The $8 trillion question.

WHAT I WOULD DO WITH $8 TRILLION.
submitted to Brian Lehrer Show on www.wnyc.org
Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Given this enormous sum we have to not only look at long-term expenditures, but also globally. So, here is my breakdown in trillion dollars:

$4 trillion: Implementing and evaluating the UN MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) for the next 20 years

$2 trillion: planning of investment in infrastructure and human services in the USA during the next 10 years with roughly equal billing to infrastructure projects and to the development of sustainable communities

$1 trillion: educating humanity to transform its attitude from an anthropocentric to biocentric worldview by adopting and applying the integration of social and ecological values as presented in the benchmark version of the Earth Charter

$1 trillion: worldwide program for an Earth Charter value-based planning and implemention to make humanity transition to a full sustainability revolution after having gone through the agricultural and industrial revolutions in a haphazard and spontaneous fashion.

Live and unite in justice, peace and praise.

Yours for sustaining futures

Frans C. Verhagen, M.Div., M.I.A., Ph.D., sustainability sociologist
Director, Sustainability Research and Education
Earth and Peace Education Associates International (EPE)
Chair, United Nations and Global Affairs Committee at the Community Church of New York, Unitarian Universalist, 40 East 35 Street, NY 10016
Adjunct Associate Professor Sustainable Communities at Pace University, NY
Visiting Scholar on Sustainable Communities at Pace University, Spring 2006
Executive Director, Metro New York Sustainable Communities Network
Sustainability Fellow, Green Institute in Washington, D.C.
Rego Park, NY 11374, USA
voice: 1+(718)275-3932; fax 1+(718)275-3932; cell 1+ (917) 617 6217http://www.globalepe.org, gaia1@rcn.com; www.fcvnyc@blogspot.com

“…..the verb sustaining holds open the actively normative questions that the idea of sustainability raises. We are required to probe: What truly sustains us? Why? And how do we know? Conversely, we must ask: What are we to sustain above all else? Why? And how may we do so?"
Aidan Davison, Technology and the Contested Meanings of Sustainability, 2001: p.64