The Challenge of Engaged Scholarship

Chapter 2.2

Scholarship as Engagement

Richard Falk

Points of Departure

My perspective on ‘New Earth’ follows the line set forth by the

volume editors: that the earth as an integrated image and reality

is imperiled by the interactive dynamics of globalization. One

result of this development is a growing and harmful human

footprint. The consequences of such circumstances is giving rise

to unprecedented risks of human disaster as well as to widely

shared perceptions of human responsibility for several centuries

of complacent stewardship of the planet. Society is being

severely challenged to come up with answers. Conservative and

restorative policies will be needed to alleviate the multiple

crises that are present in ways that are sensitive to the

imperatives of ecological justice and societal equity. In some

serious sense ‘New Earth’ entails ‘whole earth,’ that is, a

refocusing of attention to carry forward this mandate of

1

‘engagement’ in a manner that is better attuned to the ecology of

the planet, and less given over to its customary statist and

geopolitical preoccupations. In advocating such a process of

adjustment, I address particularly the question of how scholars

and scholarship might best contribute, configuring their

vocational specialties in light of this interpretation of the

holistic originality of our era that underlies this New Earth

sense of emergency.

I do this from an outlook that is skeptical about the

present problem-solving capabilities of governmental

institutions, especially when seeking cooperative responses to

challenges of global scope that serve human interests as distinct

from the aggregation of national interests. I will try to show in

the course of this chapter that only a revolution in human

consciousness can summon the political will needed to make the

necessary adjustments to an endangered planet, and that such a

transformative politics will come, if at all, from the political

mobilization of society.i Governmental institutions are too

embedded in the extremely uneven particularities of national

experience and hampered by special interests and bureaucratic

2

rigidities to have the energy and imagination needed to find

solutions unless pushed hard by the citizenry. Governmental

responsiveness to the New Earth agenda is blocked by a variety of

entrenched interests and by nationalist approaches to decision-

making. The proposed changes seem unlikely to take place without

the strong backing of a transnational popular movement that is

creative in the ways that challenge the established order in

fundamental respects. This recommended reorientation of

government is already latent in the body politics, yet until the

peoples of the world, especially the youth, awaken to its urgent

necessity, the leaders will remain at a loss as to how this

potential can be activated for the benefit of New Earth.

Scholars, Experts, and Activists

In reading Oran Young’s chapter I was deeply impressed by his

extraordinary range of contributions, especially in an Arctic

setting. He works at the interface between scholarly expert and

policy practitioner. This has meant exerting influence in a

variety of policymaking settings with respect to devising

schemes, guidelines, and recommendations associated with the

3

agenda of environmental governance. I was also interested by

Young’s sensitivity to political constraints that need to be

respected by those policymakers who seeking to be effective in

such settings. Above all, such sensitivity involves an acute

awareness of the limits on policymaking that derive from

considerations of feasibility. The acceptance of such limits will

usually require a willingness to focus on incremental and

indirect dynamics of adaptation and reform, as well as the

avoidance of harsh criticism of the powers that be. This is how I

interpret Young’s assertion that the effectiveness of an expert

in policy realms presupposes deference to what he calls ‘real

world conditions.’ Such an orientation accepts the structure of

relations as one finds them, which includes the following

features: the primacy of geopolitics in most, if not all, global

policymaking domains; respect for the constraints of national

interests and private sector leverage; avoidance of criticism

directed at the ideological premises and operating procedures of

neoliberalism (a shorthand designation for world capitalism in

the period following the end of the Cold War). The policy minded

4

expert, whatever his or her actual beliefs, must operate within

this structure to be effective.

I mention these features of Young’s work, which I admire for

its clarity, coherence, and practicality, while at the same time

situating my form of engagement in very different, perhaps even

contrasting, ways. My own form of engagement is best expressed as

‘engaged citizenship’ by which I mean an interest in affecting

the public discourse relating to the New Earth agenda,

encouraging radical critique of political, economic, cultural,

and ideological structures. I am skeptical about devoting energy

to exerting influence upon national governments as now oriented,

especially here in the United States, being distrustful of the

viewpoints and control exerted by entrenched bureaucratic and

market elites with respect to the promotion of fundamental

change. I believe that world politics as practiced is beholden,

by and large, to the ethos and praxis of ‘old earth,’ which means

the primacy of national interests as modified by the priorities

of economic globalization and its receptivity to technological

innovation. It is also may be relevant to acknowledge that my

5

academic career has not been nearly as focused on meeting

environmental challenges as has that of Young.

The policy practitioner generally functions much more as ‘an

expert’ or ‘resource persons’ than does the ‘engaged citizen.’ I

would not overstate this distinction as there are often overlaps

in both directions. I note that Young describes his own

reluctance to subsume his undertakings within the constraints

offered by membership in national delegations or groupings that

take their policy direction from the governments of sovereign

states. Presumably, he seeks the independence of an unaffiliated

specialist. In my case, I have been willing, although rarely

given the chance, especially in recent years, to offer my views

on international issues to Congressional committees as an expert

witness or to give talks at institutions associated

organizationally with the government. At the same time, I think

there is a big difference between being an expert who may

represent civil society actors, and being a radical critic that

is not often concerned with short-term incremental policy

choices, and unlikely to be consulted by the powers that be.

6

For the expert, ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ become the

principal modalities of engagement, reinforced by careful

analysis and reasoned policy assessments. In contrast, the

engaged citizen is more likely concerned with normative

dimensions of whatever problem is being addressed. As such, the

emphasis is placed on ‘ethics,’ ‘values,’ and ‘justice.’ The

overall outlook seeks what might be identified as ‘wisdom,’

invoking law, rights, experience, aspiration, and heritage to

whateverthe extent relevant. The prevailing academic constraints

on epistemological freedom create little professional tension for

the policy practitioner who is performing within the confines of

the discipline acquired during the latter stages of graduate

school and through the tribulations of faculty apprenticeship.

The engaged citizen is less likely to be so prepared to play her

or his chosen role, especially if wishing to deploy scholarship

for ‘political’ purposes and thus allowing his contributions to

stray from the objectifying mantras of ‘science.’ even in the

relaxed formats of ‘social science.’

My own stance is synthetic in the sense of accepting both

normative and scientific approaches as appropriate for seeking

7

desirable policy results, but confining my own work mainly to

normative domains, seeking a convergence of knowledge and wisdom

even if that casts to one side any prospects of short-term

influence in the corridors of power. This choice of

epistemological posture is important, however, as an indicator of

whether or not a particular person is willing to accept the

existing mechanisms of problem-solving bearing on the New Earth

agenda, or claims that only by reaching for the stars can one

hope to be relevant to the needs of the earth. My own

fragmentary experience in relevant policy domains came as a

member of the Turkish delegation at the 2010 Cancun and 2012 Doha

UN multilateral climate change global conferences among states.

These gatherings of more than 190 states were demonstrations of

the extent to which the pursuit of short-term national perceived

interests were in command. This necessarily caused the

marginalization of what might be understood as the global public

interest pertaining to climate change, which presupposed both a

global outlook and a long-term time frame. To the extent that

global public interests was treated as relevant by the

representatives of national delegations, it is was by way of

8

their rhetoric in public sessions, words often spoken with

audiences back home primarily in mind, a rhetoric thatwhich was

at odds with the pragmaticir bargaining stance in conference

rooms behind the scenes, and out of view of the media. Only in

venues set aside for NGO voices, which were located spatially and

even more so, politically, at the inconvenient outer margins of

the luxury hotels that provided the governmental delegations with

their meeting halls and lodgings.

New Earth Scholarship

In my view, the center of gravity of New Earth scholarship has

been moving in the direction of bio-politics and spiritual

renewal as vital ingredients of a restorative ecological

response.ii I find such a repositioning of outlook to be an

important part of my own engaged citizenship that has been

generated by a number of influences: participation for many years

as a member of the Lindisfarne Fellowship founded by William

Irwin Thompson, skepticism about horizons of feasibility as the

9

appropriate limit for public policy in settings that shape the

inter-governmental political landscape (including the war

system), the degree to which policy responses must defer to ‘the

iron law’ of economic growth or, put differently, media

encouragement to accept captivity within ‘the iron cage’ of

predatory capitalism as a precondition of responsible advocacy.iii

Let me explain this turn toward the spiritual and bio-

political. It is associated with a conviction borne of analysis

and experience that horizons of feasibility will not achieve the kinds

of change that seems required if we consider New Earth challenges

from the perspectives of horizons of necessity, what needs to be done

given the nature of the challenge. This gap between feasibility

and necessity cannot be closed in my judgment except by a

revolutionary or non-incremental jump that is transformational as

far as feasibility is concerned, and this will not occur without

a post-Marxist social mobilization from below.iv In other words,

such transformation depends on a populist mobilization, but not

in the Marxist form of a rising of the workers of the world. What

form is not clear at this point, although a movement built around

a New Earth synthesis would be one relevant possibility. There

10

are some examples of populist pressures based on conceptions of

necessity altering the horizons of feasibility in benevolent

directions. Among the most notable of these in the political

domain have been the liberation of East European societies at the

end of the Cold War and the American civil rights movement. In

the environmental domain, agitation against pollution often

powered by local movements as well as pressures to protect the

ozone layer in the atmosphere from chemical dissolution are

illustrative of closing the gap between what is feasible and what

is necessary.

As far as bio-politics is concerned, I have been affected by

the inability to achieve much traction in civil society on the

basis of the scientific warnings about global warming and climate

change. The resistance on the part of entrenched elites was to be

expected due to the embedded assumptions of modernity, including

the links between economic growth and human wellbeing, as well as

the pressures mounted byleverage of special corporate and

financial interests that would be threatened by the enactment of

New Earth politics. The passivity of the public is more

surprising, even taking account of the alignments between

11

dominant global media and entrenched elites, and seems to reflect

a combination of preoccupations with immediacies of the short-

runthe present and the pressures of everyday life with a kind of

widely shared cultural assumption of the modern world that if the

problems are as serious as mostthe climate experts claim, science

and technology will devise a timely rescue. Partly on the basis

of the analogous failure to take steps to reduce the risks of

nuclear warfare, I have reached the unhappy conclusion that the

species will to survive is rather weak, that is, the risks associated

with the possibilities of catastrophic happenings induce what

might be described as an acceptance of ‘a new normal’ rather than

a social demand to minimize risks.v

Narrating Citizen Engagement Prior to New Earth Agenda

Given this undertaking of depicting a personal approach to an

academic vocation in relation to the New Earth agenda is seems

relevant to include a brief autobiographical sketch. My focus is

upon what led me to an embrace of engaged citizenship. It is an

outgrowthreflects, especially, ofupon my experience as an

opponent of the Vietnam War.

12

My opposition to the Vietnam War started in the mid-1960s,

and was grounded initially on what might be called realist

calculations, reinforced by a belief that national interests even

for the United States, were better served by compliance with the

UN Charter and international law than by subscribing to the view

that the more belligerent geopolitics of the Cold War should be a

guide for policymakers in the West. I wrote frequently along

these lines in scholarly journals, debated in academic settings,

and served as an expert witness both in litigation arising from

opposition to the war and in the context of Congressional

debate.vi I was also active in the main professional association

concerned with international law (The American Society of

International Law), heading up a panel that tried to call

attention to the relations between international law and military

interventions in foreign societies.

In a move toward engaged citizenship beyond scholarly

endeavor was my willingness to chair a committee of international

law scholars that took a full page ad in the New York Times to

protest the military intervention in the Vietnam War by reference

to law governing the conduct of warfare.vii

13

As a result of this appeal to public conscience, I was

invited to visit North Vietnam in 1968 at a time when there were

growing doubts throughout the United States about whether the war

was worth its costs, and whether it was proceeding as

successfully as its most ardent supporters claimed. Going to ‘the

enemy’ during a period of war, although undeclared, was the most

radical act of citizen defiance that I had undertaken up to that

time, and was controversial given the strong emotions prevalent

in the United States for and against the war at that time. There

existed a bit of an apprehension danger that I would be

prosecuted under an old and dormant law that prohibited private

diplomacy as I was scheduled to meet with some Vietnamese

leaders. Prior to my departure for Hanoi I was informally asked

to come to the Pentagon to discuss the trip. Two fairly senior

advisors to the Secretary of Defense, both of whom later became

prominent, met with me, described their own skepticism toward the

war at its present stage, and offered to entrust a joint letter

from their boss, the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of

State to the North Vietnamese leaders if I would agree to stop

opposing the war in public. Their unstated reasoning seemed to be

14

that it would be awkward for the government to be using an anti-

war activist as a back channel contact with the North Vietnamese.

I was unwilling to do this, and hence never saw the letter, and

never regretted the decision to forego this coopting temptation.

The trip in 1968 to North Vietnam had a permanent

transformative impact upon my understanding of what engaged

citizenship meant, which came to include to a far greater extent

than earlier, what might be called ‘the imperatives of

conscience.’ In this respect to be a good American citizen for me

came to mean fidelity to conscience far more than obedience to

government fiat or even an uncritical acceptance of the patriotic

impulse to view the adversary of my government as automatically

my enemy. These reflections surfaced in Vietnam as I witnessed

the total vulnerability of a peasant society to high technology

warfare whether waged from air, sea, or land. These strong

impressions were reinforced by the warm hospitality of ordinary

Vietnamese people that had been taught by their leaders to

distinguish between the U.S. Government that was bombing their

homeland and the American people who were not held responsible.

15

I was also influenced to this day by an understanding that

the Vietnamese people were primarily fighting for their political

independence and the end of foreign control of their homeland.

The elaborate ideological justifications for the Vietnam War in

America appeared to me increasingly irrelevant. From such a

perspective it seemed not to matter whether the national

leadership of the Vietnamese nationalist movement was Communist

or not. The American geopolitics used to justify killing and

dying was tone deaf in relation to the dominant historical trend

of the period, which was moving strongly in the direction of

anti-colonialism and national self-determination. In this

atmosphere I came to adopt the outlook of the Vietnamese people

in relation to such wars of national liberation, and abandoned

the notion that the war wrong because it was being lost or that

it was not worth the effort because those Vietnamese that we

supported were corrupt and were former collaborators with French

colonialism or that better tactics might have allowed the

intervention to succeed.

My shift from being a realist opponent of the American

policy in Vietnam to becoming a supporter of Vietnamese goals in

16

the conflict was treated as irrelevant and of no interest by a

series of prominent liberal journalists who interviewed me upon

my return. Such journalists shared my hostility to Washington’s

war policies, but purely on pragmatic grounds of winning and

losing, as well as in light of their perception of a widening

‘credibility gap’ between what the rosy picture political leaders

were painting in public and the far darker realities that were

deliberately hiddenkept from the American people . From that

point onward, I became an unwelcome critic who spoke from outside

the responsible mainstream, and was no longer usable as an

expert, although in my own mind I was no less committed to the

academic life or to my primary political identity as an American

citizen, and really more valuable as a critical voice because of

joining these considerations of the heart to those of the mind.

Despite my academic inquiries into the nature of a just world

order beneficial to all people on the planet, I never was drawn

to the idea of being ‘a world citizen’ as citizenship without

community is an empty shell, and its affirmation given present

world conditions seems silly and inconsequential.viii

17

My transformational shift became evident later on when I

began to speak about crimes of war associated with American

policies in Vietnam. In this context, I had several friendly

debates with General Telford Taylor, a law professor and former

Nuremberg prosecutor. Taylor, a highly intelligent patrician

humanist, adopted the liberal anti-war view that Vietnam was

worse than a crime, it was a mistake, but in the course of doing

so acknowledged that there was a sharp contradiction between the

American demands of Nazi accountability for violating

international law in the context of World War II and American

claims of impunity in relation to willful violations of legal

constraints on the use of force in the course of the Vietnam

War.ix

In these discussions with Taylor I took the opposite

orientation: what was done in Vietnam was far worse than a

serious mistake, it was a criminal activity. I continue to

believe that this distinction is crucial. As David Petraeus’

career exemplifies, mistakes can be ‘corrected’ and then the

underlying crime of counterinsurgency can be repeated with

political enthusiasm and a relatively clear conscience. If

18

American behavior in Vietnam had been repudiated as a crime (as

well as a mistake), then it is far less likely to be done over

and over again by a country that values its reputation at home

and abroad. My opposition to the Iraq War, and after an ill-

considered initial endorsement, to the Afghanistan War reflected

this essential point.x My impulsive early support for the

Afghanistan War was based on the belief that al-Qaeda as

operating from Afghanistan, and in the fevered aftermath of the

9/11 attacks posed a severe security threat that needed to be

addressed. I am now embarrassed to admit that such a belief was

based on a totally misconceived confidence in the Bush presidency

that it was providing the public with a truthful account of the

attacks and my belief that the U.S. Government would not widen

the scope of its military objectives and war making beyond the

removal of the al-Qaeda threat.

Toward the end of the Vietnam War I engaged more directly in

activism, but within the framework of nonviolent engaged

citizenship. I participatedtook part in a civil disobedience

action in Washington that took the form of presenting a petition

for the Redress of Grievances to the Speaker of the House,

19

coupled with a refusal to leave the halls of Congress until the

demands in the petition had been met. Those who took part, maybe

75, were all adults with some public notoriety in the arts or

academia. After being arrested by polite Capitol police we were

taken to the metropolitan jail in Washington to spend the night

until arraigned the following morning. Redress was an adult civil

disobedience initiative that sought to express solidarity with

young people in the country who were facing the draft and

involvement in the war. It tried to draw public attention to the

growing opposition to a war that never could be adequately

justified legally, morally, and was rapidly losing even its

political credibility.

My other action in this period was the acceptance of a copy

of the Pentagon Papers that consisted of a vast trove of

classified government documents narrating American involvement in

Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers were given to me by Daniel Ellsberg,

a high-level RAND consultant, the Edward Snowden of his day. It

was a crime of course to release such classified material, and I

was willingly complicit by in agreeing to take possession and

refusing to disclose the source. Not surprisingly, I was visited

20

some days later by two FBI agents intent on questioning me about

Ellsberg and the papers. When I told them that I would not

cooperate because I agreed with what Ellsberg had done, they left

my Princeton home disappointedly, but politely. A short time

later I received a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury

in Boston investigating the release of the Pentagon Papers, and

when I refused to testify after being sworn in as a witness, the

judge gave me ten days to change my mind and ten days to the

government to bring reassurance that I was not the victim of

illegal wiretapping. When the reassurance was not produced, I was

spared imprisonment for the remainder of the termlife of the

grand jury, which could have been as long asup to 24 months.

I depict these forms of advocacy and defiance as part of my

efforts to combine a continuing commitment to scholarship with

this evolving idea of what it meant as a practical matter to act

as an engaged citizen. It also exhibits a different set of

choices about the nature of engagement than that pursued by the

independent expert practitioner who may be seeking comparable

goals but by other means. At the foundation of my views was the

belief that the social contract that bound persons to the state

21

in a democratic republic included the right of citizens to act

nonviolently in opposition to the state and its laws on the basis

of their conscience.

Engaged Citizenship and Scholarship in relation to the New Earth

Agenda

My connection with the New Earth agenda began quite haphazardly,

as an unexpected diversion. In the autumn of 1968 I was at the

start of a year of research and writing at the Stanford Center

for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences when I had a coffee

urn conversation with a Stanford physicist about the state of the

world. In a few minutes of listening Pierre Noyes convinced me

that the dangers posed by population increase, food limitations,

pollution, and unregulated economic growth were inclining the

world as currently organized toward terminal disaster. Being

still of an impressionable age, I altered my research plans on

the spot, explored these themes of planetary risk, and became

fully convinced that Noyes was justifiably alarmed. On the basis

of a determined effort I produced a book entitled This Endangered

Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival that did little more than

22

elaborate upon that conversation over coffee with Pierre Noyes

who later became a valued friend.

For the first and only time in my life, the NY Times came to

my rescue. Their cultural editor, Israel Shenker, commissioned to

write a story on the Center, after interviewing several of the

fellows working on a range of projects, decided to concentrate

his report on my project. As soon as the article was published, I

was flooded with offers from several leading publishers. For

reasons that would later cause me some distress, I accepted an

offer from Random House because their president, who happened to

bewas a family acquaintance, promised me William Faulkner’s

editor, a larger advance than I had ever received, and a major

publicity campaign. The book was published, but only after

friction with my distinguished editor, who dogmatically insisted

that New Earth’s problems were exclusively a result of

demographic pressure, too many people on the planet, and didn’t

approve of my emphasis on ‘the war system’ as part of the overall

problem, which included strong criticism of the global role being

played geopolitically and economically by the United States.xi

23

At this time, also, I had been involved with the World Order

Models Project (WOMP), which was a network of scholars from

around the world that was committed to work out diverse proposals

for drastic global reform. The project brought together prominent

scholars from many parts of the world, yielding diverse ‘relevant

utopias’ that were published as a scholarly series.xii The agreed

framework of inquiry affirmed several world order values:

minimization of war, maximization of economic and social justice,

and promotion of human rights. At periodic meetings, I argued for

the addition of a value associated with environmental protection,

initially encountering resistance from Third World participants

who contended that worries about the environment were essentially

motivated by rich countries in the north seeking to keep the rest

of the world poor and under developed. In the end, this objection

was overcome in the spirit of incorporating into the

environmental value the dual ideas that poverty was a form of

pollution and that environmental protection was definitely

necessary, but should be combined with the establishment of an

equitable global economic system that overcame trade and

24

investment patterns that were tilted to favor the rich and

powerful countries.

I considered both of these endeavors, my individual role as

a scholar and my participation in the WOMP project as expressions

of my scholarly life, yet at the same time reflecting ethical and

normative priorities that were departures from the neutrality of

the mainstream academic canon. As such, there existed a natural

continuity with an undertaking to take part in a small counter-

conference at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human

Environment that was a protest against the exclusion of war from

the formal work of this historice inter-governmental conference

devoted to environmental protection. Such an exclusion, which

continues to this day in climate change policy settings,

confirmed my suspicion that the global inter-governmental

mechanisms of problem-solving and policymaking were deficient

from the perspective of global public interests due to the

primacy of national interests and of Western-dominated

geopolitics. We conveners of this conference were anti-Vietnam

academics reacting adversely to the successful U.S. led effort to

keep war off the agenda in Stockholm because of Washington’s

25

sensitivity about criticisms of American tactics in Vietnam that

included destroying vast stretches of vegetation with humanly

harmful Agent Orange and other chemicals. This activism made me

aware that governments, even those that purported to be dedicated

to positive goals, could not be trusted to protect the

environment in accordance with any adequate conception of the

global public good. Such awareness remains fundamental to my

belief that the New Earth agenda will not be addressed in a

satisfactory fashion unless there emerges a powerful

transnational grassroots mobilization that is shaped by a

dedication to sustainable forms of livelihood that are to be

realized in a manner that also is responsive to the equal human

dignity of all peoples, takes account of the destructive

relevance of war and militarism, and links environmental

protection to environmental justice.

In the mid-1970s I took part in many public events that were

publicizing concerns about New Earth issues, often organized

around debates associated with the controversy generated by the

publication of the avidly promoted well-publicized Club of Rome

study Limits to Growth, as reinforced by such influential

26

publications as Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and Barry Commoner’s

The Closing Circle. At the founding meeting of Friends of the Earth

in Aspen, Colorado under the leadership of David Brower I had an

encounter with John Erlichman, then the point man for

environmental policy in the Nixon administration. Erlichman

instructed us at the meeting that the only political truth was

what one said when the TV Camera red light was switched on

signaling broadcast, and that such a reality was always needed to

be deferential torespectful of horizons of feasibility. With a

tone of contempt in his voice Erlichman went on to complain that

this conference venue dramatized the centrality of ‘the problem-

solvers’ and the irrelevance of ‘the problem-staters,’

identifying me as the embodiment of the irrelevant category. This

little incident illustrates the wide abyss separating horizons of

feasibility and horizons of necessity when it came to ecological

policy formation. It also exposed the refusal of those

controlling the political domain (as dominated by government

bureaucrats and special interest lobbyists) to protect the human

interest and global public goods, or even to undertake the more

modest and non-controversial task of upholding national public

27

goods. In these sorts of settings I suppose my identity was more

one of being a public intellectual than an activist in the sense

of taking part in events situated in public space, including

civil disobedience.xiii The essential feature of such a role is to

maintain critical distance from those exercising various forms of

power, especially governmental and corporate power, and to speak

truthfully without being overly concerned about the prospect of

adverse reactions.

My scholarly involvements in recent decades has been less

concerned with environment than with being a critic of American

foreign policy, especially its recourse to war in the Middle

East, and of continuing with my engagement with WOMP activities,

which went oncontinued until the early 1990s. I also became

increasingly involved with the Israel/Palestine conflict,

especially after being appointed in 2008 as UN Special Rapporteur

for Occupied Palestine, and with the various issues stemming from

America’s response to the 9/11 attacks.

During the first decade of the 21st century I did become

reengaged with the New Earth Agenda. Initially, as an invited

participant in a Stockholm conference, submitting a paper with

28

the title “A Second Cycle of Ecological Urgency,’ arguing that

there was a new wave of international concern, this time

associated with global warming and climate change.xiv This led

also to the formation of a four-year academic project, ‘Climate

Change, Human Security, and Democracy,’ that has been exploring

the soft (non-technical, non-economic) sides of the climate

change policy debate. It is a scholarly project that has adopted

normative goals. During this period my experience as a member of

the Turkish delegation at the UN annual meetings associated with

the UN Climate Change Framework Convention agreed upon in 1992

had confirmed the existence of paralyzing gridlock when it came

to dealing with inter-governmental diplomacy on New Earth issues.

In these settings global and transnational interest perspectives

were represented only by NGO participation, which was confined to

the outer margins of the formal events to ensure an avoidance of

interaction and displays of dissensione an absence of influence.

Overall, my citizen engagement with the New Earth agenda has

been more in the line of value-oriented scholarship and advocacy

than in the sort of activism that was characteristic of my

opposition to the Vietnam War. It provides many opportunities to

29

insist upon the adoption of a moral epistemology if we are to

develop the knowledge and wisdom to deal with the problems of the

age. Such a search for the right solutions is conditioned by a

commitment to truthfulness and respect for the uncertainties of

scientific inquiry. The New Earth agenda will only be addressed

by those who act as ‘citizen pilgrims,’ that is dedicated to

constructing a political community in the future that ishas as wide

enough to encompass the global scope of the challenges being

directed at human wellbeing. My hope is that citizen pilgrims

embarked on this journey to the future will gain political

traction with respect to New Earth priorities as their

interpretation of what is needed and what is desirable becomes so

widely accepted that it will generate a broad, yet militant,

popular movement dedicated to the coevolution of the human

species in attainablerelative harmony with its natural

surroundings.

30

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Brecher, Jeremy, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler. Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order. Boston: South End Press, 1993.

Ebbesson, Jonas and Phoebe Okowa. eds. Environmental Law and Justice in Context. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Falk, Richard. Vietnam and International Law: An Analysis of the Legality of U.S. Military Intervention in Vietnam, (New York: Lawyers Committee on American Policy Toward Vietnam, 1967).

Falk, Richard. ed. The Vietnam War and International Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 4 vols., 1968-1975.

Falk, Richard. This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival. New York: Random House, 1971.

Falk, Richard. A Study of Future Worlds. New York: Free Press, 1975.

Falk, Richard. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity,1999.

Falk, Richard. The Great Terror War. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003.

Falk, Richard Re-Imagining Humane Global Governance. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2014.

Falk, Richard and David Krieger. The Path to Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers. Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012.

Gill, Stephen. Power and Resistance in the New World Order. New York: Palgrave, 2nd ed., 2008.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Ageof Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

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Küng, Hans. A Global Ethic for Global Politics. New York: Oxford, 1998.

Lifton, Robert Jay and Richard Falk. Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism. New York: Basic Books, 1982.

Mendlovitz, Saul H. ed. On the Creation of a Just World Order. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: 1993 Reith Lectures. New York:Pantheon, 1994.

Tarnas, Richard. Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. New York: Viking, 2006.

Taylor, Telford. Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Wapner, Paul. Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Žiźek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London; New York: Verso, 2010.

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iENDNOTES

See suggestive ideas along these lines in Jeremy Brecher, John BrownChilds, and Jill Cutler, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1993).ii For diverse perspectives see Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (New York: Viking, 2006); Hans Küng, A Global Ethic for Global Politics (New York: Oxford, 1998); Paul Wapner, Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Slavoj Žiźek, Living in the End Times (London; New York: Verso, 2010).iii For my attempt to address this issue see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999). iv For differing responses see Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (New York: Palgrave, 2nd ed., 2008); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: ThePenguin Press, 2004); Richard Falk, Re-Imagining Humane Global Governance (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2014).v For discussion of nuclear realities see Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012); for more general assessment of the risk environment of late modernity, see Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2009).vi Richard Falk, ed., The Vietnam War & International Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 4 vols., 1968-1975).vii Falk, Richard. Vietnam & International Law: An Analysis of the Legality of U.S. Military Intervention in Vietnam, (New York: Lawyers Committee on American Policy Toward Vietnam, 1967).viii I distinguish my own preferred identity as ‘citizen pilgrim,’ featuring a moral and spiritual allegiance to the construction of a political community encompassing the whole of humanity. ix Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).x Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003).xi Richard Falk, This Endangered Planet: Prospects and Proposals for Human Survival (New York: Random House, 1971).xii See volume containing essays summarizing the various visions of positive future world orders in Saul H. Mendlovitz, ed., On the Creation of a Just World Order (New York: Free Press, 1995); my contribution to the

series is published as Falk, A Study of Future Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1975).xiii For a probing inquiry see Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994).xiv In Jonas Ebbesson and Phoebe Okowa, eds., Environmental Law and Justice inContext (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).