Vision of Earth is a group of deeply engaged volunteers scattered across North America. We aim to maximize the chance that humanity survives and thrives. Our tools are primarily the creation and communication of knowledge and perspectives – particularly those that illuminate a workable path toward solving humanity’s most pressing problems. We’re keenly aware that we have had tremendous opportunities to grow and thrive during our lives. For this reason and many others, each of us is deeply passionate about helping our global society as much as we can.
Over the past decade, this team has undertaken several projects in the public interest. In every case, the aim was to study a set of compelling problems with the goal of finding a feasible and pragmatic path forward. Vision of Earth has complete independence to search for solutions that are globally optimal because it is not beholden to any entrenched interests or partisan funders. Vision of Earth’s operating budget has been provided entirely by members and supporters.
Over the last ten years, Vision of Earth’s focus has been increasingly directed toward issues of global significance. Since 2014, we have been keenly focused on strategies for evoking better coordination between nations towards global goals. During 2017, we performed extensive research and undertook systematic adversarial collaboration to create a set of ideas that we hope will help shape the discourse on global coordination – published as Ruling ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance.
Standards for our Writing
Our goal is to understand the reality of our society as it exists today, and to investigate the possibilities for improvement. Being reasonable, critically-thinking humans we will do our best to assure that our understanding is accurate and that our investigations are as unbiased as we are capable of making them.
Vision of Earth is to be a repository of knowledge about the structure and function of society. It is meant to serve as a collective perspective and a forum for discussion of issues.
1. Information should be factual and well-referenced.
2. References should be clearly displayed and faithfully represented. Do not purposely ignore opposing data, or gloss over problems with corroborating data.
3. Arguments should follow from factual premises.
Deviation from these structures for the sake of argument or perspective should be made clear.
Our History
2008: Ben Harack worked with several friends to draft Conscientious Future, an essay about building a better world.
2009: Vision of Earth investigated the prospect of nuclear power in Saskatchewan and wrote a critique of the Saskatchewan Uranium Development Partnership report.
2009-2010: Vision of Earth participated in the public sessions of Saskatchewan’s Standing Committee on Crown and Central Agencies on the subject of Saskatchewan’s Energy Future. An index and summary of our findings can be found in our piece on Saskatchewan’s Energy Future.
2012: Vision of Earth entered the Morph My City challenge, a competition to redesign part of the city of Regina. As one of the finalists, Vision of Earth presented at the 2012 National Infrastructure Summit. Following the summit, we released our full report to the public: Transforming Regina: Planning for 2040 and beyond.
2014: Vision of Earth undertook a broad study of existential risks to humanity that continues to the present day.
2016: Vision of Earth began a series of articles on the subject of Humanity’s Future in Space.
2017: Vision of Earth led the writing of Ruling ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance, which explores the great need for more effective global governance – and how that can be brought about.