Global Citizens Movement
The pathways to a Great Transition are uncertain and diverse, but the essay, Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, lays out certain clues: governments, limited by nationalist sentiments, are unlikely to lead the way. Transnational corporations are not likely to reinvent themselves. Civil society, although active on the many issues arising during the tumult of transition, is currently too fragmented and small scale to significantly alter the course of global development.
The Global Scenario Group analysis concludes that a Great Transition will not be possible unless larger numbers of an active and aware global citizenry get involved in the struggle for our future. It refers to this as a global citizens movement for a Great Transition. This movement would see itself as constructing a new planetary society rooted in values of quality of life, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability. An authentic global citizens movement would be quite different from the existing fragmented social movements active throughout the world today. These movements tend to be issue-specific – focused on labor, environment, human rights, feminist issues, indigenous struggles, poverty, AIDS, and numerous other interrelated but “siloed” efforts. Without a shared vision for the future, it is difficult to imagine how diverse citizen initiatives could overcome fragmentation and exert influence on the shape of the emerging planetary civilization.
Read more about this topic: Great Transition
Famous quotes containing the words global, citizens and/or movement:
“However global I strove to become in my thinking over the past twenty years, my sons kept me rooted to an utterly pedestrian view, intimately involved with the most inspiring and fractious passages in human development. However unconsciously by now, motherhood informs every thought I have, influencing everything I do. More than any other part of my life, being a mother taught me what it means to be human.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It is certainly safe, in view of the movement to the right of intellectuals and political thinkers, to pronounce the brain death of socialism.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)