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Flourishing Earth Project: an Initiative of Collins Foundation Press

Gathering Many Voices to Create a Vision for the Future

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  • The Population of a Flourishing Earth- Controlled, Stabilized, and Happy

    Apr 13th 2010

    By: editor

    2 comments

    The following was sent to us by Jean Lombardo, a co-author published by the Collins Foundation Press:

    A flourishing Earth would be one with a controlled human population. Philosophers and utopians have started from this premise. Plato advised correlating population to available land and nearness to neighbors and Aristotle wrote that the population of an ideal state should be “as small as we can make it without sacrificing independence.” In Utopia, Thomas More kept his cities manageable by strict regulation of family size. The French philosopher, Condorcet, envisioned a future in which “men will know that” their duties “consist not in giving existence to a great number of beings, but happiness. They will have for their object the general welfare of the . . . society in which they live and not the puerile idea of encumbering the earth with useless and wretched mortals.” William Morris’s nineteenth-century agrarian utopia, News from Nowhere, posited an ideal state where the population was stabilized and distributed evenly throughout the land. Crowding, slums, and urban blight were eliminated and the meadows and forests revived. Postmodern utopias, too, such as Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax follow suit; in a parallel universe, the limits set on global population by the ecologically enlightened Neanderthals contribute to social order and existence in harmony with the natural environment.

    How do you envision the population of our flourishing Earth? Post your comments below…

    Jeanne Belisle Lombardo is Co-director Center for Future Consciousness, Scottsdale, AZ, www.centerforfutureconsciousness.com, and author of “Utopia and the Evolution of Wisdom” forthcoming in Science, Wisdom, and the  Future: Humanity’s Quest for a Flourishing Earth, published by the Collins Foundation Press (Early Summer 2010).

    Population

  • Global Governance for a Flourishing Earth

    Apr 8th 2010

    By: editor

    No comments

    The following article was sent to us by Carl Coon, one of the the Collins Foundation Press book contributors, and author of One Planet, One People: Beyond “Us vs. Them.”

    My vision of a flourishing future earth assumes some system of global governance that precludes war and requires conformance on environmental and related issues of vital concern to the planet as a whole. The current nation state system would continue under a federal authority with limited powers, guaranteeing the constituent states considerable autonomy, and allowing wide diversity in manners, customs, and political organization. Basic human rights should be ensured primarily by guaranteeing every individual the right, and ability, to emigrate to a different and more compatible society, if that individual chose to do so. This would largely eliminate the problem of “who guards the guardians” and encourage continued evolution of human cultures based on competition between many diverse elements. It also has the advantage of being a realistic possible outcome of present trends and conditions.

    What are your thoughts on such a system of governance? Share in the comments section below.

    Carl Coon is a retired US Ambassador and Advisory Panel Member of the American Humanist Association (AHA). He is also the author of “Humanism and the Future Evolution of Religion” in The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques published by the Collins Foundation Press.

    Government

  • Humanity is Integral in the Creativity of the Evolving Universe

    Mar 16th 2010

    By: editor

    1 comment

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  • Welcome to FEP

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  • Recent FEP Blog Posts:

    • Recognizing Our True Identity as Planetary Beings
    • We Are Not Only Weavers in the Web of Life; We Are Also the Woven
    • When Humans Are the Caretakers of the Earth
    • Why I’d Rather Be Flourishing than Sustaining Myself
    • Toward a New Cosmological Ethics
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