money than ever before through a combination of lower costs and larger scale. The rapid gains in the markets during the late nineties reflected this logic.  The .com mania reflected this logic.  It was all horribly wrong.

The reason is that the Internet isn’t an extension of the past.  It is a new thing.  It leverages individuals in ways that go beyond old models.  It creates a new order of things where individuals, and not companies, can expect to control all the benefits of economic gains. 

Pretty impressive stuff.  But, how did individuals pull this off?  Control of the information flow.  Individuals within and outside of corporations have used their control of the information flow to make the markets for products, services, and labor increasingly competitive.  People have more providers to buy from (on a global scale) and more organizations to work for (the monster.com effect) than ever before.  Corporations are caught in a vice between competitive pricing and higher labor costs.

In cruel turn of events (not from my perspective of course ;->, but from a corporate one), individuals are also starting to wake up to the excesses of corporate America.  They know too much (Adam Curry says that there are no secrets, and this is what he means).  Companies that have been able to hide behind copyrights (excessive in length) and patents (excessive in breadth) in order to charge excessive prices, are being challenged.   Their justifications for high prices aren’t making headway either.  In music, people now know that artists aren’t paid under the current system.  Why should people pay an oligopolist that distributes an artist’s creative works without adequate compensation a premium price?  Napster, Morpheus, and Kazaa are just the start of the opposition to this.  There will be more, and they will be more aggressive.  

Additionally, corporations are also starting to lie with abandon.  In the new world enabled by the Internet, people find out about it fast.  Public trust in corporations is at an all time low.  Andersen, Enron, Schering-Plow, Adelphia, Stanley Tools, Global Crossing, Microsoft, WorldCom, and many more have crossed over the line.  All of them have been under intense profit pressure.  All have opted to break or bend the law for a short buck.  It won’t help.  IF the guys at the top of American corporations think that this is a recourse, they are sadly mistaken.  Information travels much tooo quickly.  There is no damage control.

Corporations aren’t people, despite what the law says.  They are a means to an end.  If they end up barely producing a profit, but employee salaries rise and consumers get low prices, does that hurt us?  No.  Sure, the stock market will be a dog, but who cares?  The market is merely an abstraction of the wealth creation process and a playground of the wealthy that is often perveted to fleece gullible individual investors. 

Will companies continue to compete and invest in new technology?  Yes.  They can’t stop.  Barriers to entry are dropping daily enabled by a plethora of new technologies.  Any weakness is immediately seen, globally via the Internet, by entrepreneurial individuals who will take action to provide competition.  If corporations stay static or look to the government for salvation they will die. 

What most of us care about is the ability to think, create, and enjoy.  The new economy makes that better, easier, and smoother for more people than ever.  Say goodbye to the tarriffs from the tolltakers of corporate America.  We won’t miss them. 

Followup article: The New Economy II

John Robb’s Radio Weblog

Comments on Feeding the World

From the EnergyResourcesGroup at Yahoo,  Jimbo writes:

Interesting article. How much energy is required to pump air to 1000 feet deep? How do you hold down a large pipe full of air at 1000 feet deep?

The trouble with good ideas is that they soon degenerate into a lot of hard work.

Jimbo, I agree that an energy analysis is in order.

I was struck by the brilliance of Wenger’s realization that great regions of the ocean are desert. Only the shortage is not of water, but of air.

Just as irrigating a desert causes a desert to bloom, Wenger claims aerating the desert regions of ocean will have a similar effect.

Now the challenge to our engineers is: How to do it?

Do we need to go so deep? What about pumping down just a few hundred feet? Could our ocean oil drilling and extracting technology be used here? But instead of taking oil out, we pump air in?

How about using salts that contain oxygen or carbon dioxide to dissolve when they hit the water? Lots of questions? What do you think ?

Timothy Wilken