Randy's Blog 

I’ve been down at the Human Forum in San Jose, Costa Rica, for the past several days.  The conference is put on by the Alliance for a New Humanity (ANH).  ANH’s mission, remarkably similar to Care2’s, is “To connect people who, through personal and social transformation aim to build a just, peaceful and sustainable world, reflecting the unity of all humanity.”  To that end, the conference brings together a remarkable number of thought and action leaders who are effecting change in different parts of the ecosystem.

The first session of the conference was aimed at articulating a vision for the future.  That may seem a bit abstract, but the impact is powerful, as how we perceive the world dictates how we interact with it.   Peace and spiritual activist, Marianne Williamson, articulated it well by describing how most of us feel a great connection with our loved ones, but then view ourselves as separate from the earth, strangers and creatures.  That gap means we treat the environment as a resource for our use.

I personally like Deepak Chopra’s vision for humanity.  The leaves on the plants are our lungs, the rivers our circulator system, and the earth an extension of our body.  This isn’t just semantics – if we see the world as our extended body, which means together this is our universal body – we’ll care for the environment and others as we do for ourselves.  Of course, this isn’t just a metaphor either, as we literally are all connected/one through energy as we know through quantum physics not to mention Eastern spirituality.

Author and culture consultant, Richard Barrett, described the need for a new paradigm well: “everything we do is out of self interest, but what we need is to expand the sense of self to include all of humanity [and Earth]”. That’s such a powerful concept – imagine if people saw the oppressed as themselves oppressed? Or if cutting a forest was seen as taking a chunk out of our lungs?  This isn’t the vision Western society has today, but it is a vision similar to how many cultures view the world (including the Mayan of Costa Rica).

Now the trick is to figure out how to change society’s vision for itself… more on that later.