5 February 2011
Sat. Feb. 19, 1-4: Changing Paradigms
Posted by Admin under: Events; Forum; Organization; Sustainability .
This month we invite you to continue a dialog with us as to whether humanity can be saved without
“A Profound Transformation in Consciousness”
Those of us who work in the business sector tend to make the argument for sustainability in economic terms — in its simplest form, that we need to avoid killing the Golden Goose, the planet, if we want to keep having it lay its eggs of gold for us. But the evidence is that this argument is simply not working fast enough to have companies and individuals change their behaviors.
Similarly, the political discourse in America appears to be taking another turn for the bizarre, as President Obama avoids even mentioning climate change in this year’s State of the Union, and Congress proposes to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. (For more on this see Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Cooling on Warming” in the Feb. 7 issue of The New Yorker, Mark Hertsgaard’s “Confronting the Climate Cranks” in the Feb. 7 issue of The Nation, and the usual assortment of progressive bloggers.)
What does appear to be moving forward in this country is mostly on a local level, with communities, neighborhoods, and ecopreneurs leading the charge. Where there is even the scent of economic opportunity people are ready to leap in and make a new society possible. The question is, what will it take to get there?
On Saturday, February 19, 1-4 p.m., we invite you to join us at the Morris County Library, 30 Hanover Ave., Whippany, NJ 07961 for an open discussion of this topic and what we can do about it. Please RSVP to rsvp@slforum.org.
The original idea for this month’s session was “Connecting the Dots,” and this is something we still aim to do. We all operate in multiple realities – at work (if we have it), at home, in our communities, and in schools, religious institutions, and civic organizations. We know, in each of these worlds, that momentous shifts are taking place, in our climate, in the global economy, and in our knowledge and understanding of the interconnectedness of all things.
At the same time, the evidence is piling up that we are not moving fast enough to avert a substantial degree of environmental disruption, some of which we are already experiencing – in the most northern latitudes, in the sea level rise and the acidification of the oceans, in increasingly severe droughts, floods, wildfires, and storms across many parts of the world.
What appears to be missing has been, in Theodore Roszak’s expression, our ability to listen to “the voice of the earth,” our psychological disconnect from our ecological reality. If we are now listening, what kind of a society are we willing to create, and how do we get there from here? How do we break free from the past, and what will it take to get to the tipping point?
With the prospect of ten billion people on the planet, intimately, wirelessly, and biologically interconnected, we need to imagine – and then bring about – the emergence of a greater collective consciousness, which embraces and reflects our individual diversity while informing whatever we do with a whole-systems ecological awareness.
We invite you to join us in this exploration, adventure, and social innovation experiment, and look forward to seeing you on the 19th.
Let us know if you are coming and if you have guests. Maximum 30 people.
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About the SLF
The Sustainable Leadership Forum is a unique organization – more an experiment than an association – and we invite collaborative co-creation. In this way, the SLF is something of a social laboratory, an ongoing conversation, an exploration of the ideas of leadership and sustainable development.
At the same time, it’s also part of a larger and more pragmatic effort, the Center for Leadership in Sustainability, which is seeking 501c3 status to assist in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship both here, through the Sustainable Business Incubator, and in Haiti through the Sustainable Haiti Coalition.
We have an opportunity to leverage these efforts, and we invite your participation in that at whatever level you are willing to contribute. Our Program Investment Fund is set up to allow members to create a revolving loan pool for sustainable projects. Our Membership and Volunteer programs are designed to elicit and develop creative ideas, such as the New Wealth Game.