Straddling the World: Celebrating our Humanity and our Planet Earth on June 5th and 4th
Getting from Here to There
Why is Bill Gates only one-third correct?
The theme pf this year’s conference as in the past is “ambitious collaboration”.
This a theme championed by Bill Gates in his book “How do Avoid a Climate Disaster” .
In an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN following the publication of Gates’ book they had the following exchange of ideas:
Anderson Cooper: You believe this is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced?
Bill Gates: Absolutely, the amount of change, and new ideas is greater than the pandemic and it needs a level of cooperation that would be unprecedented.
AC: It just seems overwhelming if every aspect of our daily life has to change.
BG: It can seem overwhelming…if people think it’s easy they are wrong. If people think it is impossible they are wrong. It’s possible but it will be the most amazing thing humankind has ever done.
You can access the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNKdlnoAqIs
As you will hear at our June 4th/June 5th event One World on April 11, 2025, at the invitation of Arturo Angli and the Green Party of Guerrero, Mexico, we launched our call to create a Global Coalition for Sustainable Abundance.
Our goal is to involve K16 educators from across the world to work with leading visionaries like Bill Gates to raise our ambitions to generate a global conversation as to how we can use technology for the good of humanity creating the post-scarcity world now available to us…a world of sustainable abundance or universal high income, a world without poverty or hunger.
We have no doubt that accelerating advances in technology make this world technologically feasible, however, in order to achieve that world humanity is going to have to come together as never before. We are going to need to build a wisdom commensurate with our technology. We are going to need to be as successful as Homo Sapiens as we are today as Homo Techne.
In his books Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari explains that humanity’s success as Homo Techne results from the fact that we are able to organize flexibly in large groups. He explains further that we are able to organize flexibly in large groups thanks to the “stories” we tell one another. Stories, like money, politics, folklore etc. etc.
In his book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari argues that humanity needs a new story to navigate the future as traditional narratives face challenges from emerging technologies and data-driven systems.
We wholeheartedly agree that if we are going to successfully navigate from a world of 195 competing nation-states to the world of abundance technologically available to us we are going to need to create new “stories” that bring us together helping bridge the gap from here to there.
Our theme this year will be to continue the conversation we started in Acapulco, Mexico around how we can achieve this post-scarcity world of abundance now available to us. To that end, we are encouraging 100 hundred school participants to commit to join our 2025 – 2026 conversation on sustainable abundance. We are hoping you will commit to that conversation in three ways:
- Encourage at least 2 educators and 4 student-leaders to participate in the bi-monthly global conversation on Sustainable Abundance.
- Encourage the formation of a Sustainable Abundance Club at your school.
- Host a One World Sustainable Abundance Conference at your school.
We do not expect you to have enacted these actions by May 30th. We are looking for a commitment to act over the 2025 + 2026 school years.