For Our Common Future

Walt Taylor

We appreciated your article on "What Do We Do Now?" (Connexions #48)....Peggy Taylor, my wife of 47 years, and I enclose $25 for our subscription. We need more paper coming into our home like we need nuclear submarines, but I got a bit hooked by your article.
We get requests from countless organizations for money to save the whales, the wolves, the ozone layer, the water, the soil, the wilderness, mentally handicapped, tortured, oppressed, massacred, victims of genocide, potential victims of omnicide, space, the planet, the hungry and the starving, and so forth. Our donations are many, but tiny in comparison with the enormity of the need. We receive mountainous letters asking for money or for us to write supportive letters of concern.
Very few organizations seem to be able to respond, however, to a proposal or an idea. They have proposals and ideas of their own. Here is one I have spent years cultivating, just in case it manages to form any connexion with your busy thoughts and/or activities. The "Draft Plan for Our Common Future" [see below] is a one-page product of decades of mental ferment and several years of work on much longer statements....
Most Canadians seem brainwashed by two myths: (1) Work is scarce; not enough work for everyone; and (2) Money is scarce; Canada cannot afford full employment. Some of us remember the Great Depression and its heavy unemployment. We know that it took only a couple of years in Canada and then in the United States to develop full employment and a booming economy after World War II was declared. Everyone's help was needed "for the duration"of the wartime emergency. Whatever the cost, the resources were quickly available. Our current global crises are infinitely worse. Everyone needs to be needed and everyone is needed. Two enthusiastic research teams could open the way for an obvious idea to become an active demonstrations. What do you think?

Draft Plan for our Common Future
Two research projects will make it possible to achieve the "totally impossible" but absolutely necessary goal of keeping this battered planet habitable for the twenty-first century.

The basic idea is quite obvious. In view of the precarious predicament of life on earth today, we need to plan ways for everyone concerned to work together for "Our Common Future."At stake is nothing less than “the security, well-being, and very survival of the planet." (Our Common Future, the 1987 Report by the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Madame Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, page 343.)

A. Inventory: Researchers will prepare an inventory of the specific, high priority, life-sustaining work that must be done to avoid the unprecedented dangers we now face including the possibility of omnicide and to take full advantage of our unprecedented opportunities to prepare for a higher quality of life on earth than we can now even imagine.

The necessary information including job descriptions, training and counselling needs, tools, facilities, and budgets will be obtained from cooperating organizations, coalitions and agencies concerned with environment, human rights, peace, education, forestry, agriculture, fisheries, "sustainable"community economic development, poverty, non-violent conflict resolution, and methods of "changing our modes of thinking"in order to end our "drift toward unparalleled catastrophe" about which Albert Einstein warned us in 1946.

B. Invent-ory: (Place the accent on vent.) This research team will invent ways to provide the necessary resources for workers in one or more demonstration communities to earn a living while doing some urgently needed work identified and documented in the inventory.

At present the most important work of our generations falls too often on volunteers and "bake sale" funding. It is unreasonable and ineffective to depend almost exclusively on volunteers for the enormous task of safeguarding our common future. It is also unwise and unfair to exclude from this challenging work those people who need to earn a living at it. Dedicated volunteers are essential, but insufficient.

C. Mutual Aid Place: In each demonstration community or region, people who want to earn their living doing life-sustaining work will find appropriate opportunities in the Inventory. A "Mutual Aid Place"may be desirable (under this or some other name) to help connect interested people with whatever training, counselling, or other resources they require in order to get started. Everyone's help is needed. With so much constructive work demanding action now, unemployment has become unnecessary and utterly inexcusable.

Would you and/or your associates be willing to participate in developing this draft into a workable plan that will be implemented?

Walt Taylor
Waging Peace Secretary
Northwest Study Conference Society
Box 446, Smithers, British Columbia V0J 2N0

(CX3815)

Subject Headings

• Alternatives
• Common Earth Ecology
• Co-operatives
• Employment
• Sustainability
• Sustainable Development
• Unemployment

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