About the Gathering

It is now well known that our planet is on an unsustainable course that will leave future generations in great peril if we do not change our ways. Dramatic increases in the world's population, coupled with our voracious consumption and destruction of the planet's resources, have brought us to this point. The industrial revolution and market capitalism have been so successful that the extraordinary population growth they enabled and the consumption habits they engendered are now more than the planet can support. While technological advances may delay some of the consequences, they alone will not be sufficient to avert major environmental and social dislocations.

Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse.

Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute and president of the Earth Policy Institute

The initial building block of the Beyond Sustainability initiative will be a Gathering in Hawaii this June of sixty carefully chosen invitees who will bring the rich diversity of experiences and perspectives needed to re-imagine what a sustainable world would look like. They will explore the values and practices that have led us to this point, and the change in values and practices called for to lead us to sustainability, and beyond.

Creating Community

The wisdom of indigenous elders will play a central role in the initial gathering this June, as they will help remind us of ways of being with the earth and with each other that most of mankind has forgotten during our headlong rush into modernity. Central to all indigenous worldviews is the concept of interdependence and interrelatedness. Most traditional cultures in the world have a word for this concept, a word that places the ideas firmly at the center of the ways in which the world, and everything in it, is organized. In Hawaiian, the word is "malama". The implications of this way of being and seeing the world are many. Every relationship I am in changes me and whatever I am in relationship with, including relations between myself, others and the earth itself. Actions that we undertake individually and collectively can have global consequences that lie far outside our control.

We live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. Through centuries of keen observation, interpretation, and the passing down of knowledge, our common ancestors understood that the wisdom underlying effective sustainable practices is built into the natural world. Today that wisdom is still held in its most pure and truthful forms by the indigenous peoples of the world.

Bill McKibben, American environmentalist and author

The bright side is that it is now possible to be aware of our relationships with people from around the world, with animate and inanimate things, and with the earth itself. Cultivating and building this community means regaining the traditional values of respect, equality, balance, and harmonious relationships, on which we are basing the design of our initiative, with a deep respect for each other and the place that hosts us, and careful attention to the container that holds our work. Relationships are paramount in this world-view, and good work comes from good relations.

A Community of Leadership

The time is ripe for people of influence and power to use their resources, abilities, and relationships to lead the way toward a sustainable future. The community we are seeking to build is composed of influential people who work within many of the most powerful institutions in American life, including finance and business, education, media, politics and the arts, as well as spiritual, ethical and values based communities of practice – established networks that can be of immense value in the dissemination of these, or any, new values and practices. These people, and all of humanity, will need to work with an emerging value system that pays deep attention to the needs of the planet and its humans and other living beings. This collection of leaders represent a bridge between the status quo and the emerging value system that we must cultivate in order to turn the tide of human impact on the planet.

We know that we cannot do this work alone, and that it is lonely work to lead from the future, especially from a place of commitment to values that aren't yet recognized as mainstream, or that are subservient to the American culture of short-term results and sustained economic growth. The people we are inviting into this community are leaders able to effect change in the world. They are experienced, they have stories, they have connections and they are looking for others who share their approach to the future. We are cultivating a community of leadership that can do the work of leading transformative change in the world, proposing critical changes to those in their sphere of influence.

A Platform of Reverence

There are very few places in the mainstream of American society where people operate out of deep reverence for themselves, for each other and for the earth. But traditional indigenous communities are organized completely around this orientation to the world. The gift of life, the privilege and responsibility of living in community with other living things, and with the earth itself, is one that demands a constant orientation towards reverence, a deep humility for the power of the natural world and a profound recognition of the interdependent nature of reality. This is a fundamental philosophical approach that is markedly different from the philosophy that has arisen out of classical and European thought for the past 500 years. Enlightenment philosophy and the pursuit of scientific materialism led to a separation between humans and the earth. It has made possible the development of technologies and objective thinking that has given rise to the fastest growing and most influential civilizations in history. Human beings now have the ability to influence life on the planet in ways that only large asteroids have done in the past. And, with the rise of this ability has come a challenge: if we are unable to bridge the divide that keeps us believing that we are separate from each other and the fate of the planet, we now risk radically changing the conditions of earth that will make it impossible for humans and many other forms of life to survive.

That we have evolved to this point is both a blessing and a curse. The 20th century, a century in which humans killed each other at a rate greater than that of all other centuries combined, and a century in which we developed the means to completely eradicate ourselves from earth, was also the century in which western science discovered what indigenous philosophers have known for all time: All life is related; All things are related. When change happens in one place in the system it affects the whole system.

Systems thinking, ecological science, quantum mechanics, epidemiology, oncology, organic chemistry, biology – the very sciences that brought us to this brink -- have all discovered this truth. What is missing is a user's manual for living in an interconnected reality. It is precisely this set of practices that indigenous communities have cultivated from time immemorial and that continue to inform the way in which traditional peoples live with each other. What is needed now is a community of leadership that can recognize the primacy of the ideas of relationship, and interdependence and can cultivate practices to restore the philosophical basis of action to one of reverence. This is no easy feat. It does not have a road map, nor does it have an end point. This is an invitation for very smart, concerned, humble, people to stop and take the time to learn together, develop a conversation that will outlast their life on earth and bequeath to their descendants a way of being in the world that is fundamentally based on right relationship with that which sustains us.

We are not alone in undertaking this work, the worldwide collaborative effort that created the Earth Charter, and the 2007 Conference in Aspen called "Towards a New Consciousness," being prominent examples of the work of others that we will build upon. We are aiming at articulating these values as tactics and to use the power of convening to call tactical gatherings to identify and develop new ways of moving forward. What is different about this gathering is the intentional foregrounding of the indigenous voice and worldview here as a primary foundation for our work.

You are not just anybody. You are specifically invited because you are involved, you are connected and you understand the need for this shift on a deeper level. You are involved in some way in shifting the values of a society that is consuming the earth for short-term prosperity, and we recognize and value your potential to effect change.

None of us coming to this gathering is perfect, nor does any one of us have the answers. Rather we invite you together to see how much more effective we might be in exerting influence on key parts of American society. This is a call to do the heavy lifting of deep change work. It is not for the faint of heart, and there are no guarantees that we will be effective in either the short or the long term, but all of us are impatient and unwilling to stand by and let our influence wane.

A sustainable world, too, will only be possible by thinking differently. With nature and not machines as their inspiration, today's innovators are showing how to create a different future by learning to see the larger systems of which they are a part and to foster collaboration across every imaginable boundary. These core capabilities – seeing systems, collaborating across boundaries and creating versus problem solving – form the underpinnings, and ultimately the tools and methods, for this shift in thinking.

Peter Senge: Author, The Necessary Revolution

The gathering will be held within several layers of container. A container for action gives us a basis for working and understanding one another, a shared language and a set of practices that can come to define the community.

We are working with the following elements of our container:

We can not solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

• Being hosted by the land itself, in the presence of an active volcano, Kilauea.
• Being hosted by the traditional peoples of this land.
• Exploring and experiencing what it means to practice deeply out of malama, including through ceremony and constant orientation to connection and reverence.
• Working in a space in which every individual can bring their gifts and share them as they are needed, and ask for help with their work.
• Using meeting processes that focus on cultivating relationships, building community, learning together and making new work possible.
• Sharing tools and stories that are helpful to each other's work.
• Working with the natural dynamics of emergent and self-organizing systems to discover how our community will be birthed and will grow.
• We operate from an assumption of abundance, that everything we need is at hand, and that we need only make best use of all of our resources.

Ritual and ceremony will be present in this gathering as a way of bringing us to action. Stories will be told not from a podium, or a panel of "experts", but by each other to each other. People are invited to come with their deepest questions and most powerful offerings from a lifetime of experience, and ancestral knowledge, in order to create a place of abundance, where everyone, regardless of age, experience or power can make a contribution.

The following is a brief overview of each day:

• June 21: All invitees arrive, are picked up from the airport, and taken to the Gathering site
• June 22: Creating a platform of reverence
• June 23: Building a community of leadership
• June 24: Taking leadership
• June 25: Integrating and acting

The Propositions On Which the Initiative Rests

We have to find a new form of economy, an economy that knows how to govern its limits, an economy that respects nature and acts at the service of man, a situation where political and humanistic choices govern the economy and not the other way around. We have to discover new economic relationships that move at a more natural pace.

Carlo Petrini, Founder of Slow Food

We have much to learn from the natural world. As traditional wisdom keepers have been trying to tell us, if only we would listen and be guided by nature's examples rather than assume we can take from it without consequence. The emerging scientific field of biomimicry is doing just that. It studies nature, its models, systems, processes and elements and imitates or takes creative inspiration from them to solve human problems sustainably.

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 as a community. The era of the lone wolf is over. There are no single heroes who will bail us out of the situation we have created for ourselves. Together we must act in community, bringing the values of our ancient understanding of the village to play on a modern global stage and never forgetting that as human beings we are built to work together and not separate from one another.

Sustainable human communities are best modeled after nature's ecosystems, which themselves are communities of plants, animals, and micro-organisms that nurture and support each other. Thus the way to sustain life on a whole is to build and nurture a more than human community.

Bill Plotkin: author, Nature and the Human Soul

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 to 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 areas, 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 world views 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, 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.