As one takes an informed look at the world today, it is as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Pestilence, Famine, War and Death - have been merged, through leveraged buy-outs and hostile take-overs, into a larger, vertically and horizontally integrated Big 4 -

Their wild and reckless ride across the world brings us what political analyst Susan George calls the four converging, overlapping and interrelated “Crisis Clusters” that together characterize the opening of the 21st century:

“History,” said Time Machine author, H.G. Wells, “is a race between education and catastrophe.” Now, as the petro-philes of the current administration strut their arrogant, unilateral stuff on the world stage -- abrogating treaties, bombing, threatening, sanctioning, engineering coups, installing puppet regimes, supporting dictators and oligarchs, causing unspeakable misery, scoffing at international law abroad, trampling civil rights at home, targeting 60 countries in its pursuit of “Full Spectrum Dominance” (as the weapons wonks call it) --- a growing number of “observers” have begun to wonder if history isn't now more precisely, a race between the demise of the biosphere and the deconstruction of the American Empire.

Back in 1991 the World Game Institute published a chart entitled “What the World Wants.” It listed 14 objectives, showed their interlinkages, and gave supporting data and strategies to “make the point that what the world needs to solve the major systemic problems confronting humanity is both available and affordable.” Those objectives :

1. Eliminate starvation and malnourishment
2. Provide health care
3. Eliminate inadequate housing and homelessness
4. Provide clean and abundant water
5. Eliminate illiteracy
6. Increase energy and material use efficiency
7. Increase renewable energy
8. Debt management
9. Stabilize population
10. Reverse soil erosion
11. Reverse deforestation
12. Reverse ozone depletion
13. Stop acid rain
14. Stop global warming

Now, nearly two decades later, those challenges to humanity still remain and most of them seem even further from being met. Yet there has been and continues to be positive change at every level from the local to the international. But how to chart and track and participate in those changes if the dominant corporate media, from which most people get their worldview, can't see them or won't report on them - or is overtly or covertly opposed to them?

There's a famous Rorschatz image which, viewed in one gestalt, looks like the face of an aged crone, yet changes with a slight shift in perception to show the face of a youthful maiden. Once you see both faces, you can switch back and forth between them. They're both inseparable aspects of the same image, but learning a conscious shift in perception is necessary to see them both . For us, that's a useful metaphor for the current world situation. The fundamental purpose of EON is to aid in this conscious perceptual shift.

Another useful metaphor is the cinematic “cross-dissolve,” in which the fade-out of one scene overlaps the fade-in of another. “Freeze” the film the middle of the dissolve and both scenes are present, superimposed on each other in the same frame.

It's as if in this period we're in the middle of a long, slow, historical “cross-dissolve.” The incoming scene of a post-corporate world of Enlightened Cultures of cooperation, liberation, conservation and long-term sustainability is just beginning its fade-in to visibility, while the present corporate scene of competition, control, exploitation and short-term profit is almost imperceptibly beginning its fade-out.
EON's goal is to strengthen the incoming scene by helping to give it more light - to “connect the dots” that Hawken and Donahur are talking about and give the “bird's eye” view that Natural Step founder Karl-Henrik Robert finds so necessary to sustain hope in the face of the “abominations” Galeano so pithily and ironically describes.

SOUTH - NORTH LINKAGES
We have learned much over the years from our friends and colleagues in the Global South. We continue to today. Chief among the learnings is that, by any objective observation, and certainly in the view of the people of the South, since it is us Northerners who have and continue to bear most of the responsibility for causing the evolutionary challenges now confronting our species, it is arrogance squared for us from the North to suggest that it is principally we who will solve them with the same ideologies, policies, practices and technologies that have spawned them. To recognize this is not to play a global game of Blaming & Shaming, but simply to acknowledge historical reality and recognize the present reality that species-wide challenges (whoever caused them) must and will be met by the co-creative pluck and genius of our entire species.
We feel strongly that a key part of EON's mission must be to support , encourage and facilitate two-way exchange, mutual aid and solidarity between evolutionary activists in the South and North, with special emphasis on restitution and restoration as well as innovation and the revaluing and adaptation of traditional and indigenous knowledge, wisdom and time-proven best practices

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WEBWORK
Our research shows that, encouragingly, thousands of organizations and websites exist which address in some way, at some level, all of our current evolutionary challenges. One site for example, Global Issues Affecting Everyone, is maintained by Anup Shah at his own expense and has over 3000 links to related sites, news, archives and information sources - most, but by no means all, in the so far more heavily-internetted North. Sites like Wiser Earth and ManyOne are using their resources to help link the activist communities documented by Paul Hawken in his book and website Blessed Unrest.

Of the many important evolutionary initiatives currently in play (see partial list below), we've decided to focus on the six broad issues displayed on our home page and explained more fully here.

Neither Cassandra nor Pollyanna
We have developed a starting place for what we think is an holistic interpretive analytic framework for mapping, documenting and reporting on the emergent elements of a potentially sustainable planetary society or “polyculture” - diverse, peaceful, celebratory and richly creative. This EON Matrix is designed to help us maintain “binocular vision,” the capacity to see simultaneously both the looming crises and the creative options now available.

What's Working Where?
As Kevin Danahur points out, “We know how to do renewable energy. We know how to do organic agriculture. We know how to do democracy. We know how to create a sustainable society. All the pieces are there. Now we just have to connect the dots.”

Here's a brief list of some of the “dots” that we're talking about: