FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

David Korten to Speak at CFSC Conference

David Korten to Speak at CFSC Conference David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World, will be the luncheon speaker at the Community Food Security Coalition conference on Monday, October 7 in Seattle.

Korten, who lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, will speak on the development of local economies in the age of globalization. His essay, "Economies for Life," is the lead article in the current issue of Yes! Magazine, which is devoted to local living economies. The article is available online at: http://www.yesmagazine.com/index.htm.

On September 28th Korten gave a major speech to the Earth Charter Assembly on the emergence of a new global civil society. An excerpt from his speech, entitled "From Empire to Earth Community," is below. The full text is available online at: http://www.pcdf.org/2002/earthcommunity.htm.

DAVID KORTEN:
"(An) extraordinary evolutionary development new to the human experience is the emergence of a new planetary social organism we call global civil society. It is the largest, most international, and potentially powerful social movement in human history, yet it is not identified with an individual leader. It is a mutually empowering movement in which every one of the millions of participants is a leader in his or her own right. Rather than mobilizing around an ideology, it is converging around the emergent values consensus articulated in the Earth Charter. It gains its power from the fact that it is an expression of deeply authentic values that flow from the awakening of a new cultural and spiritual consciousness deep within our being. It points the way to the human possibilities that lie ahead.

"Global civil society also manifests a previously unknown human capacity to self-organize on a planetary-scale with an unprecedented inclusiveness, respect for diversity, shared leadership, individual initiative, and a deep sense of responsibility for the whole of life. It's rapidly expanding capacity for mutual learning, consensus convergence, and global coherence suggests the qualities of an emergent planetary consciousness or brain. It manifests a human capacity for democratic self-governance beyond anything previously known. We are only at the beginning of understanding its nature, let alone its full implications and potential.

"This social organism is living into being a spiritually grounded, values based planetary culture. Millions of carriers of the new culture are forming local alliances to create thousands of cultural zones of freedom within which people are growing into being the new living economies and living democracies of Earth Community."