Genesis Of H.U.P


A world spectrum of distinguished leaders has inspired and encouraged me toward fuller development of the World Public Forum. Bertrand Russell's, Albert Schweitzer's and Giani Zail Singh's words (above) speak for themselves. In 1967, I met with Robert Hutchins (founder of The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), to pursue an inquiry into ways that our human lives have become confounded with our institutional identities at the cost of our humanity, and the resulting damage we do to ourselves and Earth. This led to further communications with journalists Norman Cousins and Walter Cronkite, economist Milton Friedman, futurist Willis Harman, psychologist Carl Rogers, scientist Jonas Salk, and many other national and global thinkers and leaders, including the former president of India, Giani Zail Singh.
The Human Unity Project, and its centerpiece Declaration of Human Unity, developed from observations I made in more than four decades of traveling and interacting with the world as an explorer, geographer, anthropologist and, not least important, a human. Observing close-up people's diverse cultures and identities, I found a trove of intrinsic riches and worth in our lives as humans; yet I then observed, in my own discipline of anthropology as well as in the world at large, disturbing inattention to, and consequent distortions of, humans as humans.
Recent findings by Dr. Spencer Wells (director of the Genographic Project and geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine) suggest that we all ultimately came from one mother. Over some 100,000 years, humans (homo sapiens) evidently spread to all ends of the world, learning to live in highly diverse environments and ways, forgetting their common roots and conjuring each other as strangers, eventually as enemies. During this time, our differences hardened, habituated and institutionalized, effectively making us like orphans, disconnected from the human family from which we all originated and of which we are truly a part. Decades of search led eventually to the founding of World Public Forum (1973) and the Human Unity Project (1982), and to the coauthoring of the Declaration of Human Unity (1986).

"This is a San Francisco type of project. Human Unity supporters should know that they are welcome here and that this fair city is the best place in the world for the dream of Human Unity to become reality."
"Be it resolved that I, Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco, recognize and honor the importance of human unity and the positive effect it can have on the world and its conflicts."
-Willie L. Brown, Jr. (Mayor of San Francisco; attorney, State Assemblyman and California State Assembly Speaker).

"Mr. Eugene A. Haggerty, whom I've known for many years, would like to share with you his ideas for a [World] Public Forum. Any courtesy or consideration you can extend to him will be appreciated by me." -George R. Moscone (Mayor of San Francisco; attorney and State Majority Leader; tragically assassinated on November 27, 1978).

As the universal fact and agreement of our humanness is understood and communicated, its staggering implications progressively unfold, and our bright potential becomes apparent in countless and unexpected ways. In the process of communication itself, the nature of our communication is transformed, and conversation in its nearly infinite variety becomes a catalyst for new discovery and coordinative endeavors. In all its levels and permutations, from the most intimate human groups to the level of global human-focused communications, this "Great Human Conversation" can revivify our lives and rehabilitate the world in ways profound and simple, subtle and obvious. The Human Unity Project is dedicated to the application of our universally human agreement -and the authentic conversation it engenders -to the crucial imperatives and prudent priorities facing our turning point, for assuring the security and wholeness of all our lives and environments in this now-perilous world.