Slouching Towards a Great Convergence

Transition Decade
The Transition Decade creates a campaign platform and a shared timeline
for action for the next ten years. (Australia, 10 group coalition, launched 2/14/2010, acknowledges debt to Lester Brown's 1990 suggestion of a "Transition Decade" in 1990.)
http://www.t10.net.au/node/13 Official homepage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transition_Decade

Transition (Town) Movement
Started in Fall 2005 in Kinsale, Ireland by Louise Rooney and Rob Hopkins, this movement attempts to build community-based efforts to reduce our carbon footprint, reduce our oil dependence and build community. 284 official initiatives as of April 8th, 2010. Third annual conference happened in June 2010 in Britain. Now based in Totnes, UK.
http://transitionculture.org/essential-info/why-transition-culture <-- early history http://www.transitiontowns.org <-- movement home page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns

Great Transition Initiative
Started in 1995, The Great Transition Initiative is a growing
international network of scholars and activists that
analyzes alternative scenarios and charts a path to a hopeful future. Based in Boston, MA . Has many monographs and thinkpieces.
http://www.gtinitiative.org Official home page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Transition

Four Years. Go
Dedicated to the notion that the planet is at a tipping point, this campaign stresses that the next four years will determine the course of the next thousand years. This effort comes out of the Pachamama Alliance. It was born out of an inspration of Lynne Twiss. Strongest on outreach, light on theory, the four years in question run from February 14, 2010 (Valentine's Day) to 2/14/14.
http://www.fouryearsgo.org
http://twitter.com/fouryearsgo
http://www.youtube.com/fouryearsgo
http://www.facebook.com/fouryearsgo

Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior (MAHB)
Pronounced “mob”, this initiative was catalyzed by Paul Ehrlich, a MacArthur award winning senior biologist most famous for writing the bestseller The Population Bomb in 1968. While it has been around for a few months, it went public more loudly on April 6th, 2010 with the publication of an article in an online science magazine.

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000330
http://mahbsustainability.wordpress.com/about

Defusing the Nuclear Threat (Stanford Univ.)

Professor Martin Hellman, who helped build the anti-nuclear group Beyond War, is trying to start a Stanford University effort that will go global.
http://nuclearrisk.org

Charter for Compassion
A call to a principle embraced by every faith, and by every moral code. It is
often referred to as The Golden Rule.
Started by Karen Armstrong, a historian of religion. Announced February 28, 2008 when she won the TED Prize, and unveiled on Nov. 12, 2009. Well over 150,000 people from over 180 countries participated in the course of the six week discussion period.
Twitter: @TheCharter 3.346 followers
http://charterforcompassion.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_for_Compassion


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(Disclosure: I'm on-board with a number of these: I helped start Transition Town Asheville in December 2006 w/ two others; am recently part of the Great Transition Institute network; & am recently part of some Four Years. Go working groups. I also helped found the US Citizen's Network for the 1992 Earth Summit, and got started with all this by reading the Population Bomb in 1970 after the first Earth Day.)