Listen to this week's Podcast
TWIGG - Podcast 28 - 3rd April 2011 (click here to see the notes)
TWIGG is a weekly podcast dealing with the fraught and divisive subject of Global Governance. Hence the odd spellinGGs on the site's menu items. The GG stands for global governance, or perhaps the singular and glaring lack of same that is the bane of humanitarians, humanists and just plain humans across our planet.
The world faces a number of very serious
issues in the coming decades such as - to name but a few hot topics - climate change, peak oil and widespread environmental degradation. All of these issues are sources of potential conflict and any one of them, or a combination, could result in global catastrophe. In the worst case scenarios leading to the extinction of human life on Earth.
If this seems like reckless hyperbole consider the civilisations that have collapsed due to similar resource crises in the past; Easter Island, The Maya and the Greenland Norse. This has happened. It can happen again.
With global population fast approaching 7 billion the entire planet has now become our Easter Island. A lonely outpost of life in very, very large and generally inhospitable universe. Like the Easter Islanders we lack the technology to migrate elsewhere; we don't even know if there is an elsewhere and if there was - only a tiny fraction of us could leave. Like the Easter Islanders, and countless human societies before, we face a choice : co-operate and survive, or splinter into factions and perish. The great departure from these examples of the past is that the society in question is now the entire human race; the resources to be fought over those of the entire planet. For the moment the Earth, and it's dwindling pool of water, metals and oil, is all we have to share.
To weather the coming storms, both metaphorical and literal, we need new political structures, new global institutions and new thinking. We must grasp the opportunity currently afforded by a relatively peaceful world to forge the social and political tools that will help to midwife our nascent planetary civilisation through the birth canal of resource shortages already visible on the horizon. Although we at TWIGG don't claim to have all the answers, we do think it's time to broaden the discussion to include as many members of the human family as possible.
On the podcast we will discuss climate change, global referenda, war crimes, the international criminal court, the UN, regional and global parliaments, local injustice, the absurdity of nationalism, the evolution of human collective decision making from the family to the tribe, the city state, the region, the nation, the supranational region and finally the World.
We'll occasionally go off topic and talk about the psychology of nationalism, division and tyranny; conspiracy theories about global governance and the myths that swirl endlessly around the topic. We'll talk about the absurd, the comic and the tragic; there's a lot to cover.
We hope you'll join us on the journey to a democratic world free of war.
Brian Coughlan
P.S. You can take a concrete step towards global unity right now by casting your vote in the Vote World Parliament global referendum; just click on the link below and fill in the ballot.
