Category: World that Works

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Speaking to People’s Greatness

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What’s interesting is to look back at Werner’s remarkable insights and see the compassion in the man—a man many regarded as the ultimate advocate of tough love.

This site is a tribute to Erhard, and to the organization which he created—and then let go of when his persona became an obstacle to its existence—for the extraordinary good that he and “the technology” he developed did for so many people. I can remember many thrilling and deeply moving instances where individuals in the Landmark Forum experienced profound breakthroughs, freeing themselves from the past and opening up to new possibilities for the future. In my case, it gave me access to an awareness of myself and of Victoria that has kept our relationship alive for nearly forty years.

For many years I held back from speaking and writing about the Forum, partly in response to the repeated warnings to treat every word and idea as proprietary, and partly out of concern that I could not do it justice on the printed page. The power of the Forum lies in the dynamic engagement with the listener in real time, the sudden a-hah that occurs when we see the truth about ourselves as revealed through the eyes of another.

In the end, I think Werner will be recognized for his remarkable contribution to ontology, the study of being: to its presence beyond words, which he nonetheless conjured up through a disciplined practice of interaction and conversation. He took his own advice to heart and dealt with people as if they were perfect, while giving space to allow them to let their garbage go.

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A Possible Planet

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We’re in the processing of “re-branding” ourselves as Possible Planet (www.possibleplanet.org, of course). So what does this re-branding mean, and why are we doing it?

By “we” we mean here the Center for Regenerative Community Solutions, our 501(c)(3) umbrella entity under which we house a number of our own and others’ projects. These include not only global and local projects, but pretty much also every level in between. So not only are we concerned with what’s needed for “A Possible Planet” (the title of our forthcoming book), but we’re also working on Possible New Jersey (www.possiblenj.org) and Possible Bound Brook (www.possibleboundbrook.org [since retired]) as examples of the application of what is really the paradigm-shifting model behind Possible Planet.

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Making Our Contribution

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By Victoria Zelin & Jonathan Cloud

DuaneElginIt seems appropriate, in the context of this project, to state that much of what we are talking about is “already out there” in one form or another; part of our goal is simply to bring it together in a way that we and others can work together effectively to build a new future for ourselves and the rest of the world.

I’m reminded of this specifically by picking up Duane Elgin’s The Living Universe (2009), in which he reminds us of the “Warning to Humanity” issued by 1600 of the world’s top scientists — including a majority of the Nobel laureates in the sciences at the time — in 1992:

“A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

Today, 22 years later, we know that we have not made this “great change”— and that catastrophe is looming ever closer. We know, for example, that we have already locked in a greater than 2°C temperature increase in the global climate; that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction of species on the planet; and that we are not likely to solve these problems until poverty, war, and oppression have been banished from the earth. Despite the “mainstream media’s” efforts to keep alive a wholly-obsolete “debate,” almost everyone we know now understands and accepts this reality.
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“A World that Works for No One”

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83David_Korten

Unless people of good will join in common cause to build a truly democratic world that works for all, we will find ourselves living in a world that works for no one. —David Korten (2000)

There is a sense in which we already find ourselves living in “a world that works for no one”: not the rich, and certainly not the poor; not the believer or the agnostic, not the Ph.D. or the high school drop-out, not the pop celebrity or the homeless veteran still suffering from PTSD. It’s not just that the rich are as depressed, confused, and cynical as the rest of us, which is certainly true in many cases; or that the world we live in seems to be unravelling in a dozen different ways, which has certainly been the case during all of our lifetimes. It’s that the world cannot work for anyone unless it at least begins to work for everyone.

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Building “A World that Works”

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fuller1“A World that Works” is the central project of our time — and will indeed be that of any foreseeable future. Science has brought us enormous realms of understanding, but none more important than an awareness of our actual impact on the planet and its unsustainability. We may regard this as fact: our Earth, which is at this point our only habitat, is in the process of becoming increasingly inhospitable to life. Climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification and the loss of biodiversity are each capable of becoming massive and in some cases overwhelming disruptors, each capable of passing a point of no return.

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