Dear Co-workers,
The Cycle of Conferences is placing a focus, beginning today, on the UN Climate Change 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, 31 October to 12 November.
Climate change. We are all broadly familiar by now with the physical meaning of this – the alarming acceleration of the occurrence of extreme weather events. And there is little doubt that humanity is contributing to the process. The out-going civilisation is still largely driven by a climate of thought that sees human beings as separate from the rest of the natural world. The COP26 meeting in Glasgow reflects an emerging will to change this and work at building right relations with the earth.
Climate can be defined as the long-term pattern of weather over a period of time, usually 30 years. By coincidence, it is almost thirty years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which agreed upon the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Framework Convention has since transmuted into the Kyoto Protocol and then the Paris Agreement. This process could be seen as the gradual incarnation of an enlightened idea into a workable set of political and legal arrangements. The upcoming COP26 meeting is intended to further ground this process, with possible agreement on cooperative approaches that parties can take in achieving nationally determined carbon emissions reductions. Another intended outcome is the first opportunity since Paris in 2015 for all parties to commit to increased ambition in these emissions reductions. Increased cooperation, increasing ambition – both are ultimately reflections of a strengthening will-to-good within humanity. For while the inevitable gap between the ambition of governments and peoples (as reflected in collective agreements) and the implementation of policies to achieve those ambitions leads some to despair, it leads many more to a heightened sense of responsibility, and is evoking a flowering of the will-to-good in humanity.
As outlined on this Cycle of Conferences webpage, it is this will-to-good that the initiative seeks to actively invoke and direct, to subjectively empower the great gatherings of minds and hearts taking place at this crucial time. Among these gatherings, COP26 is surely of major significance. If it is successful, it may ask of humanity a more profound and sustained level of visionary, sacrificial action than ever before. We can identify with this vision through the seed thought in our visualisation, which is adapted from one of the key inspirations for the Cycle of Conferences initiative.
The will-to-good of the new group of world servers is the magnetic seed of the future.
Our lighted support of COP26 begins now, and continues until the 12th of November.
Headquarters Group
Cycle of Conferences
