The Heart of
A Sustainable World That Works for All
Preface to Youth for a New World
Building Toward a Perfect Storm
I’m not sure when it was that I began to have any inkling that the world was in trouble. Not that
the world has problems (because that has always been true), but that continued human existence
on Earth itself could no longer be taken for granted in the way we had gotten used to living.
Perhaps it was when the report Limits to Growth by Dana Meadows was published in 1972. I and
everyone else in my wife’s family read and discussed that book and its thesis that world
population growth, as Thomas Malthus wrote in 1784, would start exhausting the finite resources
of the planet.
I remember being very provoked, but happily went on leading my life as usual, as did most other
people. In fact, Limits to Growth took a beating from its many critics which scoffed at the
seemingly chicken little “sky is falling” implications of the authors. They quarreled with that
notion that there might not be some way for our ingenious human species to invent themselves
out of any impending mess we might make.
Ten years earlier Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring had caused a similar stir talking about the
destructive effects to land, water, human and animal health caused by the increasing use of
industrial petrochemicals for agricultural, industrial and consumer uses. While critics arose,
Carson’s book came at a time when the kinds of effects to water and soil quality and bird
populations were becoming more visible to everyone. It was harder to argue against her claims
of environmental deterioration when the beloved river you swam in as a kid—like the Cuyahoga
River in Northeast Ohio—was now a toxic soup of industrial pollutants. In fact, the Cuyahoga’s
catching on fire in 1936 and later in 1968 literally helped, along with Carson’s book, to ignite the
modern environmental movement taking shape around the world. Shortly after the fires on the
Cuyahoga (and partly because of that), the Environmental Protection Agency was established
during the Nixon presidency.
Few in those years around the early 1970’s could have foreseen, however, the world we see
today where the combined juggernauts of population growth, increasing world wealth and the
appetite to consume would bring the Earth family to the edge of environmental and social
disaster on a global scale. The term we hear today is “overshoot,” meaning the way we live is
exceeding the carrying capacity of Earth.
The immensity and speed of the potential breakdowns in the modern world took many of us by
surprise. In 1965 world population was half what it is today. Then the world had not fully
assimilated the prophetic message of 1960’s revolution that our modern way of life was
somehow all screwed up. Then, as now, people were in love with “the good life,” and we had
just entered an age which launched the dream of eliminating global poverty, disease and
illiteracy by promoting democracy in hand with economic development.
True, the environmental movement got its wheels in the early 1970’s along with a popular “backto-nature” movement, in which people grew longer hair, wore bell-bottom pants and sported
natural fashion colors. And the civil rights movement under M. L. King had given social justice a
huge inoculation, which led later to the women’s movement as well as worker’s rights activism
under Cesar Chavez as well as the push for indigenous rights inflamed by the tragedy at
Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation when FBI agents and Indians lost their lives.
But all these movements which had their boost in the all-important 1960’s revolution were
separate phenomena. Advocates from each camp rarely got together to find common ground,
and were often competing for their community’s attention and scarce foundation dollars. The
Black social activists who fought for racial equality might criticize the peaceniks against the
Vietnam war for their unconscious racism, while both would think the spiritual seeker just
returned from India was totally oblivious to the social justice side of their religions. After all,
weren’t Jesus and the Buddha above all supreme social reactionaries of their times?
Meanwhile the chanters and meditators were telling the social activists that their unexamined
anger and resistance to looking at their inners lives would simply polarize the society they
wanted to change and cause their movements to implode. After all, history is littered with
examples of how the radical protestors who overthrow the corrupt regime, themselves repeat all
the same corrupt, repressive patterns, because they had not done the inner work of rooting out
their own fear, prejudice and greed.
All the above might think that the tree-hugger environmentalists had missed the point that the
really important things were happening in the human realm. Why prioritize care for animals and
nature, when we had better do something about the black people getting beaten up by police, or
wives battered by abusive husbands, or people’s hectic lives needing the centeredness from
ancient practices of inner peace?
Reconnecting: the Beginning of an Integral Vision
But then something began to happen in the thirty or so years since Limits to Growth was first
published. These separate movements went, like rivers, underground all over the globe. The
mysterious and wonderful matrix of the deep human mind became a vessel in which these seeds
of change, like a soup, began to blend together into something tasty and intelligent for a world
that was waking up slowly from its slumber, as human population exploded from about 3.5
billion to almost double that in 30 years. What increasing numbers of people began to see all
over the world was the iceberg, so to speak, that humanity was headed for in what had become a
titanic voyage toward self-destruction.
In other words, faced with the mind-boggling idea that humans might actually no longer inhabit
planet Earth the way we had been doing, people began to connect the dots. They began to see a
pattern among what had before looked like seemingly unrelated issues.
People in the modern world began to see the wisdom of indigenous peoples and listen to their
admonitions that human peace, justice and prosperity was linked to the Earth and our own
attitudes to nature and each other. Social activists began to be worn out by their own angry
rhetoric, and felt a need for consolation in nature and in observing their own breath. Seekers and
religious church-goers felt a hollowness in their spiritual lives and saw a decline in congregations
which were not following the example of their great teachers. So, religious revivals began around
commitment to preserve the Earth family, and join anti-poverty activists in the fight for
economic and social justice. Environmentalists began to explore the spiritual roots of their love
of nature in a wave called the deep ecology movement.
People began to realize that all the social, spiritual and environmental ills had a common cause,
and that was disconnection. This is a disconnection from our deeper selves, disconnection from
other humans and the natural world, and disconnection from a spirit or ground of being in which
we find unity and a greater meaning in life. People began to find common ground in the need to
come together and become reconnected. From those roots a global civil society started growing
which is dedicated to realizing an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially
just human presence on Earth.
I call this coming together and reconnecting the emergence of an integral culture—same as the
word integrated, bringing together. The deep human desire to be more whole is happening all
over the planet and gaining more momentum every day. There are too many elements in the soup
of the authentic, planetary culture rising up today to mention them all here. And besides, this is
what the following writings are all about which you will hopefully launch into after reading this
preface. But I will mention three that are most significant—the first being our view of Earth from
space, the second being the proliferation of world and local problems and the third being the
Internet.
Perhaps the most significant single shift in human consciousness came from man’s first view of
Earth from space from the moon-bound Apollo 8 flight in 1968. Astronaut Bill Anders said
“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered
the Earth." Astronaut Jim Lovell said: "It gives you in an instant, just at a position 240,000 miles
away from it, (an idea of) how insignificant we are, how fragile we are, and how fortunate we are
to have a body that will allow us to enjoy the sky and the trees and the water ... It's something
that many people take for granted when they're born and they grow up within the environment.
But they don't realize what they have. And I didn't till I left it." These words and the Earth photo
spreading around the globe gave something none of our human ancestors could possibly have
had without the technology making space flight possible. For the first time all humanity saw
itself as a totality—all people’s, water, land and air and life forms—as a solitary ship floating
through the vast, black oceans of an infinite universe.
Seeing the whole beyond the limitations of looking only at the parts no doubt played its role in
helping folks to connect the dots—to make sense of the growing amount of bad news in all
aspects of life including the environment, society and individual health and happiness. And there
were not just a few dots, but a vast proliferation of problems, and these problems began to form a
pattern. You see, in this thirty years period since 1972 things in all areas really got worse. More
and more people began to notice how serious the local and global situation was becoming. I’ll
give a partial list here which is covered in more depth in the articles that follows:
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The Earth is getting overcrowded. Population has soared in the last 150 years from 1
billion people to more than 6.5 billion people and doubled from 3.3 billion to almost 6.6
billion in the last 40 years alone. While the rate of growth is slowing, by 2050 Earth is
projected to have 9.2 billion people.
Global wealth and spending has been unequal and enjoyed mostly by the rich,
industrialized northern countries whose level of consumption is depleting world
resources, polluting the planet and seriously undermining the Earth economy.
The gap between rich and poor has grown intolerably large. The top fifth of the world’s
people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of
foreign direct investment — the bottom fifth, barely more than 1%. In 1960, the 20% of
the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% —
in 1997, 74 times as much. A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the
world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.
Meanwhile, half the world’s population—or 3 billion people—lives in poverty and make
an average of $2/day or less.
Human activity is causing the largest extinction of plant and animal species seen on Earth
in the last 65 million years. Elephant, tiger, lion, chimpanzee and large fish populations
have declined in many instances by as much as 50-90%. By the year 2050, it is estimated
that half of all plant and animal species alive 100 years ago will be gone forever. These
are facts assembled by the scientific community which the world at large is barely aware
of.
The increased emission of C02 and other greenhouse gases is causing global warming.
Current trends continuing unchecked could result in sea level rises of 20+ feet around the
globe, dislocation of hundreds of millions of people and death from food and water
shortages as well as diseases.
We are quickly running out of cheap oil, as global oil production is now reaching its
peak. This situation is made worse by the explosive economic growth of the world’s two
largest countries (China, India), accounting for 1/3 of world population, and putting more
demand not only on oil supplies, but food supplies as well. Rising energy prices are
expected to cause world-wide economic shock waves in the future.
Fresh water in lakes and underground aquifers is being depleted world-wide, and there is
growing pressure on the world’s basic food supplies (grains) due to population growth
and greater world wealth. Already some 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to
water.
It is increasingly apparent that large, transnational corporations have begun more and
more to determine the political agenda and legislation of nations, causing governmental
corruption, loss of democracy and personal freedoms, and destruction to local cultures
and the environment. 51% of the world’s wealthiest entities are corporations.
As throughout human history, the relentless development and land acquisition by
aggressive nations and peoples has all but caused extinction to indigenous cultures, which
are the only remaining examples humanity has of how a human society can live in peace
and balance with itself and the natural world.
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There is a trend, especially in the USA, toward corporate media consolidation and less
freedom for the media to tell people of the truth about what’s going on in the world. The
result is that as the number of serious risk factors in the world increase, and major global
crises are coming, few people are aware enough of the gravity of the situation to be
mobilized toward action. If the media had been looking for and telling the truth, it is very
likely, for example, that the tragedies of 9/11 and Katrina could have been minimized or
avoided altogether. It is also likely that the American political landscape of the last thirty
years since the Reagan administration would have been very different.
Well, this list could on and on for many pages. But when you see all these problems here and
around the world the mind is weighed down, perhaps even into depression and denial. But then
in a few people a light goes on and they start to see a connection between all these issues. A
vision making sense of the greater whole starts to take shape. Some see a pattern in corporate
greed and irresponsibility and point a finger at the corporate world where globalization and the
network of transnational corporations and their agencies hold governments, people and nature
captive. The anti-globalization protests which made their debut at the “battle of Seattle” in 1999
helps people see the emergence of a global civil society movement against control by
transnational corporations and their agencies.
But the analysis needed to go deeper, and did. It brought in great cultural scholars like Thomas
Berry, who told us that we had to evolve a new human presence on Earth and see reality not as a
“collection of objects, but a “communion of subjects.” We could not live as if we were better
than and above nature. We are part of nature, and needed to act accordingly.
Suddenly, the echoes of older writers came back with greater meaning to shed light on our
times—people like Albert Schweitzer, the Swiss doctor who worked in Africa and made famous
the notion of what he called “ a reverence for life,” the single greatest contribution to humankind
one could have. Could we revere all of life, not just humans, and not certainly just people of our
own ethnic background or skin color?
We began to read again the writings of thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit Priest,
philosopher and paleontologist who in the Phenomenon of Man began to explore the idea that
humans were evolving a noosphere, or mindsphere (which like the biosphere or geosphere) was
an actual field moving toward greater integration. The idea is that humanity as a whole is like a
single person, with its own interconnected mind, a notion taken up by biologist Rupert Sheldrake
and, in a different way, by physicist David Bohm.
These intriguing ideas of one planetary human mind moving toward unity within one Earth
community revolving through space called upon us to question why now--some 70,000-100,000
years since homo sapiens evolved—had we brought ourselves to what looked like a possibly
tragic decline. And why indeed end this celestial journey when we were just beginning to
glimpse the magnificence of life, as astrophysics began to explain in greater depth the incredible
beauty and mystery of this 13.5 billion year cosmos from which we all have come? Did human
life evolve against all odds on a once boiling and often terrifying planet only to perish in great
numbers?
If we humans are part and product of that 13.5 billion year evolution, was there not some
purpose for which we were destined? After all, homo sapiens are the only life form on Earth
capable of realizing its own existence. In fact, we are actually called homo sapiens sapiens, or
doubly wise. We don’t just see like animals and birds. We can see seeing itself, being conscious
of our own consciousness. Cosmologist Brian Swimme says we are the cosmos seeing itself, the
universe singing songs to itself. Why would destiny want the unique beauty humans contribute to
the universe to be overwhelmed in the flames of our ignorance, fear and greed.
With all these marvelous reflections, it’s as if humankind at the very threshold of species tragedy
were going back to school—not a school made of brick and mortar but one made through intense
reflection and interaction with one another. These reflections went into overdrive with the third
major catalyst of the last thirty years—and that was the personal computer and the Internet.
Never before in human history had we enjoyed the technology that allows humans to
communicate with others all around the globe about things that were vital to them. As nonprofits for peace, social justice and environmental causes proliferated in response to the looming
world crisis, so has the level of dialogue and speculation about something critical going on today
that we have to do something about if we want to preserve a planet worth living on. The level of
dialogue among peoples living far away from one another has never been more widespread or
more intense. These conversations in millions of Internet sites, blogs, discussion forums and
social spaces are beginning to weave the fabric of thought for a new world society.
The majority of the world’s people are still going about their business of making a living and
buying things. Though most sense something is not quite right on planet Earth, many remain in
blissful ignorance of just how serious the world situation actually is. The last thirty years,
however, has birthed these canaries in the mineshaft. (canaries were brought into mine shafts as a
way to detect poisonous gas) or cultural prophets who are warning us.
These are the people who are aware and extra sensitive to the world’s current and coming pain
and who throw their prophetic voices into the crowd. “Wake up,” they are saying, “We’ve got to
change our ways.” And, according to environmental activist, Paul Hawken, these voices are part
of a huge and growing movement around the world which he says “…is humanity’s immune
response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection and ecological corruption caused
by ideologies.” http://blessedunrest.com/video.html
Even pop singer Michael Jackson made “change his ways” the refrain of his smash hit song
“Man in the Mirror,” sung beautifully on July 16, 1996 in a special concert in Jerudong Park
Garden in Brunei. That night the candles held by many of the 60,000 Bruneians gave the
watching world testimony that we needed our lights to shine. Those many candles glowing in the
dark were a symbol that the goodness inherent in humans and in life could push away the
impending darkness around us.
A Bit of my journey
Born in New England in 1943 to a family that traced its roots back to the early colonials, my life
has spanned all the years and events mentioned here. That journey has been one of waking up
from privilege, pain, ignorance and fear and the realization that we all must grow to let our lights
shine. A world in trouble will not let us happily sit out our lives without exacting a price in
feeling like we have missed something deep and important in our lives. Each news shock, each
“dot” of pain I’ve seen in the unfolding of 40 years of recent history has been a wake-up call for
me. Kennedy’s assassination followed by his brother’s and Martin Luther King’s, the events of
9/11 and Katrina have all played their role in the eventual birthing of my own calling and of
Youth for a New World.
This work that you, I and many others engage in is our way to become more of who we are in the
context of the needs of a world in great transition. We will be part of that universe seeing and
singing to itself.
I think the great lesson and message of today is to find ourselves more deeply. In so doing we
find our connection to all of life. We need to be healed of our separation from our deeper selves,
from each other, the Earth and spirit which gives life meaning. This is an age-old message taught
in all other cultures and all other times. But self-realization today has a totally new and expanded
meaning.
The self I am realizing is not just a “me” limited by my skin and ego. It is self-as-world,
interconnected with all peoples and all of life. When we feel connected to all of life we start
thinking and acting in a different way.
When your mind and heart are awake this way, you no longer can just stomp on a spider or swat
a fly without thought or feeling. You begin to get a feeling that other beings have a life that
matters. That certainly includes humans on another side of the planet who are dying of starvation
or killing each other off in senseless civil wars. Much as we get inundated and sometimes
numbed by images of these horrors, when we slow down the film of our lives, the compassion of
our open heart seeps in and we may start to weep tears with our kin of other colors and speech.
I certainly felt the compassion in myself as I stepped off the plane at the tiny airport in
Bujumbura, Burundi, Central Africa in August, 2004, where a sequence of events had led me to
connect with a Burundian peacemaker. This man, Prosper Ndabishuriye, has a courageous story
of risking his life to save Burundians, which touched my heart and brought me along this 30hour voyage from Seattle to the center of Africa.
Nothing had quite prepared me, though, for the impact on my emotions of knowing the horrors
Burundians—like those in Rwanda—had undergone during the ethnic killing, and then seeing
the unexplainable joy and love in them which is so rare in the USA. How could a people so poor
and desperate, forgotten by the international community sing and dance all afternoon as we did?
And yet as I returned to Seattle, here I see those who have so much being all stressed out. Take a
look sometime and notice the preoccupied, sometimes joyless people, white-knuckling it in
traffic with their C02 polluting cars, and all of us spoiled beyond comprehension with the
material things of life.
So, I didn’t know who to be more sad for—the poor people in Africa or the poor people here in
the USA who had material wealth but were spiritually poor. I decided I needed to grow arms big
enough to wrap around everyone and everything, and that we are all in this boat together called
spaceship Earth. No use in fighting the political battles of red states vs. blue states, or getting
trapped in endless arguments about what’s wrong with the world. If your friend gets shot with a
poison arrow, the Buddha said, getting lost in philosophical arguments will only send them to an
early grave. What they need right away is a doctor.
The Buddha’s medicine, like that of Jesus, is love and compassion. Caring so much that you
would be willing—if necessary—to die for your friends and what’s important. That’s what
moved me in the story Prosper told when he and 53 young people from both warring tribes took
buses to a northern part of Burundi in 1994, and faced off death squads to help Hutus and Tutsis
come together again in peace and reconciliation through rebuilding their destroyed villages.
You and I may never, I hope, have to stare down the barrel of a gun. But when we contemplate
the global crisis before us, we are staring at a threat no less real—and one that affects all of life,
not just our own.
Tapping this compassion in all of us is, for me, the heart of the sustainable, better world we are
looking for. True, we need the creative ideas for new economic systems, new forms of
governance, local regional economies, green energy, lower personal and national ecological
footprints, a willingness to live more simply that others may simply live, as Gandhi said. We
need to live in new kinds of housing arrangements, to get out of cars and into urban
neighborhoods, develop a national department of peace (a Kucinich recommendation). We need
to save our remaining habitats and revive once depleted ecosystems so that the other life we
share this planet with can live as they deserve to, along side us as part of the Earth family. And
much more.
But we must never forget that the very heart of all these initiatives is the will to live, as
Schweitzer reminds us. And that will to live comes from none other than a love of and for life
itself. That connectedness and compassion is the most human part of us.
The Birth of Youth for a New World
The world’s need for a compassionate heart free of the hectic and spiritually impoverished life of
the modern world was the insight out of which Youth for a New World was born. Young people
and those working along side them would awaken their heart to the needs of the world about
them. We would learn about the problems and then take action. We would step into the bigger
person all of us are called to be. And whatever fear we had that the world’s problems were
impossible to solve would slowly recede as we began to see the positive results of our efforts and
those of literally millions of other ordinary people all over the globe working to make the world
a better place.
Our first program, AfricaAmericaExchange, started in an email I sent to Prosper before my
August 2004 trip and exemplifies all these aspirations. At first, I called it simply a school
program connecting youth in Burundi with kids here in Washington State through email and
letter exchange—then later we gave it a name. I heard that the Burundian President’s wife liked
that idea. So Prosper and I got started offering workshops for Burundian youth and teachers.
Then coming back here to the states we did the same thing with about fifteen schools in
Washington State over a two year period. That’s how Youth for a New World got started.
We had committed to help raise funds for Prosper’s home building project in Burundi to house
refugees from the ethnic wars. Kids learned about the tragic colonial history of Central Africa,
read books like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, saw the film Hotel Rwanda and raised
money for homes. Skyview High School and Vancouver School of Arts & Academics in
Vancouver, WA had a miraculous fund-raising dinner in May, 2005, attended by an overflow
crowd of 320 people which raised almost $19,000. The amazing dedication of the 70 students
involved from both schools caught the attention of Washington State Governor, Christine
Gregoire who wrote this beautiful letter of praise. The Governor’s office asked a delegate from
the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to read this
letter, and the kids were filled with awe and pride at this honored recognition:
I am delighted to extend warm greetings to all attendees of the Vancouver School of Arts
and Academics and Skyview High School benefit dinner for the AfricaAmericaExchange
to help build homes in Burundi. Please accept this message as an expression of my great
esteem for your important efforts.
The evolving partnership between these two high schools and the people of Burundi is
truly remarkable. What started out as an exchange of letters and emails has grown into a
substantial undertaking to assist this Central Africa nation. This project is a shining
example of young people maturely focusing on a difficult problem.
Central Africa countries in general, and Burundi in particular, are quite possibly the most
neglected areas in the world. Their troubling history of civil war and famine has created a
need for our assistance. Because of this, it is critical that we promote and celebrate efforts
by our communities to alleviate poverty and foster peace.
For these reasons, I humbly thank all in attendance for their crucial assistance. We should
also make special recognition of the extraordinary leadership shown by the students who
made this event possible. On behalf of Washington State, I wish you all the best and hope
you enjoy the evening.
Sincerely,
Christine O. Gregoire
Governor
At the same time Prosper I traveled across the USA speaking in homes, churches and schools
bringing a message that we needed to care for one another and live like a family if the world
were to survive. We went to the most liberal groups of progressive activists to the most
conservative in African American and Evangelical Christian churches in the deep south.
Everywhere we were received with the same open-hearted compassion. Everywhere people knew
the truth that love is the only thing that can win out over the world’s impending darkness.
It seems like a miracle to me that now, barely three years later, over 400 homes were built in an
area that had been totally destroyed in the wars. Now some 3,000 people who did not have a
home began remaking their lives because of what Prosper, I, many students and other donors
have done. Many lives young and old were deeply touched.
The huge effect this work had on young people like Kelly from Skyview high school in
Vancouver, WA showed the power in engaging the heart of compassion at a time when a sense
of the immense world crisis is taking hold. Kelly wrote:
Dear Mr. Seymour:
I am so happy with the work we have accomplished on this project. I cannot
express how changed I feel thanks to you and (Youth for a New World’s) work in
Burundi. I can honestly say that before this project I had no idea what was
happening in Burundi, or even in actuality that Burundi was a country. Looking
back I feel so ignorant, but I have come to realize this is the general problem in
America’s schools. I am so grateful for this opportunity to help out.
Without you and all of your generous time and funding, this project would never
have been possible. I am amazed that so few (of us) could accomplish so much. I
know that this project has truly brought out the best in me and I feel an
overwhelming gratitude to you and Prosper. Living in America people take so
many simple things for granted, and thanks to this project I have really been able
to step back and reflect on just how many things I have been so blessed with and
just how much these families and individuals in Burundi and Rwanda have lost.
Any way I can help, I am working to make a difference.
I would just like to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. I can’t imagine
anyone better to lead this project and no one could have inspired us more. You
have done a truly amazing thing at Skyview and Vancouver and I believe the
world. I know that now that the situation is getting more attention, people are
going to start to care more. I work at a movie store and in our “screener” that
shows the movies coming out, it shows a scene from “Hotel Rwanda.” When the
photographer is speaking with Paul, I believe, Paul says that once people see the
situation it will make a difference because it is so bad. And the photographer
looks at him and says that yes they will see it on the news and be sad, and say that
it is horrible, and then they will go back to eating their dinner. Every time I see
that part I actually cry. I will never understand people who see and don’t care. I
have seen the pictures and heard the stories thanks, in majority, to you and I
cannot turn away. I want to do everything I can to help. I know I wouldn’t have
been able to help as much as I have if it had not been for you and your generosity
and compassion. Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Kelly Kolke-Sakryd
The transformation in many young people like Kelly increased my sense of urgency to broaden
and deepen the work of Youth for a New World. Seeing students of all ages, teachers and adults
across the USA open their hearts to the needs of others, I knew we needed to dream into a larger
vehicle for personal and world transformation, especially given the gravity of the world situation.
So the idea emerged of introducing students and the adults caring for them more deeply to the
key issues confronting humanity today, some of the solutions that are being developed and
actions locally and globally that could be taken.
That’s the evolution of the different subject areas that you can read about, research, write about
and on which we can take a variety of actions. We cover lots of ground here from leading a
purposeful life, to the wisdom of indigenous peoples, controlling greenhouse gases, preserving
biodiversity, and much more. I hope the list of subjects we study will grow with your help.
The idea here is that we want a more whole kind of learning experience, one that involves the
head, heart and hands and which causes us to be aware, care and make a difference in our local
and global communities toward a new world society.
My sincere wish is that your involvement in Youth for a New World helps you to become a
bigger person and more of who you are. Each of you—each person on Earth—has a calling.
Like Kelly and all the other students and adults who have been involved in Youth for a New
World, there is a heart in all of us that yearns for a sense of the largeness in life. Life is about
more than simply getting ahead, having a good job, a family and a roof over our heads. Those are
good and important things, but what about the meaning of our lives?
When you get to the end of your life and look back, I want each of you to feel that you have
contributed to something important--that your presence, caring and efforts made some one, some
many happier.
You did not choose to be born at this momentous time in human history—nor did I. But the
world is calling all those who have ears to hear. We are in trouble. The Earth needs you. We
need people all around the globe who have the courage to look squarely at the frightening
realities before humanity today. We need people like you who choose not escape into self-denial
or pleasure but are committed to go forward with compassionate, intelligent action to heal a
world in need.
With those sentiments, I want to close by welcoming you to Youth for a New World and this
wonderful adventure we will take together at this most important and critical time in human
history.