 Our speaker for this evening is Dr. Arthur Liondahl. He comes here from Geneva, Switzerland. He is the president of the International Environment Forum, the organization which has collaborated on many aspects of the conference this year. He is a retired deputy assistant executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, with some 40 years experience in ecology, environment, and sustainability. It would indeed be hard to find anyone in the Bahá'í community with that kind of experience in this field. And we are delighted that he can join us tonight. It's my pleasure to present Dr. Arthur Liondahl. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here this evening with you at this conference on the theme of environments, which of course is very dear to all of us International Environment Forum. And we greatly appreciate the Association of Bahá'í Studies agreed to allow us partner in this conference. This is only our 13th annual conference, so we're 20 years younger than the ABS. But we're getting along there anyway. And so we hope that by bringing this material together for you, we've been able to enlighten you perhaps and challenge you to explore the topic in new and different ways. I think that's most fundamentally it's important to recognize that the Bahá'í approach to this and many other subjects forces us to step out of our usual disciplines in the academic community and to look at things in a much broader and more integrated perspective. Sometimes this pushes us beyond our comfort zone, as it would be defined by our peers in our own academic field for whom you should only publish in your own area and everything else is somebody else's specialty to stay out of. But that is part of our problem. We look at economic issues quite separately from social or environmental questions and have great difficulty integrating them all into the concept of sustainable development. And that really is why we need meetings like this to explore the subject in a much broader and more integrated way. And therefore, when we look at this question of environments, we must look at the relationship between our outer and inner environments, between the planet and our soul, between science and spirituality. If we look at the state of the world today, we can see why this is so important. For some, particularly those within our Western materialist economic system, we might say the state of the world is the apex of human progress, perhaps. Wealth undreamed of by our forebears, the successful result of economic development with technological solutions to every problem, perhaps even the greatest civilization the world has ever known. And of course, economic success proved that the system was right until recently. If we look at the state of the world with a different perspective, perhaps, half the world population lives on less than $2 a day, which for example, is about what the European Union subsidizes every cow in the European Union. I don't know what the subsidy is in America. I suspect that American cows probably get more than European cows. The extremes of wealth and poverty are widening. We've seen the rapid expansion recently in Asia, which has reduced poverty at great environmental cost. We have the energy challenge, climate change threats, water shortages, the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, food production capacities at risk, our financial system has imploded. We're clearly living beyond our means. A very different perspective on the state of the world. If we take one simple measure of this in what is called the ecological footprint, which is the surface needed to supply the needs and absorb the waste of an individual or a community or a country, the global average today is 2.7 hectares per person. In the United States, it's 9.4 hectares per person. Canada, 7.1, Mexico, 3.4, in the European Union, 4.7, Russia, 3.7, China, 2.1, but there are only 1.9 hectares per person left on this planet to support us all. We overshot the Earth's capacity by this measure in 1975. So we've been living beyond our means for some time. If we look for instance at human population growth, it has tripled in my lifetime. Not many species can go through that kind of a rapid process of change without running into environmental limits. Here we see the scenarios for population growth for the last from 1900 to 2100, and you can see that probably by mid-century, the population could stabilize and maybe even decline, but at a level which is perhaps at nine billion people. So we need to find space for three billion more than we have today when we're already running out of resources. So by some estimates, however, the resources of the planet could only sustainably support, say, 500 million people. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia hypothesis, said recently he expected by 2100, the world population be less than one billion people. So that's what the pessimists are saying about what may happen in this century. We've seen be following the classic ecological pattern of what they called overshoot and collapse, a species that goes beyond its carrying capacity, eats up all the food when there's nothing left, then they all starve to death. Planetary carrying capacity, of course, depends on not only our numbers, but our standard of living. If we want to increase the carrying capacity, we should reduce the standard of living. If you all want to live in the world like Americans, we will need five or six or seven, eight planets. Whereas if we are except living at the level of, say, simple Indian villagers, we can certainly fit many more people into the resources available. Certainly, science may find ways to increase that carrying capacity, but probably only at longer time scales than are available to us now. We know we can imagine new technological solutions in the long-term future, but it takes capital, it takes time, it takes research to find those solutions and put them into practice. If we look, for instance, just at human impact on the carbon cycle, which is what's causing our global warming, we've been extracting and burning fossil fuels, returning to the atmosphere in two centuries. The carbon sequestered by hundreds of millions of years of primitive biological activity. Because originally, the planet did not have an atmosphere suitable for animals. There was no oxygen. It's only biological activity that removed carbon dioxide and provided the oxygen to allow animals to evolve. We're now reversing that process very rapidly. The latest scientific evidence is that climate change will be stronger and sooner than anybody expected. I attended the International Science Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this last March, updating the science in time for the negotiations in December, and everybody was pessimistic. Carbon dioxide levels have been accelerating since the year 2000. Whereas in the 1990s, it was 0.7% per year increase, it's now 2.9% per year since the year 2000. For several reasons, partly the growth in the world economy, even if it slowed a little bit recently. The rise in the coal use in China, which is launching a new coal power plant every week, if not two. But also the weakening of the natural carbon sinks, the fact that much of our carbon dioxide is being absorbed by forests, by the oceans, and so on. But those capacities are reaching saturation, are no longer able to absorb much more carbon. As a result, the rise in carbon dioxide is about 35% faster and higher than expected only a few years ago. We see this result particularly in the polar areas because they're expected to warm more than any other place on the planet. We'll probably use half the permafrost in the Arctic by 2050 and 90% by 2100, releasing enormous quantities of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. 14% of the permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean melted in this one summer 2005. 20% more in 2007, nearly as much in 2008, opening up the Northwest Passage for the first time. It's now being predicted that the permanent ice in the Arctic Ocean may be gone by as early as 2015 to 2030, only a very short time away. Everybody has been shocked by the speed at which the ice has thinned and disappeared. Greenland's glaciers have doubled the rate of flow to the sea in the last few years. 1997, six kilometers a year. In the year 2009 kilometers a year. In 2003, 13 kilometers a year. This is now raising sea levels by nearly a millimeter per year. And the similar thing is now happening in the West Antarctic ice sheet, which seems to be accelerating and is already adding a considerable amount as well to sea level rise. There's really very little time left to act to reverse this situation. Lower temperatures have already risen 0.6 degrees Celsius and will probably rise a further three degrees or even four to five degrees by 2100. When scientists are saying anything over two degrees will produce irreversible serious damage to the system and possibly runaway global warming. Ocean temperatures are rising even in the deep oceans. Late as I mentioned have decreased. Sea level rise has doubled in the last 150 years and is now doubled again in the last five or six years. And the latest predictions are that the minimum rise in this century will probably 80 centimeters and it could be up to two meters as the probable level of sea level rise during the 21st century. So the children being born today may see that rise in their lifetimes. Therefore we're probably approaching a tipping point where runaway climate change would be catastrophic. The most vulnerable areas according to scientists in this century are the Arctic Ocean and the Greenland Ice Sheet as I mentioned. The Amazon Rainforest which is expected to dry out, catch fire and burn and become a savanna. The Northern Boreal Forests. The El Nino which will probably become much more severe and frequent affecting weather across North America, Southeast Asia and Africa. With the collapse of the West African monsoon and the Indian monsoon becoming extremely wet and causing flooding in some years and dry and causing drought in others. And of course billions of people depend on those rains. The Stern Report. This is for Nicholas Stern, the Chief Economist for the British government estimated the annual cost of under controlled climate change at more than $660 billion. Five to 20% of global GDP as compared to only 1% for the control measures to prevent it from happening. And he said climate change represents the greatest market failure in human history. There of course is also the energy challenge because of course our civilization is based on abundant cheap energy from fossil fuels. 80% of our energy on the planet comes from fossil fuels. And just think of it, everything that we do in industry, agriculture, transportation, communications, trade, urbanization or lifestyle all depend on cheap energy. It's expected that energy demand will grow 50% by 2030 but oil production is peaking and will decline 75% over the same period of time. Coal also may even peak by then. And climate change requires a rapid halt to fossil fuels not stopping only after we've pumped every drop out of the ground. It's gonna be extremely expensive to adapt and therefore a fossil fuel based civilization is almost by definition unsustainable. We also have problems with food production. The Green Revolution of the 1970s postponed food supply as a limit for growth but did not prevent it. Coal production produced improved in the last 20 years but this required this intensive agriculture with high energy, fertilizer and petrochemical inputs. If we don't have the oil, how do we plow the fields, fertilize them, treat them, move the food to markets around the world and so on. World soil production peaked in the 1980s and has decreased slowly since. But if we want to feed the growing world population and reduce hunger, we have to double world food production by 2050 but land, water, phosphate, energy are all going to be limiting and make that very hard to do. This for instance is a map of soil degradation around the world and you can see how many areas are affected by soil degradation. We're facing a coming soil crisis as well. A recent study by professor at the University of California at Berkeley showed that the average global soil loss today is 10 to 100 times the rate of soil formation. In Indiana, erosion, each ton of grain produced causes one ton of soil to be lost every year. Since 1945, erosion has degraded 1.2 billion hectares equivalent to the area of China and India combined or 38% of all the global crop land just since World War II. We're losing 75 billion tons of soil a year and abandoning 12 million hectares or 1% of the total every year. So we're heading to a crisis where simply because of lack of soil producing enough food is going to be an enormous challenge. We've already seen the start of a global food crisis with a rise in prices in 2007. Global food reserves are the lowest in 20 years. We see climate change, drought, floods, many things affecting this. With the move to biofuels, we have 800 million motorists competing with two billion poor people for the same food energy. There are 960 million hungry people today and it seems to be growing about 40 million a year as prices go up because we're pricing food out of the reach of the poor. If you worry about other things like resource depletion and I'm not giving you a full catalog here, just a little sampling of what's happening in this state of the world. We're phosphorus, which is a key fertilizer, will probably only last less than a century and a half. Antimony is in drugs 15 to 30 years. Copper will run out in 40 to 60 years. Half name an indium for your chips and your cell phones five to 15 years. Platinum, 15 years if you decide to use it for catalysts in fuel cells and things like that. Silver might run out in 15 to 30 years. Tantalum again for your cell phones, perhaps 20 years. Uranium, we want to solve our problems with uranium, nuclear reactors. Uranium expected to run out in 30 to 60 years. And zinc in 20 years. So many key materials for our civilization are running out on a very short term. We of course have tried to address the problems of poverty in the world. Development, as the bi-community has pointed out, has been our largest collective undertaking. But while it brought impressive benefits, it failed to narrow the gap between the rich and poor. And that gap has widened into an abyss. We have also seen the accumulating economic, social and environmental debt that this living beyond our means has implied. Even the financial debt in this crisis with sub-prum so on, we didn't lose all of that. We simply gave it to the governments. We bailed out the private sector and shifted all those toxic assets into the governments around the world. The UK chief scientist announced on the 19th of March the world faces a perfect storm of problems in 2030 as food, energy and water shortages interact with climate change to produce public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migrations. And I've seen estimates of those migrations. Well, there are 150 million people that live at less than one meter above sea level. They're all going to have to move. And with all the other problems of drought and so on, we could easily see several hundred million environmental refugees. If you think we have problems with immigration now, with a few boat people here and there, imagine what it's going to mean. There was a paper last year, New Scientist, the headline on the cover was Goodbye Miami. And this was by James Hansen, the chief climate scientist for NASA. He knows what he's talking about. He was showing the expected coastlines in 2100, only half of Florida was left. Good, many major cities of the world are port cities, which would be flooded in large part by this. There was no Belgium, there was no the Netherlands. It was not just the Nile Delta or Bangladesh or poor countries that were going to be flooded out. We can imagine scenarios of possible futures. What's the future going to bring to us? We always start, of course, the United Nations with business as usual, ignoring what's going to happen in the future. And that's where the starting point, it looks pretty grim. There are those who say we should retreat to a fortress of old world values, keep out the immigrants, stay in our culture. But then goodbye, pineapples, goodbye, bananas, you know. We can't simply live all our own like that anymore. And living locked up in a castle surrounded by the hordes of the hungry is not a very pleasant experience. We know scientifically we can make a transition to sustainability. We have the knowledge, we have the technologies. We know how to do it scientifically. The problem is not a scientific or technical problem. These are the scenarios from the World Three model that became famous in 1972. Club of Rome's report on the limits to growth. It's been updated in 1992 and then again in 2004. And recent scientific work has confirmed there's nothing in these predictions that is not seem to be following right along schedule. If you look at business as usual on the left, you can see that it says everything goes fine until about 2015 or 2020. And then civilization collapses. They said if in 1995, after the Rio Earth Summit, we had adopted sustainable development, we could have avoided that. We could have stabilized our civilization with a good life expectancy, a high level of good propulsion, a good standard of living. But they said if we waited until 2015 to start making that transition, we would have overshot too many limits and could not avoid a serious crisis in mid-century before stabilizing by 2100 at a level of then living much lower than that we could have had and be changed 20 years ago. So are we seeing now the first signs of the collapse of civilization? This has become a popular theme with various books on the subject by Jared Diamond and Thomas Homer Dixon and others who've been writing on this subject quite convincingly. Certainly we can say we're going to see the end of the growth paradigm, so dear to our economists. Is endless growth realistic in any case? We can't simply keep growing forever on this planet. In nature, everything follows cycles with optimum sizes. Economic growth has depended on population growth. We've seen that's going to stabilize by mid-century. On fossil fuel energy subsidies, running out very shortly. On resource discoveries, what's left to explore on the planet? We've looked in an awful lot of places so far. And technological innovation. The first three all are going to end well within this century. So all that is left is our brains and our heart. And therefore this idea of endless growth as we've known it, material growth, is going to have to end as well. The collapse of the financial system is perhaps a good illustration of the nature of these problems. It was due to greed, herd behavior, and overconfidence in scientific approaches to risk management. Everybody had complex statistical models, but they don't work for extreme events. Each vulnerability was evaluated independently. And future projections were based on past experience. But there was no evaluation of the overall system's behavior. And that's what happened. The whole system imploded. Where is the economy going? We know its origins were in the American consumer society living beyond its means and accumulating consumer debt, corporate debt, government debt at all different levels. The UK minister for the economy said recently this is the worst recession in 100 years that's passed the Great Depression. The head of the European Central Bank recently said we live in non-linear times. The classic economic models and theories cannot be applied and future development cannot be foreseen. Economists don't know where we're going. Just as an example, these derivatives so dear to our bankers and investors, now total over $500 trillion, and increased by four times in the last five years. Now, that is many times the worth of all the economies of the planet. It is totally unrealistic that we've created these things that are worth more than all the wealth on the planet. Several times over. And yet, they continue to make them and sell them and make them and sell them and make them. There are European countries on the brink of insolvency and that's perhaps the next set of dominoes to fall because Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland are all on the verge of bankruptcy. The UK had difficulty floating its latest government bond issue and it used to be you would simply inflate your way out of those problems but if you belong to the euro zone, you don't control your currency anymore. So, what we could easily see the day at which there is a loss of confidence in government's abilities to repay all the money they're borrowing, that we will see a crisis much worse than the loss of confidence in the banks and their ability to pay what they were borrowing. That seems to be the next cloud on the horizon on an economic sense. How do we get ourselves such a situation and what's preventing us from solving it? Part of it is that we've compartmentalized our view of the world. Economists look at the economy, psychologists look at psychology. Each especially looks at their own particular area and for all of us in the Western world at least, the environment is something outside of us. It's sort of some decent thing, it's not in the cities and maybe we can worry about that later. There's been this disjunction with reality in economic thinking. As for instance, the common concept in traditional economics, the planetary sources are free for the taking. You just say, mind whatever you can, cut down the trees, so on. It's all there, we can bring that into the material economy. This is of course the short term perspective. The quarterly balance sheet, the next election is as far as most people look. We've seen this herd mentality in investors and speculators. Everybody altogether keeping up with what everybody else is doing. And there's been this expectation that all things will always get better and that's what growth is all about, getting better and better and better in a material sense. But as I mentioned, we don't see that in nature. Uncontrolled growth is like a cancer. And we know from the Bahá'í community that economic thinking is challenged by the environmental crisis. It can no longer insist that there is no limit to nature's capacity to fulfill any demand made on it. Attaching absolute value to growth, to acquisition, satisfaction of people's wants is no longer a realistic guide to policy. And economic decision making tools cannot deal with the fact that most of the labor challenges are global. It's not sufficient that the G8 meet everyone and say, what do we do next with the world's economy? There's no structure out there to deal with those global economic challenges. And of course the roots of this are in this 20th century materialistic interpretation of reality that has become the dominant world faith in the direction of society. Rational experimentation and discussion are expected to solve all the issues of human governance and development. And dogmatic materialism has captured all significant centers of power and information at the global level, ensuring that no competing voices can challenge projects of worldwide economic exploitation. We have sold the American lifestyle all over the world. Every Chinese wants a car, just like the Americans and so on. And there is nobody criticizing or coming up because the global system of advertising, of the media, of films and television and so on are all selling one particular vision of how the world should live. But we're all living what are totally unsustainable lifestyles today. And this of course is the root of our unsustainable consumer culture. Materialism's vision of human progress produced today's consumer culture with its ephemeral goals. For the small minority of people who can afford them, the benefits it offers are immediate. The breakdown of traditional morality has led to the triumph of animal impulses and hedonism. Selfishness has become a prized commercial resource. Falsehood reinvents itself as public information. Greed, lust, indolence, pride, violence are broadly accepted and have social and economic value. But it is a culture without meaning. If we look at some of the barriers, why is it that we can't change when we see these problems coming? No politician will sacrifice short term economic welfare even while they may agree that sustainability is essential in the long term. After somebody else wins the next election obviously. Deep social divisions within societies between countries are preventing united action in the common interest. If you don't trust each other, how can you agree to solve problems together? And we've seen again and again whether it be at the individual level or in concepts of national sovereignty, the promise of self-interest over solidarity. But scientifically it is clear that business as usual is not an option today. But how are we going to respond to these challenges? Like climate change, changes in the energy systems and use, food shortages and price rises, forced migrations of environmental refugees, reform of the economic system, there are enormous challenges on the agenda. So how are we responding? One interesting example is what you might call the global land grab. I don't know if you've been following this in the papers recently in this country, but we certainly have overseas. Wealthy governments and large companies are buying or leasing large areas of land in poor developing countries so they can grow food to export back home to their own countries. Ensure their food security at the expense of the poor. 10 million hectares were bought in 2008. 20 million more in the first half of 2009. This is equal to half all the arable land of Europe. South Korea bought 690,000 hectares. United Arab Emirates in Egypt, 4,000 each in Sudan. Saudi Arabia has just bought a half a million hectares in Tanzania. Daewoo picked up 1.3 million hectares in Madagascar, a very poor island. Libya 100,000 hectares in Mali. South Korea businesses 8 million hectares in Congo. China has got 2.8 million hectares in the Congo, 2 million hectares as well in Zambia, and there are a million Chinese farm laborers now in Africa. So they're not even using local African labor. They're bringing in their own Chinese to their farming in Africa to feed the Chinese in China. This is a creeping new kind of colonialism at a global level with very serious ethical and economic implications. The main Daewoo, this is a quote from Augusto Lopez Claros, the well-known Baha'i economist and letter to the Financial Times on the 4th of December last year. He said, the main danger we face is that by late 2009, the global economy will be perking up again because the housing sectors will have bottomed and the unwinding of commodity prices will boost consumption among oil importers. And governments will go back to business as usual, missing a once in a lifetime opportunity to address the serious vulnerabilities in the world's financial system, which the current crisis has revealed. In that scenario, the next crisis would find us with little ammunition left. That is the real danger. Governments have borrowed to the hilt to bail out the system now. What more could they do if the next time there's a collapse, especially if governments themselves are involved? We've simply become increasingly vulnerable. Well, in this kind of situation, this kind of news, the first thing you always do is deny it. It's just not going to happen. It couldn't possibly happen. Then you go into depression. Oh dear, I just bury your head in the sand. Don't think about it. I don't want to worry about that. How do we get to action? But do we have a choice? Can we go and hide on a remote island? I used to work there, so I know what it's like. Where do you throw your garbage? I don't like that. There's no escape from this. So how do we achieve the transformation of human society? How do we achieve this giant challenge ahead of us? How do we transform environments from the inside out? It's not through science. Science is no particular competence in this area. Psychic information does not change behavior. I can tell a smoker he's going to get cancer and that won't stop him from smoking. But perhaps this chaos is an opportunity for some spiritual intellectual leadership. In science, we know what is called punctuated equilibrium in evolution. Evolution is not just necessarily a slow, steady increase in improvement. It tends to be a relatively stable system and then suddenly some changes happen and you get a great leap forward and then it stabilizes and then another leap forward. You sort of change in leaps and bounds. You have new ideas and then consolidation and then something new and then consolidation again. And we seem to be seeing the same kind of thing in human society. And therefore, we're just in the beginning of one of these opportunities for rapid significant institutional and social change. And as the world collapses, so to speak, those opportunities will open before us. And we have, of course, the vision in the Baha'i writings and statements of a much more integrated way of looking at environment, society, economic system together in a combined vision of sustainability. We have to recognize that sustainability in this context is fundamentally an ethical challenge. Is it egotism versus altruism? Me first versus altogether? Fundamentally, this is the challenge we are all faced with as individuals, as nations, and as a world community. Clearly, the oneness of humankind, as Bahá'u'lláh has told us, is the first fundamental prerequisite for the reorganization and administration of the world as one country, the home of humankind. This is going to require a profound reconsideration of every dimension of our lives and society, including the environment. We've already seen this quote three times this evening, and therefore I won't bother to read it again. It's obviously one that you cannot avoid in the Baha'i writings on the environment that man is organic with the world and that we therefore have both the inside internal and external environments coming together. There's also this interesting statement. Sustainable environmental management must come to be seen as a fundamental responsibility that must be shouldered. A prerequisite for spiritual development as well as the individual's physical survival. It was clear sustainability is important to our physical survival, to see it as a prerequisite for spiritual development. Both of these quotations imply an intimate link between environment and spirituality, which is what we were exploring at this conference the whole weekend. If we look first then at transformation from the inside out. So I'm trying to combine a little bit of art with science as well here. This is one of Mark Toby's wonderful paintings of the meditative series. There is this connection between spirituality and nature that is deep in so many cultural religions. In the Native Americans, the First Nations of Canada, the Pacific Islanders of the South Pacific, in Jainism, in Buddhism, in many, many parts of the world, there is a very strong linkage between nature, the environment, and spirituality. And therefore we might say that the environmental crisis is the result of a spiritual crisis. We cut ourselves off from our spiritual nature and from God, and at the same time from our roots in the natural world. As Bahá'u'lláh said, nature is God's will at its expression in and through the contingent world. So there's no separation for us between the natural environment and spiritual reality. Bahá'u'lláh also said, the country is the world of the soul. The city is the world of bodies. Abdu'l-Bohá noted the scientific and spiritual interest in looking at nature. When thou dost contemplate the innermost essence of all things in the individuality of each, thou will behold the signs of thy Lord's mercy in every created thing and see the spreading rays of his names and attributes throughout all the realm of being. Then wilt thou observe that the universe is a scroll that discloseth his hidden secrets which are preserved in the well-guarded tablet and not an atom of all the atoms in existence, not a creature from amongst the creatures, but speaketh his praise and telleth of his attributes and names, revealeth the glory of his might and guideeth to his oneness and his mercy. Look thou upon the trees, upon the blossoms and fruits, even upon the stones. Here too wilt thou behold the sun's rays shining upon them, clearly visible within them and manifested by them. A wonderful inspiration not only for the spiritual but for scientists. Geologists have the stones, botanists have the blossoms and fruits and trees. All these parts of creation can share with us many aspects of the wonders of God and of the natural world that he has helped to produce. We also have to make as part of our inner transformation that spiritual effort to detach ourselves from this consumer lifestyle of the world around us that has been so highly criticized in the Baha'i writings. As the Baha'i community said, we must avoid the temptation to sacrifice the well-being of most people and even of the planet itself to the advantages which technological breakthroughs can make available to privileged minorities. Is this breakthroughs like SUVs and the latest iPod or whatever other technical gadget is available? Baha'u'llah said, we should be content with little and freed from all inordinate desire. And again, take from this world only to the measure of your needs and forgo that which exceeded them. The Hukuk'u'llah allows you to calculate what were your real needs, but this seems to imply the rest of that you don't really need at all. Forgo that which exceeded them. In this advice that Baha'u'llah gave to the Sultan of Turkey, he says it is unjust to allow people to lay up riches for themselves, to deck their persons, to embellish their homes, to acquire the things that are of no benefit to them and to be numbered with the extravagant. None should be allowed to either suffer want or to be pampered with luxuries. And Shoghi Effendi called for the exercise of moderation in all that pertains to dress, language, amusements in autistic and literary applications and the abandonment of a frivolous conduct with the excessive attachment to trivial and often misdirected pleasures. In the light of quotations like that, we really have to look at our western North American lifestyle with a certain amount of critical attention because we're really trapped in a system that constantly pulls us to the extremes of extravagance and excessive consumption. And if we apply these principles, maybe we will learn to release some resources to allow the poor peoples of the world to develop. Another element of this individual questioning because very important, particularly in the academic community, is what you might call the spiritual danger of intellectual pride. We have this desire to know everything and the pride to think that we can know everything through science. The Cartesian statement, I think therefore I am, has led to a rationalist individualist approach where the individual is the final arbiter of right or wrong. And we decide what is true. This is really, this is very different from independent investigation of truth and is much more an expression of egotism and self-centeredness to think that we can know everything because we place ourselves above nature and therefore we're led to exploit and destroy it because of that self-centered perspective that has come from the western intellectual approach to science. Aruva Ha said, we should oppose our passions. The desire is a flame that has reduced to ashes uncounted lifetime harvests of the learned. And therefore transforming our inner environment means that we need to have the humility to acknowledge that there is an unknowable essence that we must love and worship though our minds cannot grasp it nor hearts contain it. We also need that same humility with respect to the environment around us. As Bahá'u'lláh said, every man of discernment while walking upon the earth beeth indeed abashed inasmuch as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exultation, his advancement in power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men. There can be no doubt that whoever is cognizant of this truth is cleansed and sanctified from all pride, arrogance, and vain glory. We also need to have the humility as scientists not to hold on to our wonderful specializations earned at the expense of great struggle for PhDs being part of the inner coterie who speaks the language of our particular specialization that keeps everybody else out and recognize that the expansion of scientific technological activity must cease to be the patrimony of advanced segments of society and must be so organized as to permit people everywhere to participate in such activity on the basis of capacity. Apart from the creation of programs that make the required education available to all who are able to benefit from it, such reorganization will require the establishment of viable centuries of learning throughout the world, institutions that will enhance the capability of the world's peoples to participate in the generation and application of knowledge. If we can apply this concept of science and make it available to everyone everywhere, they all can become their local environmental managers. They can do their own environmental monitoring. They can adapt their impact to their own local situations. They can do the kind of science we can never do from a few specialists in university centers in the most advanced countries. And this will give us the tools for a much more intelligent kind of environmental management in the future. We also need to be transforming our communities, as well as individuals. Of course, the community is the basic unit of social organization. That's where we meet our material needs when we go to the supermarket or we plant things in our garden, where we have most of our economic and educational activities. It's the center of our social and spiritual life. Think of the Maastricht-Glaskar as the way the city is reorganized in the future. And it is where we determine our relationship with our local environment. And we clearly need, if we're going to achieve sustainability, to explore new kinds of balance between local autonomy or self-sufficiency, buying local, eating local, for instance, and our larger integration into our nation and the whole world society. So there are challenges for communities today. Including, for instance, assisting in endeavors to conserve the environment in ways which blend with the rhythm of life in our community, as the House of Justice has said. We also face an enormous challenge. As I mentioned earlier, if we're going to see hundreds of millions of migrants forced to leave their homes because they're underwater or there's no water left or they have no food or whatever, we're going to see an increasing mixing of the peoples of the world all over and therefore the challenge of rebuilding human communities in all of their diversity. The human and psychological and social and political challenges is enormous and nobody wants to talk about it. This is the other dimension of globalization. We have globalized the movement of capital anywhere in the world today. We're globalizing the movement of goods and services you can trade anywhere, buy and sell anywhere. Nobody wants to talk about the global movement of people and yet that is what is meant by the Earth being one country and humankind its citizens. It's an enormous political challenge and we must start the debate because it's coming very fast upon us and we must say, how do we reallocate hundreds of millions of people? What parts of the world will have the ecological space, the water and the soil to accept them? Probably Northern Canada, Siberia, places that are going to warm up and become habitable? And how do we allocate them? To determine how many each country should take and who should pay for it? There are enormous challenges, probably need a world migration organization to lower immigration barriers and allocate refugees equitably among the nations of the world. These are the kinds of challenges coming in the decades immediately ahead. And therefore building unity in communities is going to be this enormous challenge and it's exactly what Baha'i communities are developing for the institute process and the core activities. Group study from the classes. The ultimate testimony that the Baha'i community can summon in vindication of his mission is the example of unity that his teachings have produced. We therefore have to learn to convince the leaders of thought of the power of spiritual change. Most of them don't want to listen to religion today. They don't see it as relevant and yet a fair-minded observer is compelled to entertain at least the possibility that the phenomenon may represent the operation of influences entirely different in nature from the familiar ones. Influences that can properly be described only as spiritual. Cable of eliciting extraordinary feats of sacrifice and understanding from ordinary people of every background. And that is what it's going to take to meet the challenges of climate change and resource depletion and the challenges coming news ahead. Extraordinary feats of sacrifice and understanding from ordinary people of every background. We need to develop this self-organizing transformation based on contact with the creative word. The culture of systematic growth taking root in the Baha'i community would seem by far the most effective response the friends can make to the challenge discussed in these pages. The experience of an intense and ongoing immersion in the creative word progressively frees one from the grip of the materialist assumptions that pervade society and paralyze impulses for change. We've seen those before. Those are the barriers to change that are stopping our society from moving forward. It develops in one a capacity to assist the yearning for unity on the part of friends and acquaintances to find mature and intelligent expression. Therefore, responding to the world's environmental problems is one of the things we must be doing today. And we're told the parallel efforts of promoting the betterment of society and of teaching the Baha'i faith are not activities competing for attention. Rather, they are reciprocal features of one coherent global program. The obligation of the Baha'i community is to do everything in its power to assist all stages of humanity's universal movement towards reunion with God. And most recently, we've been told as you continue to labor in your clusters you will be drawn further and further into the life of the society around you and will be challenged to extend the process of systematic learning in which you are engaged to encompass a growing image of human endeavors obviously including the environment. In the approaches you take the methods you adopt and the instruments you employ you will need to achieve the same degree of coherence that characterizes the pattern of growth presently underway. So we are learning in the Baha'i community how to create the social tools of change of unity in mixed and diverse communities being able to detach people from the material of our society and able to start this process of building a coherent world system respectful of nature. This is transformation from the inside out and this is the coherence between our words and our actions. We also then need to address the challenges of the outer environment and therefore environment impacts must be reduced at the global level in each country in each community by its individual through finding a balance of material and spiritual approaches. The Baha'i community has told us Baha'i scriptures describe nature as a reflection of the sacred. They teach that nature should be valued and respected but not worshiped. Rather it should serve humanity's efforts to carry forward an ever advancing civilization. However, in light of the interdependence of all parts of nature and the importance of evolution and diversity to the beauty efficiency and perfection of the whole every effort should be made to preserve as much as possible of the earth's biodiversity and natural order. We are also told as we should be trustees or stewards of the planet's vast resources we must learn to make use of the earth's natural resources both renewable and renewable in a manner that ensures sustainability and equity into the distant reaches of time. We know Baha'u'llah talked about a cycle of 500,000 years. This is more than a five year plan or looking 20 years ahead. We really need to look at the distant reaches of time for our sustainability. This attitude of stewardship will require full consideration of the environmental consequences of all development activities. It will compel humanity to temper its actions with moderation and humility. Those are not words you hear very often from economists. Moderation, humility, realizing that the true value of nature cannot be expressed in economic terms. It will also require a deep understanding of the natural world and its role in humanity's collective development both material and spiritual. And as I quoted before, standard environmental management must be seen as a fundamental responsibility that must be shouldered. A prerequisite for spiritual development as well as the individual's physical survival. This of course means that we also have to look at the economic side of the equation that's been driving so much unsustainability. And here again we have a redefinition of what economics should be and where should be going. The ultimate function of economic systems should be to equip the peoples and institutions of the world with the means to achieve the real purpose of development. That is, the cultivation for limitless potentials latent in human consciousness. Now this doesn't say the real purpose of development is to make the bankers rich or to make certain famous inventors of software rich or whatever. It's the cultivation of limitless potentials latent in human consciousness. And of course those things can grow forever. We need new economic models that further a dynamic just and thriving social order. Such economic systems will be strongly altruistic and cooperative in nature. They will provide meaningful employment and will help to eradicate poverty in the world. There you have the design criteria for the new economic system that is needed to replace the one that has failed us so badly recently. But it's very different from anything that we see not in the mechanisms of the system but in the values behind the system as we know it today. We also have a challenge particularly those of us in the academic or intellectual communities working with the leadership of the world that we have to rehabilitate through our own and therefore is not being looked at as a potential solution. A global intelligentsia is prescription largely shaped by materialistic misconceptions of reality clings tenaciously to the hope that imaginative social engineering supported by political compromise may indefinitely postpone the potential disasters that few deny loom over humanity's future. As unity is the remedy for the world's ills it's one certain source lies in the restoration of religion's influence in human affairs. This is a giant challenge in our secular societies for whom they don't see the relevance of religion to address this fundamental problem that's leading us to disaster. We also need to reflect this process and structures of global governance because these environmental problems are largely global in nature. They ever require a framework of laws environmental and social standards and we have to replace this concept of national sovereignty which has been the bulwark of the way United Nations was established in the past with mechanisms to address climate change to achieve the global management of the world's resources and their equitable distribution to achieve true sustainability among the nations of the world and that our present system is unable to do. Lots of things are happening at a small scale in civil society government has its role in the level of governance but already we see for instance the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development which has even been looking at the role of religion and faith-based organizations in this process the US Partition for the Decade which Peter Adrian has been involved in for many years here in the Super-Associate Network which is now becoming the Partition for Education and Research for Responsible Living working to develop educational materials for the schools, civil society organizations now all over the world it's been funded by the European Union 125 universities and training centers involved it's led by Abahai incidentally and we have the project we talked about in the workshop this afternoon on values-based indicators for educational development again funded by the European Union to say how do we measure our progress in this area the little things are happening it's far from enough but it's only when we see the grassroots pushing our politicians pushing our business leaders pushing the world to take us into account we'll begin to see a change what has to be coming from civil society from the grassroots and from our academic and research institutions but there's still something fundamental that is missing the pace and scale of change up until now have been wholly inadequate the challenges we face as we saw at the beginning we're looking at the need to change our system fundamentally in 5, 10, 15, 20 years very very short time scale given the inertia of the system the only way we've seen in the past that kind of change take place has been with a spiritual transformation which can accelerate a process of organic change from bottom up in society if you look back to ancient history the speed which say Islam spread all the way from Spain to Indonesia for instance these are the times of rapid change when there's a spiritual impulse that can make people do the kinds of change that we saw referred to in the statements earlier the only solution to this series of challenges is the world order of Bahá'u'lláh until such time as the nations of the world understand and follow the admonitions of Bahá'u'lláh to whole heartily work together in looking after the best interests of all humankind and unite in the search for ways and means to meet the many environmental problems present on the planet little progress will be made towards their solution in collusion therefore we must learn to overcome the narrower perspectives that we've inherited in our education in our professional lives we must also overcome this pervasive materialism in which we are almost drowning particularly in North America which has carried this to an extreme and detach ourselves from that to work for a totally alternative way of looking at our own development of educating our families organizing our communities and living in our society we must encourage this spirituality that is the fundamental level and show that religion has a role to play in addressing these problems to the world outside we must achieve a better balance between the material and spiritual in everything that we do in our lives we must apply moderation in our approach to all those dimensions of material society and we must use the tools of consultation to get the agreement of everyone around the world for the challenges of the world of the coming ahead we probably need a new kind of specialist in the world today we need generalists whole system specialists people who could have looked at the financial system and say, look at the whole thing it may look fine as bits and pieces but together it's going to collapse and Abdu Baha described how in the future the learned required knowledge of the sacred scriptures and the entire field of divine and natural science of religious jurisprudence and the arts of government and the varied learning of the time and the great events of history in order to meet the necessary qualification of comprehensive knowledge those of you struggling through one course of study at university or specialized in only one area the target for us has been set very very high in the future but maybe some of the young people can start to become these new whole system specialists these people able to integrate across the natural the economic and social sciences and the spiritual sciences to define solutions to the problems that we face the challenge to us all is to become leaders in the transformation of society and its relationship to the environment we need to learn to use spiritual principles to guide us and that is as we heard one of the purposes of the ABS one of the purposes of conferences like this to apply spiritual principles to practical problems we must lay new intellectual foundations for social change from the inside out we need to pioneer in building new economic and social systems and institutions at all the levels of organization in society that will be able to bring us back into balance with a sustainable environment and that will lay the foundation for an ever advancing civilization transforming environments is only possible from the inside out thank you very much