Whereas, finding ourselves inhabitants of a planet whose biodiversity is collapsing, whose oceans are acidifying and filling with waste, whose climate is subject to weather variations of increasing violence and whose ecosystems are overburdened in ways too numerous to count, whose resultant ecological and humanitarian disasters are multiplying in scale and frequency, whose mineral and biological resources are regularly extracted and processed unsustainably and without regard to environmental degradation, nor consideration of human equity or health, either of our generation or of the generations of the future, and
Whereas, having determined that the forces acting to perpetuate these reckless and destructive imbalances are largely corporate and macro-corporate in nature, assemblages of capital and protocol, enmeshed in the operation of our states and polities, untethered from meaningful regulatory oversight and frequently beyond the scope of individual culpability or agency to direct or alter, and
Whereas, having established that the extant institutions, whether governmental or international, under whose authority problems as immense and entangled as those facing our civilization might be addressed, have conclusively demonstrated not only a functional incapacity to respond meaningfully but a more fundamental inability to even accurately delineate the scale and complexity of the issues at hand,
We – those of us who abide among these systems, under these institutions and amid these injustices, and yet object; those of who understand the severity of the challenges facing our species’ and planet’s survival, and yet have hope – claim the following:
The work of defining a sustainable, structurally balanced relationship between our species and our planet is the task of generations. Almost incomprehensible in scope and complexity, it’s an effort whose completion or meaningful furtherance we cannot possibly hope to live to see; neither will our grandchildren, nor our grandchildren’s grandchildren. The consequences of forces at work already in the world today, acting in direct opposition to these ambitions, likely to cause continued and catastrophic quantities of suffering and destruction, will be unfolding for centuries. And yet, ours is a generation of consequence. Today, more than ever before, we have the tools necessary to build a reasonable framework for combating the problems we face; the most sensational opportunity is ours, because from amid the various failings of today’s societal structures, we might imagine and engender the replacements that shall better suit us. We need not be constrained by the flawed systems of our past, or the inadequacies of our present. And so, in the acknowledgment of all that is lost, and all that we yet will lose, we have begun building the Alma Project: a scaffold whose flexibility and strength may serve to support us through the worst of what will come, and whose breadth and height, if we anchor it well, might show us the extents of where we might one day yet reach. We would like to request, in this effort, that you join us.