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Masami Saionji, Ervin Laszlo, Bente Milton, Hiro Saionji. 

At Twenty-One the Club of Budapest has become a grown-up butterfly. In 1993 it flapped its wings when with its first Honorary Members Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Ustinov, Yehudi Menuhin, and the Dalai Lama it called for a Planetary Consciousness. We defined it as „the knowing as well as the feeling of the vital interdependence and essential oneness of humankind and the conscious adoption of the ethic and the ethos that this entails.” At the time this idea seemed esoteric: it was ahead of its time. But the tiny current it created has nucleated: for the most part globally thinking people now recognize that the kind of consciousness we possess is a crucial factor in creating the kind of world we could leave in good conscience to our children. 

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Twenty-one years later the time has come for a new stage in the flight of this butterfly. As a global think-tank we have thought and we have talked, and now we must walk—or fly—our talk. With a planetary consciousness we must tackle the challenge of creating a sustainable planet. We cannot create it alone, nor can anyone. But we can create it together. The next stage in our flight is to bring together people with the ethics and the ethos of planetary consciousness to think together and to act together, in order to enable all the women, men, and children on this planet to live with the dignity and wellbeing that is the birthright of every human being on earth. 

We wish to evolve from a think-tank to an act-tank: to a platform that people and organizations can join if they wish to promote the shift toward an ethical and responsible world. We now call together our Members, Partners and Associates to tackle this ambitious but entirely necessary and extremely urgent task.

Einstein said that we cannot hope to solve the critical problems of our time with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to them. We need new thinking to solve our problems. There could not be a better or more important reason to call together some of the thought leaders of today’s world than to discuss the thinking we need. What kind of thinking do we need?

The answer to this question is complex, and discussing it would fill not just one forum, but all the fora of this World Fair. If we have to choose one set of issues to discuss during a single day at this global event; we must concentrate on the basics. We believe that the basic issue is to discover the actions, and the ethics and mindset needed to take the actions, to enable people to create a better world; create a world that is both sustainable and humane. Because today’s world is neither the one nor the other.

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Achieving a degree of sustainability is perhaps the most important and urgent challenge we face on this planet. It is becoming every day more evident that if we continue on the course we have taken in the past decades our world will be exposed to ever more critical crises. Seven billion people cannot live on this Earth with a modicum of physical and mental wellbeing if we do not change direction. Lest we do, we will continue to impair the natural balances on which human life and all life depends, and create growing stresses and strains for people and societies. The much-discussed “carrying capacity” of the planet is in question—the capacity to enable all people in the human family to live in peace and wellbeing.

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Creating a sustainable world of peace and wellbeing is not a quixotic quest. The planet is well endowed with physical and biological resources and is bathed in a rich flow of energy from the sun. We have the technologies to exploit our material and energy resources for human ends; we have the resources as well as the know-how to create a sustainable and humane world. The question is whether we have the wisdom and the will to create it. This is a crucial question for humanity and for all life on the planet. Time will tell how it is answered, but we do not have the luxury of waiting until time would tell. We need to take our destiny into our own hands.

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With each passing day more people are waking up to the need to create a humane and sustainable world and ask how they could go about creating it. This query needs to be answered; and answered wisely and without delay. To find the answer, or at the least the basic elements of the answer, is the reason we have convened some of the eminent thought leaders of the contemporary world to this Forum. The Expo 2015 World Fair, dedicated to “Feeding the Planet,” is the right venue for searching for an answer to this paramount question of our times, and bringing it to the attention of all the people who have come together here - responsible people who feel concerned about our life and our future and wish to ensure that we truly and effectively care for people and for the planet.

There is a well-known saying in France that the French people and all people on this conflict-ridden planet would do well to take to heart. Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. To understand all is to forgive all. To understand is to forgive.

Can one forgive the killing of hundreds of innocent people? There is an emotional, gut-reaction that says no, this is unforgivable. Yet there is another answer that tells us that if we understand why these murderous events take place we can also forgive them. To forgive is not to give in, nor to forget, but to learn how to overcome and ultimately eliminate them.

Can we understand why the Paris attacks took place; understand them not as solely economic, political and religious conflicts but as a consequence of the nature of our shared existence in the contemporary world? Let us attempt a deeper understanding. Let us see ourselves as members of one family - the Human Family. There are no “others” in this family, just ”us.” Consider, then, the situation facing this family today. We are a species on the brink of self-initiated self-destruction and perhaps extinction, killing each other for achieving goals that do not change the course on which we find ourselves. We are on course to collide with a giant Iceberg while we fight for a privileged position on what may be the deck of the Titanic.

We can call Earth a spaceship named Titanic, and the Iceberg ahead Climate Change. Ifour vessel does not change course, the collision ahead will make it impossible for all 7.4 billion of us to survive. Can just some of us survive and not all? Would we not unleash the kind of conflict and violence of which today’s attacks are a tragic but limited foretaste? How many millions, or billions, would have to disappear from the face of the Earth for the rest of us to live? And would there be a “rest of us” altogether? We could destroy the conditions for all higher forms of life on Earth, and if the planet heats up and becomes arid like a desert— as Mars is today—the chances of existence would be foreclosed for all higher forms of life.

We can also call the Iceberg ahead Global Breakdown. We have serious and rapidly growing existential problems facing us in addition to the threat of an unfavorably and perhaps catastrophically altered climate. A few of us have great wealth and power, while most of us are abjectly poor and powerless. The less privileged among us are increasingly frustrated and some invoke a higher mission to justify a violent struggle for a better life, or just bare existence.

However, violent conflict and murderous acts are a misguided, unproductive, and wrong response to today’s problems. This should be clear, but it should also be clear that the response to to today’s problems cannot be more of the same. What would it do for us if we took revenge and respond to terror with terror, violence with violence, as some of our political and military leaders want to do? Would we not just hasten the encounter of our planetary spaceship with the double Iceberg ahead?

Today's world is still dominated by wars and armed conflicts. The combined direct military expenditures of the world's nation-states totaled over $1.776 Trillion dollars in 2014, and the ongoing wars and massive loss of life in the Middle East have generated the movement spearheaded by ISIS as well as the Syrian Refugee crisis that now engulfs Europe and spreads to other continents. 

The response of the big powers with more attacks, war and violence will not either reduce or end these threats. Quite the contrary. It will only exacerbate the growing cycle of violence and expand the theater of conflict to cities and countries worldwide. 

Forgiveness is a better response. It does not mean staying with the status quo, nor failing to act to change it. It is to act like a presumably intelligent species would act in an interdependent and seriously endangered planet: with empathy and insight, shared vision and common resolve. We shall either hang together with understanding and solidarity, or will hang separately with our rancor and revenge.

Conflicts are continually erupting in today’s world: we keep fighting among ourselves. Some of our conflicts engender major violence, and the consequences spread across the face of the Earth. Others enter into the conflicts, intending to help some factions to overpower the others. Those who are threatened by these interventions do everything they can to stop them. They are do not hesitate to use all the means at their disposal to achieve this goal, including misguided but still effective fanaticism. Yet these people are not the devil, nor are they pure evil. They are desperate members of the human family whose sense of family has been overwhelmed by their abject condition. In regard to losing their sense of family they are not different from those of us who come into the fight brandishing arms and wielding their powers of destruction.

Continuing to help some of us against some others among us only exacerbates the conflicts and spreads the fighting. This deflects our attention from recognizing that the fight we are engaged in is on the deck of the Titanic—and that there is a double Iceberg ahead.

What are we to do? If we choose revenge as the way to proceed, future archeologists visiting from another planet will discover that there was once a civilization on Earth, but it disappeared when the inhabitants made the planet inhospitable to life. They will not know whether the inhabitants had recognized the problem and tried to change course while they could. We, the inhabitants of this planet, must wake up and steer another course. Communication based on understanding, instead of eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth is the indicated course. We need to try it, before our problems overwhelm us.

Paris has become the venue for a “nearly” (even if sadly not entirely) unprecedented act of violence. It will soon be the venue for another, and this time entirely unprecedented event: the attempt of the leaders of the world to come together to keep humanity alive and flourishing on the planet: the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP21, to take place in Paris from November 30 to December 11. 

Let us remember Paris as the place where the resolve was born to maintain life and civilization on Earth, and not where that resolve was dissipated before it could even be born.

The first of Two Statements on the Responsible Response to the Paris Attacks and the course to take.