merging. The effect has been to awaken in both the masses of humanity and
many world leaders a degree of hopefulness about the future of our planet
that had been nearly extinguished.

Throughout the world, immense intellectual and spiritual energies are
seeking expression, energies whose gathering pressure is in direct
proportion to the frustrations of recent decades. Everywhere the signs
multiply that the earth's peoples yearn for an end to conflict and to the
suffering and ruin from which no land is any longer immune. These rising
impulses for change must be seized upon and channeled into overcoming the
remaining barriers that block realization of the age-old dream of global
peace. The effort of will required for such a task cannot be summoned up
merely by appeals for action against the countless ills afflicting
society. It must be galvanized by a vision of human prosperity in the
fullest sense of the term--an awakening to the possibilities of the
spiritual and material well-being now brought within grasp. Its
beneficiaries must be all of the planet's inhabitants, without
distinction, without the imposition of conditions unrelated to the
fundamental goals of such a reorganization of human affairs.

History has thus far recorded principally the experience of tribes,
cultures, classes, and nations. With the physical unification of the
planet in this century and acknowledgement of the interdependence of all
who live on it, the history of humanity as one people is now beginning.
The long, slow civilizing of human character has been a sporadic
development, uneven and admittedly inequitable in the material advantages
it has conferred. Nevertheless, endowed with the wealth of all the genetic
and cultural diversity that has evolved through past ages, the earth's
inhabitants are now challenged to draw on their collective inheritance to
take up, consciously and systematically, the responsibility for the design
of their future.

It is unrealistic to imagine that the vision of the next stage in the
advancement of civilization can be formulated without a searching
reexamination of the attitudes and assumptions that currently underlie
approaches to social and economic development. At the most obvious level,
such rethinking will have to address practical matters of policy, resource
utilization, planning procedures, implementation methodologies, and
organization. As it proceeds, however, fundamental issues will quickly
emerge, rela