It is a rare individual who is willing to face into the overwhelming complexity of humanity’s biggest challenges and then, with unyielding optimism, dedicate his life to overcoming them. Jim Garrison, religious scholar, geopolitical activist, and founder of Wisdom University, is one such person. In fact, over the course of his career, Garrison has made a habit of it—heading up the Esalen Institute Soviet-American Exchange Program in the eighties and partnering with Mikhail Gorbachev to start the State of the World Forum in the nineties. Now he’s turned his attention to what he sees as the most significant issue we face on the planet today: climate change.
In this EnlightenNext roundtable interview with editors Andrew Cohen, Carter Phipps, and Ross Robertson, Garrison shares his ambitious plan to tackle and solve this global dilemma at the 2009 State of the World Forum using the powerful philosophical framework of integral theory as a guide. The international event, which will be held this November in Washington, DC, is being cosponsored by Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute and will bring together an impressive coalition of world leaders, activists, scientists, and cultural visionaries. Over the course of their conversation, Garrison explores with the EnlightenNext team why he feels that only an integral perspective is sophisticated enough to address an issue as complex and multidimensional as climate change.
BIO
Jim Garrison cofounded the State of the World Forum in 1995 with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Forum is a San Francisco-based non-profit institution created to establish a global network of leaders dedicated to those principles, values, and actions necessary to guide humanity toward a more sustainable global civilization. With President Gorbachev as its Convening Chairman and Jim Garrison as its President, the Forum has brought together leaders from around the world to its annual and regional convenings to deliberate upon and take action concerning issues of global concern. Jim's most recent focus, and that of the Forum, has been the Integral Governance Initiative, dedicated to establishing global issue networks to solve global problems.
Garrison became active in foreign policy issues, particularly with Soviet-American relations, in the mid-1970s. From 1986 to 1990, he served as Executive Director of the Esalen Institute Soviet American Exchange Program, which engaged in nongovernmental diplomacy with Soviet counterparts in a variety of sectors. In 1991, he founded the International Foreign Policy Association in collaboration with Georgian President Edward Shevardnadze and former Secretary of State George Schultz, focusing on providing humanitarian relief for children in the former Soviet republics. He has also written six books on various aspects of philosophical theology and history, including Civilization and the Transformation of Power (2000) and the most recent America as Empire (2004).
Garrison was born in Szechuan Province, China, in 1951 to Baptist missionaries. He lived with his family in Taiwan from 1953 to 1965, after which they settled permanently in San Jose, California. He holds an M.T.S. in Christology and History of Religion from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge University.
