adviser news Global Vision director Michael O'Callaghan set up our new headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, in April 2010. This follows 20 years in New York, 4 in London, and 9 in Ireland, where he suspended other Global Vision activities to lead the GM-free Ireland campaign and secure a (yet-to-be-implemented) Government agreement to ban GM crops in 2009.
Note: This rest of this page provides occasional news updates about members of the Global Vision adviser group.
Architect William McDonough is nearing completion of the NASA Sustainability Base, which integrates his cradle-to-cradle design with NASA'S technology for life support in space to create the US Federal Government's most advanced green building. The 50,000-square-foot, $23 million project should be completed in late 2010 with full occupancy in March 2011. See his website at www.mcdonough.com.
Peace Child International President David A. Woolcombe is organising the Fifth World Youth Congress in Istanbul, Turkey, from 31 July to 13 August 2010. See Peace Child's website at www.peacechild.org and our related Be the change! documentary film about their Second World Youth Congress in Morocco in 2003.
Psychiatrist Dr. Stan Grof M.D. will give a keynote address at the 17th International Transpersonal Conference: Consciousness Revolution: Transpersonal Discoveries That Are Changing the World from 23-27 June 2010 in Moscow. Stan is a leading psychiatrist, the founder of the International Transpersonal Association, and recipient of the prestigious Vision 97 award from the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation in Prague in 2007. See his website at www.stanislavgrof.com.
Environmental Economics Professor Willam E. Rees, who co-invented the Ecological Footprint concept with his former student Mathis Wackernagel (see interview), gave a speech entitled Is humanity unsustainable? in Vancouver, Canada in April 2010, in which he discusses the scientific consensus on the coming global eco-social catastrophe, human intelligence, and the need for planned contraction and convergence of the economy to save the biosphere on which our survival depends - listen here: www.ecoshock.net/eshock10/ES_100528_Show_LoFi.mp3. Meanwhile, Mathis Wackernagel is promoting adoption of ecological footprint accounting by the member states of the United Nations under the aegis of the Global Footprint Network, which is hosting the Footprint Forum 2010 near Siena, Italy, from 7-12 June 2010.
World Future Council programme director Herbert Girardet gave two lectures at the BioVision Conference held at the new library of Alexandria, Egypt, in April 2010. The conference was attended by 2,000 people, including six Nobel Laureates, from around the world. Herbert presented the WFC's latest ideas on regenerative cities and bio-sequestration of carbon, based on material from their most recent book, A Renewable World - Energy, Ecology, Equality. Bill McKibben of 350.org says "Here's the book we've been waiting for, a thorough, up-to-date, and above all proportionate response to our climatic predicament. When I say proportionate, I mean: it tells us how to solve the problem we really have, not the one we wish we had. It's truly important!" In 2007 Herbert edited Surviving the Century: Facing Climate Change and other Global Challenges, published by Earthscan. See the WFC website at www.worldfuturecouncil.org.
Futurist and evolutionary economist Hazel Henderson published an intesting article entitled Supreme Court's shocker makes CSR key buttress of democracy in January 2010, about the recent US Supreme Court decision which Barak Obama described as "a green light to a new stampede of special interest money into our politics - a major victory for big oil, Wall Street bankers, health insurance companies and other interests that marshal their power every day in Washington and drown out the voices of everyday Americans". Hazel argues for tightening U.S. corporate governance through the SEC and other regulatory agencies, so that corporations must get prior approval from their shareholders for such new political financing while enforcing immediate public disclosure of such funds and recipients, along with new screens for SRI funds and other institutional investors, "now that every corporate governance decision will be viewed as political". Hazel is the President of Ethical Markets Media, (USA and Brazil), author of many books and co-creator of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. She founded the EthicMark Award for advertising, which is currently signing up companies against the emerging practice of neuromarketing. See her website at www.hazelhenderson.com.
Robert Thurman, the Professor Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and President of Tibet House in New York was recently desribed by the New York Times as "the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism". His commitment to finding a peaceful, win-win solution for Tibet and China inspired him to write his latest book, Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet and the World, published in 2008. See his website at www.bobthurman.com.
International law professor Prof. Richard A. Falk was appointed to a six-year term as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights in 2008. He was previously appointed to the United Nations Human Rights Inquiry Commission for the Palestinian territories in 2001. Before that he was the Albert G. Millbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice, Center for International Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Global & International Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of many books including The Great Terror War (Olive Branch Press, 2002).
In December 2002, Le Monde Diplomatique published Richard's article Washington against Baghdad: the United Nations taken hostage, in which he condemned the invasion of Iraq as a blatant violation of international law and a dangerous precedent for future "pre-emptive" wars by other nations, such as Israel's illegal chemical weapons attack on Gaza in 2009 (see photo, right).
The so-called war on terror brings to mind the perceptive insight of the late psychiatrist R.D. Laing (see interview) who was also a Global Vision adviser. Laing observed that the individual whom society labels as "insane" can often be more accurately described as the identified patient in a network of inter-personal and family relationships which are themselves pathogenic. This insight can help to understand how suicide bombers and other violent religious fundamentalists can be caught in a global network of economic, political and military relationships which are collectively driving them mad. From this perspective, the "war on terror" attempt to control the symptom of fundamentalist violence is certain to exacerbate the disease for generations to come - and to guarantee vast diversion of taxpayer funds for the weapons and private security industries. As Carl Jung observed, "To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. What we can improve in others is of doubtful utility as a rule, if, indeed, it has any effect at all."
Film producer and media critic Danny Schechter produced Plunder: The crime of our time in 2009. This hard-hitting investigative documentary film and book explores how the global financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity. "I used to think of Wall Street as a financial center. I now think of it as a crime scene." Danny is the author of Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror, and the founder of The Media Channel, a global non-profit media issues network offering media news perspectives, education and analysis. He is also the co-founder of Globalvision News Network (no connection with us), a global syndicate of hundreds of independent news organisations that collaborate to provide fresh and intelligent perspectives on global events through the eyes of experienced, professional journalists who are native to the regions about which they report. See also our interview where Danny speaks about the need to hold the media accountable: "There's been a merger between show business and news business in the USA and in other parts of the world, with a shrinking number of informational educational documentary programmes as many broadcasters imitate the American model of broadcasting."
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