09:15 William S. Becker (us): The Future We Want
William (Bill) S. Becker is senior associate at Natural Capitalism Solutions, author of “The 100 Day Action Plan to Save the Planet” and co-founder of The Future We Want. The Future We want is a global conversation and visualization in advance of and beyond Rio+20. It is the theme of Rio+20 and was announced this November together with Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the UN. Bill will share the idea behind this ambitious project and the need to collect and spread positive visions of a sustainable future on a gloibal scale using social media and other communication technologies.
Bill starts his presentation by showing a short film outlining the future we don’t want as it is constantly presented in society. We talk only rarely about the world we want. In 1939 The Futurama New York World Fair set the standards for the design of cities and energy consumption and we still follow those standards today even though we can no longer afford it.
Three years ago a group gatherered and started to define ‘The Future We Want – The Power of Positive Thinking’. “We have since then defined a program that focuses on co-creating a 20 year positive vision, which we presented to the UN. They liked it so much that they want to make it an integrated part of the Rio+20 conference 2012. We are very happy about this since it means we will now get a large distribution of the message and interaction with people worldwide to define the future we want and make it come through,” says Bill S. Becker.
The plan is as follows: Before Rio we will engage in local conversations with a focus to creating the future we want through actual change with a 20 years goal. During Rio we will make the input visisible in an exhibition, and after Rio we will follow up and continue world wide distribution. Visit www.futurewewant.org to take part in the conversation.
We are also in the proces of asking some of the big minds globally to share a three minute vision of a better world and document it on video. “We cannot solve the problems by using the approach that created the problems”, as Einstein said.
See the video of Some of the Futures we want.
Future We Want from Arnold Imaging on Vimeo.
See the video of the Gaia World. Download all the films.
I think it was very inspiring to hear how an initiative that started by a small group of people and was kept alive by only two people was able to access the UN and will now contribute to the Rio conference. To me it proves that you can get a long way when you have a concrete vision. It also illustrates how our world need concrete visions and not just an endless row of compromises to secure reelection in the political world.
Download presentation.
Download all the films.