A video produced by UNIFY, subtitled "A New World is Being Birthed" focuses on a timestream of key global ethical movements from 1941 to the present. UNIFY.org is a platform created to support organizations and people who are organizing Global Synchronized Movements of good in the world. It is a social networking outreach and organizational platform focuse on overarching global ethical issues.
UNIFY.org was birthed on December 21st, 2012 to serve the self-organizing emergence of intentional events, flash mobs, meditations, ceremonies, and prayers on that day. Millions of people at sacred sites around the world aligned their expressions of consciousness and participated in a historic moment of global unity.UNIFY’s vision is to provide a sacred mirror reflecting back to humanity its inherent state of unity regardless of nation, race, politics, color, creed or gender.
This Earth Day was the time and place for their global synchronized meditation upon Love Water. It's about hope and action in the face of the overwhelming evil of ecocide and environmental degradation by the economic and political forces emanating from fossil fuel development and extraction over the last 200 years. Do we, as inhabitants of the earth, stand by while life is decimated in the name of control and power?
Rabbi Jeffrey Newman is a UK Earth Charter member, and is an advocate of an equitable framework for a global climate agreement. His essay, Hannah Arendt: Radical Evil, Radical Hope in the Berghan Journal, Volume 47, Issue 1, 2014, European Judaism, addresses this issue: "The world is facing a multitude of interconnected issues, leading to avoidable starvation, poverty and death for hundreds of millions. Is Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’, which she adopted in preference to Kant’s ‘radical evil’, applicable here? Are we bystanders, addicted to ‘growth’? The paper considers the central role of thinking and, with the help of Greek myth and Nietzsche, the relationship between evil and hope. Finally, there is an emerging concept of ‘radical hope’. What is this, could it be of help and how would it connect with Judaism’s teachings of the Messiah?"
A response to this, by Peter Head, Executive Director of The Ecological Sequestration Trust, on January 21st 2014 engages this question of radical hope. Their purpose states:
Our priority is to develop a network of ‘at scale’ demonstration projects that each encompass city-regions of up to 5 million citizens in China, India and an African country and link them to parallel regional activities in two European centres.Through our Advisory Board and network of partners, we aim to bring together leading local and international experts to catalyse and implement evidence-based action in a network of high-ambition, large-scale demonstrator projects in selected city-regions across the world. The Ecological Sequestration Trust (TEST) was formed in 2011 to demonstrate at city-region scale how to create a step change in improving energy, water and food security in the face of the combined challenges of changes of climate, demography and increasing resource-scarcity. To quote Mr. Head:
"Radical Hope is very relevant. Radical because dealing with the severe problems requires serial cutting edge innovation in the integration of previous disconnected decision making processes-it has never been done before.
Resilience is a good general goal and we have to learn more about what it means in detail as we go but the UN SDG process is doing that right now. The current development of UN post 2015 SDG’s will be sufficient to define the resilience goal I think. It brings together world leading thinking from all the sectors. The concept of resilience is important because it means the solutions have to come from within society and not be imposed from outside if they are to succeed. Hope is the theme that comes through my engagement all over the world with many people, with the most common reaction being that the approach has hope and is inspirational."
Even as the world seems to be careening towards self-destruction, it's possible for its people to calmly stand against the unfolding events and consciously choose a different path towards life. The strength and resiliency needed to do this is immense, but humanity has prevailed before in spite of terrible odds.
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