WiserEarth Editors

We need to write a set of position papers defining the issues that we see, current best practices, and research needed to improve our understanding of the issues, and our practices for dealing with them. Here are some critical topics.

• What are the causes of poverty? War? Oppression? Corruption?
• Free Trade that is Free for corporations but not for people cannot work. What do we need instead?
• What new human rights must we recognize in order to solve our problems?
• What is the cost of a Global Marshall Plan to deal with the issues of poverty once and for all?
• The One Laptop Per Child project proposes a coordinated campaign of education, aimed at making it possible for every person to contribute economically to their community and to prosper themselves. What is needed to make this happen? Note that education is already defined to be a basic human right, but far too many children cannot exercise this right.
• OLPC also proposes to put every child, and hence every member of any child's family, into communication with the world. This means giving everybody a voice in the conversation about our shared future.
• Partners in Health proposes to make health care a basic human right, and refuses to accept the usual obstacles to delivering it, thus greatly improving the standard of health care it can provide. What is needed to make this work globally?
• The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka has an integrated program of village development, presently in use in more than half the villages of the country. It also gets Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians by the hundred thousand meditating on each others' welfare.
• How can we create a sustainable economy, one that treats natural resources as capital to be preserved rather than income to be consumed?
• How can we communicate this vision and the practical actions needed to attain it, whether through education, the media, or the arts?