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Water, Water, Everywhere


An interview with Jim Garrison
by Ross Robertson
 

Introduction

Jim Garrison is a man on a mission—a ten-year mission, to be exact—to green the global economy and reduce worldwide carbon emissions by eighty percent by the year 2020. On November 12, his State of the World Forum will be convening its 2009 conference in Washington, DC, with the explicit goal of focusing the world’s attention on the immediacy and urgency of the climate crisis. Over the next ten years, this international assembly of corporate and political leaders, citizens, and institutions will be gathering all over the world, from China to Holland to India to Brazil, in a concentrated effort to galvanize the unprecedented levels of public support and political willpower necessary to save the human species from a decidedly watery apocalypse. And perhaps most significantly, they’ll be framing, shaping, and assessing all of this work in the context of the newest, most progressive, and most promising set of organizing principles they know of: integral theory.

Garrison, who founded the State of the World Forum in 1995 in collaboration with Mikhail Gorbachev, is not new to living life with a missionary’s sense of destiny. As Robert Hager, one of his partners from the 1990s once reflected, “[Jim] never has any lower plans than the cosmos and God’s broad firmament.” Perhaps it is simply that he grew up a missionary’s son in China; or perhaps it is the fact that his longtime intellectual passions for theology, philosophy, and the work of Carl Jung have given him a rich sense of the deep archetypal forces driving human history. But whatever the case, there is little doubt that Garrison has a knack for reading the cultural tea leaves and for grasping the political and even spiritual significance of new progressive causes. Indeed, with two degrees from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge, this philosopher-activist and self-titled “recovering academic” has always felt the need to infuse progressive movements with a spiritual and moral sensibility. In the early eighties, in response to the Reagan revolution and the rise of the religious right, he cofounded the Christic Institute, a public interest law firm in Washington, DC, that championed left-leaning causes and whose name was taken from a phrase in the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin’s book The Heart of Matter. The Christic Institute’s legal team made a name for itself by successfully prosecuting a number of civil rights cases, and many of them had a hand in representing Karen Silkwood in her case against the Kerr-McGee Corporation as well.

After his time in Washington, Garrison headed west to California, ending up at Esalen Institute, where he served as executive director of the Soviet-American Exchange Program from 1986 to 1990. Through the many connections he made in those days of “hot-tub diplomacy,” he moved on to establish the International Foreign Policy Association with former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze and former U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz in 1991. By then the Cold War was ending and leaving in its wake a more uncertain, chaotic world that was globalizing at a furious pace. So Garrison joined forces with Gorbachev to create the State of the World Forum “as an incubator, catalyst, and integrator for innovative leaders and institutions working to bring greater equity, democracy, and accountability to globalization and global governance.”

Previous iterations of the Forum, in San Francisco, New York, London, Mexico City, and Brussels, have addressed the challenges of democracy and sustainability in a globalizing world from many different angles—political, social, ethical, economic, scientific, and spiritual. Garrison plans to take the same broad-minded approach to climate change. Indeed, it’s no surprise that this latest initiative plans to “refract” the unparalleled complexities of climate change through the lens of integral philosophy. It is one of the few systems of thinking that has the power to capture the multidimensional reality of this critical issue and, in doing so, to help clarify and empower our response. As Garrison observes, “It is remarkable that just as global warming threatens the world and our financial and economic structures are collapsing . . . new social values are emerging along with the appreciation, skills, and technologies that can shape a future sustainable and resilient enough to meet the challenges besetting us.”

EnlightenNext caught up with Garrison after his return from a recent trip to Brazil, where he has been pursuing new relationships and connections and working to mobilize Brazil’s up-and-coming generation of politicians to lead the way on the politically sensitive, globally relevant, spiritually urgent, and increasingly stark reality of global climate change.



–Ross Robertson


 
 

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This article is from
Envisioning the Future