RBF, headed by Laurance and David, made careful preparations before the crucial climate decisions in the 1980s. The RBF board now included David’s children, David Junior and Neva, as well as their cousins Abby Milton O'Neill and Hope Aldrich Rockefeller Spencer, who would later carry the family legacy forward.
The 1975 Conference Crisis and Opportunity
In June 1975, World Future Society (founded in 1966, see chapter 4) hosted the milestone conference, The Next 25 Years: Crisis and Opportunity.
The conference was organised (on commission from Edward Cornish) by Graham T. T. Molitor (1934–2017), lawyer and expert on forecasting who had worked as policy researcher for Nelson Rockefeller during his presidential campaigns 1964 and 1968 and became Research Director for the White House in 1973. It was thus no surprise that U.S. Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was chosen as opening speaker and author of the foreword to the conference book in which he set the tone of the conference, with references to his Commission on the Critical Choices for Americans:
What are the prospects for mankind—optimistic or pessimistic? Are the challenges to be met as crises or opportunities? Now is the time for thinking through our most difficult problems.
Throughout the years, the future of America has been a great concern and a constant challenge for me personally. Two years ago, I organized the Commission on the Critical Choices for Americans, composed of a group of distinguished leaders grappling with many of the questions raised at the second general assembly. The need is urgent to focus strenuous efforts on devising actions which will enable us to meet the economic, political, and social challenges in the years ahead. (Nelson Rockefeller,
The Next 25 Years: Crisis and Opportunity
)
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Other speakers included congressmen such as Edward Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The conference gathered around 2,000 people and was a great success for the Society. During the conference a number of renowned futurists discussed how the world could be united under a common project. If the perception of “a world in crisis” was more widely accepted, it would provide opportunities for creating a global civilisation with a unified global consciousness and Global Governance. (Climate change was later identified as the crisis best suited to motivate the general public to agree to the changes desired, and New Age as a means for rallying the masses.)
The conference and the conference book outlined a direction for how the ideas of the Futurist movement could be promoted. It was a vision that would lead to the Great Transformation – a futuristic utopian vision of creating a perfectly ordered world system, seasoned with equal doses spirituality and environmentalism.
Topics discussed had close connections to the concerns summed up in The Club of Rome report
Limits to Growth
. As always, population was a key issue. Drastic means of attenuating population growth were discussed, as well as the methods for altering man and the planet on a fundamental level.
Graham Molitor’s theories on how policy issues are developed and implemented had a profound influence on the strategy drawn up for achieving the futuristic goals. He stated that reality lay somewhere between crisis and opportunity, and that,
…even though we may not be doing so bad now, the point is that we can do it better. In short, mankind seeks and strives for PERFECTION.
The Molitor Model
a)
L
eading events,
so alarming that rectification by public or private policy is required.
b)
L
eading authorities/advocates
enter to champion causes.
c)
Leading literature
provides written analysis, rationale and help spread new ideas and concepts.
d)
Leading organizations
enter the fray and provide an institutional base from which the cause can be pursued.
e)
Leading political jurisdiction
implements new political solutions.
The fear of the great catastrophe would open the door to fulfilment of the envisioned Utopia. Molitor concluded that the planning of the future would need a new technique of social navigation. He answered to his own call and outlined a forecasting scheme on how things eventually would progress and how to influence the desired road to the future. To Molitor, who would later become vice-president of The World Future Society, it was a choice between chaos or calculation.
Through a better understanding of change, wiser alternatives can be selected.
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The other conference attendees, a motley crew of futurists, global planners and spiritual leaders, including several members from the Club of Rome, were already agents in Molitor’s model for the decades to come. They had been well prepared after the L
eading event
(the 1973 energy crisis) and would now help with L
eading advocacy,
writing
Leading literature,
and founding of
Leading organizations
in order to achieve
Leading political jurisdiction,
while Nelson, the Rockefeller family, and their billionaire allies, were standing ready to offer their assistance.
Ervin László
Of significant importance for the coming agenda was Ervin László, a Hungarian pianist, systems philosopher, and project leader of the Club of Rome project Goals for Global Society, which resulted in the book
Goals for Mankind (1977).
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The project was presented at the conference with its goal to “raise the problem with inner limits and their paramount role in deciding the future of mankind.”
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László, a Special Fellow of the United Nations Project on the Future, would the following years serve as a director of the NIEO-project.
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So what was László’s desired future?
László had been editor of the book
Cosmic Humanism and World Unity
(1975), written by Professor of Philosophy Oliver L. Reiser (1895–1974) and published by UN think tank World Institute (founded by lumber magnate Josef Stulman, a major financier and backer of World Future Society). Reiser’s book can be seen as the blueprint for the goals of the futurist movement. It was strongly coloured by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's ideas on the Omega Point and the Noosphere, Evolutionary Humanism, and concepts derived from Theosophy and Freemasonry.
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Reiser outlined a grandiose plan for transforming the world and creating a “Cosmic Wisdom Temple” (a World Government) with a common religion where mankind would be integrated into the technological system. He would later, together with José Argüelles, become instrumental in advocating these techno–spiritual transhumanist/eugenicist ideas where man was to be upgraded and improved to fit into the new great World Organism.
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Barbara Marx Hubbard
Another important attendee was futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard (1929–2019). She was a board member and early financier of World Future Society and has been called “the mother of the futurist movement” with her ideas of conquering space and promoting conscious evolution.
During the conference she held a mini seminar called SYNCON, using a unique method designed to bring together opposing groups and gradually working towards a “synergistic convergence” in their thinking, exploring ways to build “new worlds on Earth”, “new worlds in space” and “new worlds in the human mind”. As a part of her engagement as a Soviet–American Citizen Diplomat, such seminars were later held in Washington D.C. and Moscow. The Iron Curtain didn’t stop her ideas from spreading across the globe.
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Barbara Marx Hubbard, who credited Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with her spiritual awakening, would later describe the emergence of a new species,
Homo universalis
, through the development of new technology and human control of evolution.
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Perhaps her background as the wealthy heiress to the “Toy King of America”, Louis Marx, made her believe in human possibilities beyond what most people would regard as realistic.
In the decades following the conference, László and Hubbard would come to play essential roles in promoting these futuristic ideas to a growing New Age audience, with the threat of catastrophic climate change as a motivating force.
Laurance Rockefeller would become a crucial ally in this endeavour.
Laurance and RBF had been actively promoting the growth of the emerging New Age movement and supported organisations like Esalen Institute (founded in 1962), Lindisfarne Association
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(founded in 1972 by William Irving Thompson), Planetary Citizens (founded in 1974), and was now ready to support the new spiritual movement, with “lightbringers” such as Barbara Marx Hubbard.
Through virologist Jonas Salk, Barbara also came to meet other "evolutionary souls" who wanted to help humanity to the next level in evolution.
Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future
In 1976, Annie Cheatham, with Senator Charlie Rose and members of World Future Society, founded the futuristic think tank, Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, and became its first president
.
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A young Al Gore joined shortly after he had been elected to the U.S. Congress in 1976.
The Clearinghouse was a bipartisan Legislative Service Organisation (LSO) of the Congress, providing members of Congress with foresight into long-term challenges in the legislative process by predicting the future and offering policy solutions to create the desired development.
These ideas came from World Future Society. WFS chairman, Ed Cornish, and his wife Sally served as advisors to the Clearinghouse.
Futurists such as Jay Forrester, Dr. Margaret Mead, Barbara Marx Hubbard, and Alvin Toffler were invited for dinner talks.
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Their goal was a global shift from industrial to a post-industrial society, with an common global consciousness interlinked via information technology (like the Internet, which did not yet exist).
Toffler thought the future would require new political solutions and replacing nation states with large federations such as the European Union and international organisations such as United Nations. Toffler called this “The Third Wave.”
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Toffler’s ideas had many similarities with those of science fiction writer H. G. Wells (Fabian Society), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, economist Kenneth Boulding, and philosophy professor Oliver Reiser.
In a letter to the organisation's Advisory Committee, dated March 10, 1983, Clearinghouse president Robert Edgar listed nine proposals from a recent meeting with a group of futurists, including:
The group of futurists also identified issues believed to become of growing significance to the nation, covering areas such as
Education
;
Retraining the work force
;
National security
;
Biotechnology
;
Demographic shifts
;
Environmental problems
;
The use of space
;
Interdependence
;
Creating ‘future thinking’ institutions to alleviate crisis management
; and
Economic issues
, including the New International Economic Order (NIEO).
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Congressional Institute of the Future
In 1978, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, and John Heinz founded the Congressional Institute of the Future, a research institute under the Clearing-house. Funding came from Siemens, W. Alton Jones Foundation (Cities Service Company), C. S. Mott Foundation (General Motors), Merck & Co, IBM, and Carnegie Corporation.
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Institute members later became pivotal in anchoring the climate issue politically in the United States. In 1989 the institute also founded GLOBE for influencing legislation on a global level (see Chapter 6).
Rockefellers’ Unfinished Agenda
In 1976, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund launched The Environmental Agenda Project, in cooperation with environmental organisations under Rockefeller patronage and funding (including National Resource Defence Council, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Defence Fund, Conservation Foundation, and Sierra Club). The project was to result in constructive suggestions on how to solve environmental problems identified by the environmental NGOs as most urgent to tackle during the coming decade. The report,
The Unfinished Agenda
(1977), included 75 recommendations covering 10 urgent areas (including Population; Food and Agriculture; The Energy Economy; Water and Air Pollution).