One Health Initiative team/website Joins Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere (MAHB)
SEE: http://mahb.stanford.edu/groups/one-health-initiative/
The MAHB’s natural scientists and social scientists (sociology, economics, business, humanities, linguistics, etc) are working together now to:
1. Understand and communicate foresight intelligence;
2. Create a vision of a plausible and compelling world in 2050 which is moving towards sustainability and social equity;
These are powerful tools for global civil society, the often under-funded front line in the battle to build a secure and sustainable world for all humanity.
The goal of the MAHB is to create a platform to help global civil society address the interconnections among the greatest threats to human well-being: failure of ecosystem services, economic inequity, social injustice, hunger, epidemics, toxic chemicals, and loss of security to crime, terrorism and war, especially resource wars (veiled or not), to name a few.
The term “civil society” includes scholars, non-governmental organizations, businesses, social activists and individuals who share a vision for a sustainable world respecting the rights and prosperity of all humanity. While the MAHB is pluralistic in its acceptance of differences and diversity a generally accepted core set of values has emerged globally and constitute the public good: these are that all humans should be able to live peacefully, securely and sustainably.
Globally, there are thousands of organizations and individuals sharing these values and working towards these goals; too often they compete for the same money and stakeholders, struggle with small budgets, and work in constrained and often isolated environments.
The MAHB aspires to offer seven unique tools to civil society concerned with the major threats to humanity. These tools are:
1. Community: The MAHB is a diverse community; organizations and groups that join the MAHB are called “Nodes”; individuals who join are “Associates”. Nodes and Associates include natural scientists, social scientists, students, homemakers, economists, business people, artists, scholars, professionals: people from all walks of life. A Node may be a formally organized NGO, a professional organization or an informal team or group including a group of scholars, neighborhood associations and book clubs to name a few.
2. Vision of a world moving rapidly towards sustainability in 2050: MAHB scholars are defining what a world in 2050 moving toward sustainability might look like—a compelling world of some 9 billion people. Building on a growing scholarly effort, the MAHB is in the process of describing economic systems that depend on agility and equity without depending on growth, social systems that recognize the limits of our ecosystems, energy and resource infrastructure, and governance: a world where most people can meet their basic needs while enjoying a high quality of life. This vision is being designed to inspire and unite the diverse MAHB membership; it will provide a shared purpose that is exciting and inspiring—working towards core goals rather than against current injustice and destructive behaviors.
3. Scholars working across disciplines to build the knowledge that is necessary for civil society to act in ways that will have the highest positive impact quickly;
4. Resources: The MAHB website aspires to become the “go to” place for the best literature, multi-media materials, analysis, movies, and editorials on the interconnected issues threating humanity and it’s life support systems.
5. Activities: The MAHB website catalogs and makes available ideas for high impact action for those Nodes and Associates seeking additional ideas. Nodes and Associates post their activities, accomplishments, and strategies for shifting human behavior in ways that support a sustainable and equitable life style.
6. A meeting place: Nodes and Associates can also interact with one another on the website—recruiting partners, sharing ideas and information, learning from one another and making it easy for the best work and results to go viral and have international impact.
7. Urgency: If we are to reverse the degradation of the systems that support civilization, we need to act now. The MAHB aspires to make available the tools necessary for fostering a contagion, a passion for action.
How the MAHB works:
There are two arms to the MAHB—a research arm and an action arm. The research arm relies on multi-disciplinary collaboration and scholarly research on critical questions about shifting individual, cultural, and institutional behavior from the current self-destructive patterns to actions that support equity and ecological stability. Here we house our initiatives to 1) define foresight intelligence and 2) create a compelling and plausible vision for a 2050 headed for sustainability, pathways to that desirable world, and measurements of success.
The action or engagement arm comprises the Nodes and Associates that focus on interventions, projects, and initiatives and who use the MAHB to interact, share information, lift individual work to higher visibility and fuel a sense of urgency. The MAHB does not direct Nodes or Associates, but rather provides resources for them to amplify their work. When a Node signs up and joins the MAHB they are automatically listed on the MAHB website and a web-page is set up for them to use to present their work, mission, goals to the MAHB community; they can also link their MAHB webpage to their own website. In addition, their activities become part of the catalog of activities and ideas for others to view and be inspired by. The MAHB website provides a library of books, articles, movies, editorials and unique initiatives so that Nodes and Associates have easy access to the best thinking about meeting the challenge facing those committed to a more equitable, secure, and ecologically sound world.
Finally, and hopefully unobtrusively, there is a secretariat that maintains and develops the website, recruits Nodes and Associates, organizes meetings and workshops, and helps develop and manage research and public education agendas.
|
