About the Gathering

Two hundred and fifty invitees from around the world will bring to the Gathering the rich diversity of experiences and perspectives needed to re-imagine what a sustainable world might look like and what concrete actions must be taken now to achieve enduring results. They will explore the values and practices that have led us to this point. They will redefine what prosperity for all can look like. They will explore the shift in priorities and actions that governments, businesses, educational and other institutions, as well as individuals, must take if we are to have a real chance of bringing a sustainable future into being.

Among those participating will be leading voices from the communities of practice that make up much of the world: Government policy makers (10); Environmentally conscious business leaders (10); Philanthropists (10); Leaders of environmental NGO’s (10); Environmental activists (5); Spiritually grounded activists (5); Social entrepreneurs (5); Educational leaders (10); Documentary filmmakers, artists and musicians (5); members of traditional and new media (5); Scientists, naturalists (5); Traditional wisdom keepers (25); Young leaders from around the world (60); "Global citizens", who have much to contribute but who are not so easily put into the various communities of practice (85).

The gathering is being designed using architecture in which all voices are honored and concrete solutions evolve. All the knowledge needed to craft wise solutions will be represented at the Gathering.

All two hundred and fifty invitees will come together June 21st through the 24th, 2010 on the island of Hawai'i at the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, alongside one of the most beautiful volcanoes in the world. If the earth has been talking back and we have not been listening, we will be aware of her as we come together to envision how best to assure that the planet can support future generations. The invitees will be encouraged to listen deeply to and be informed by voices they seldom hear. And they will work together to re-imagine what a sustainable world would look like, agree on the major shifts in values that need take place and commit to the actions they, and those who share their communities of practice, will commit to take over the next two years before a 2012 follow-up gathering.

The immensity of the work requires that the right tools be in place to support collaboration among participants who have little time to spare but who also recognize the importance of this work. The initiative’s website will serve as both a password protected intranet to support the invitees, as well as an Internet site to connect others around the world to this effort.

The Beyond Sustainability initiative is also building upon other initiatives that have explored the shift in values needed to live in greater harmony with the earth and the rest of humanity. It is building on the important work of the Earth Charter, a worldwide collaborative effort "to establish a sound ethical foundation for the emerging global society and to help build a sustainable world based on respect for nature, diversity, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace." It is building on the work of the 2007 conference in Aspen, Colorado, organized by the Yale School of Forestry & Environment, entitled "Toward a New Consciousness: Creating a Society in Harmony with Nature."

Among the other questions this initiative will address are:

• If we “got it right”, what would it look like in 2030, and what were the values that enabled the world to evolve in that direction?
• If the belief structure of society is to evolve from where it stands now towards true sustainability, what has been missing from the dialogue?
• What is needed for a new consciousness leading to sustainability to be born,establish roots, and result in transformation?
• Since the past notions of growth and prosperity are overwhelming the planets capacity to support nearly seven billion people, what new notions of prosperity and growth need to emerge?

We must redefine "growth" in ways that lead to sustainability. Future economic growth must occur in ways that enable the planet’s renewable resources, such as fresh water, topsoil, fisheries and forests, to no longer be depleted, but constantly be renewed. Business must adapt itself in ways that enable it to be successful while contributing to the sustainability of the planet and humanity.

We must operate from a platform of reverence for the natural world. Collectively, many of us who have been influential in the systems that shape our world, have done so divorced from the consciousness that our ancestors held for the deep connections we have for the natural world. Reverence has been a capacity of human life that has kept us accountable to each other and to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years. Now that 50% of the world’s seven billion inhabitants, and 80% of the U.S. population, live in urban area, many of us have shed that reverence and have dulled our senses to the awe that is inspired by a deep connection to the earth, to each other and to ourselves. Reverence must be our operating system, and connection our practice.

We need to embrace the practice of collaborating. Some of the answers to our questions lie outside ourselves, in the wisdom of community and collective intelligence. In order to access this wisdom and offer ourselves fully, we are prepared to cross boundaries and travel to unfamiliar places and be there as learners and contributors to an emerging sense of direction. The boundaries that exist between peoples, cultures, lands and man-made organizations are artificial and have unnecessarily divided us and deprived us of inspiration, wisdom and co-creation.

We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long-term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. The time for a myriad of enlightened experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activists, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. They are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.

Our way forward is a conversation about values AND tactics. Exploring values without the actions that will put those values into practice is wishful thinking. Employing tactics without values is reckless. We need to employ the tactics of hope from a platform of reverence for the natural world, supported by a community of influential leaders who are connected to the systems that need to change.

Social entrepreneurs and traditional peoples are important sources of new worldviews and practices. There are people in the world whose lives are devoted to practices of accessing the sacred source of reverence for the natural world, crossing boundaries, collaborating with others, and sharing and giving away what they know and have acquired. These fundamental practices represent both the foundation of many traditional indigenous communities and new ways of doing business, governance, education and social development, as employed by social entrepreneurs. The Beyond Sustainability initiative will employ tools that will allow us to be in deep connection with one another face to face and across oceans, and these tools amplify and make possible the practices that stem from a platform of reverence. Social entrepreneurs and indigenous peoples are sources of powerful and generative world views, guides on the path, and leaders to the future of a shift in the values that underlie global systems of domination, exploitation, disconnection, violence and greed.

As a community of leaders we seek to become a system of influence. All of those participating in the Beyond Sustainability initiative are deeply embedded in powerful systems and many have channels and connections to the underlying architecture of power in its many forms. Now is the time to put those resources to work, to help hospice the old systems so that they may die gracefully, midwife the new and steward the nascent so that we can accelerate the emergence of a set of values that restores right relationship to the earth and to each other.

Tapping into the power of young leaders and of inter-generational collaboration. The most interconnected, digitally savvy, and globally conscious group in human evolution, the Millennial Generation, aka “Generation We”, knows it is inheriting the planet's greatest challenges, yet believes it can innovate beyond sustainability with entrepreneurship and well-guided action. These young leaders have the vital impatience not just to study problems, but to help create and implement working solutions. The Gathering will provide them with a powerful opportunity to learn from and collaborate with elder leaders from across multiple disciplines and cultures. It will also be a time for elder leaders to learn from younger leaders.

For example, in the Hawaiian genealogical prayer chant, the Kumulipo, the light of knowledge (Ka-malama) is conferred to the parent sources forming the material world. Ka-malama, the effective force bearing up new growth, contains the encoded intelligence for sustaining life. Such intelligence is revealed in the natural world, as evidenced by Anil Rajvanshi's observation that nature's design template for sustainability is decentralization, a principle expressed in the Hawaiian resource management system of the ahupua'a. Conducting themselves with loyalty and faith to those principles, Hawaiian ancestors understood that sustainability is an innate phenomenon. This is a far different world view from the one that sees humanity’s role as having dominion over the natural world, and it is this qualitative shift in conversation that traditional peoples will explore and share with leaders from around the world at the Beyond Sustainability Gathering.

VALUES - We are only inviting those who recognize that a fundamental shift in values is essential to humanity’s future.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES - We are inviting leaders in field such as biomimicry, permaculture, slow food, and slow money, who may provide cues about systems that are in alignment with the nature world and the new values.

ACTIONS – We are inviting social entrepreneurs and others who have demonstrated the ability for original, unconventional thinking that is in alignment with Einstein’s quote, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it”. And, we are also inviting leaders, who by dent of their positions of authority in governments, corporations, universities and other institutions, can rapidly initiate actions in those areas over which they exercise influence or control.

MEASUREABLE RESULTS – We are inviting both those who focus on non-traditional measures of prosperity, such as the Human Development Index and the Gross Happiness Index, as well as those who focus on more traditional measures, such as GNP and GDP.

On the final day of the June 2010 Gathering, each of the communities of practice will articulate the actions they plan to put into place. Government policy makers, for example, will articulate the policies they will champion, business leaders the shift in policies and practices they will bring into being, university presidents the changes in curriculum they plan to initiate, documentary film makers the types of films they will produce, and philanthropists the types of initiatives they will invest in if the looming sustainability crisis is to really be addressed before a number of irreversible tipping points are reached.

The initiative’s website will serve as a critical lynchpin in achieving many of these goals. While much of the thinking and strategizing will occur during the June Gathering, the implementation of the actions agreed upon will occur over the following two years.

June 2010 – Participating in the Gathering
The June 21-24, 2010 Gathering at Volcanoes National Park will be immediately preceded by two smaller gatherings: From June 16-20, twenty-five traditional wisdom keepers, and from June 19-20, sixty young leaders, will spend time exploring what knowledge and wisdom each has to share with the other participants.

July 2010 through June 2012 Supporting and Tracking Progress against Commitments
Following the conclusion of the gathering, Beyond Sustainability will remain a place where all the participants stay connected and illuminate the work each is engaged in to deeply influence the foundational values of large systems. The communities of practice will continue to meet periodically, at least virtually, to assess their progress. The Beyond Sustainability website will play a critical role in supporting these interactions and outreach.

June 2012 – Assessing and Reexamining the Work
In order to create a global community of change makers to address the sustainability crisis, we plan to host a similar gathering in 2012. The purpose will be to share and assess how effective the participants have been in carrying out the commitments they made in 2010, what has worked, what has not, and what initiatives should be supported over the next years.