Our plan is to circumvent the globe on our trusty travel tandem to talk to people about the Earth Charter, global democracy, and the concepts of Deep Democracy. The survival of civilization will depend on us learning how to live with each other and with our planet, institutionally, as well as individually.

Our tour will be in segments, beginning with the East Coast of the United States, March through June, 2003. We plan a leisurely pace, to have time to meet people in their homes and to give presentations and lead discussions at churches, colleges, and other venues. It is the global perspective that is becoming ever more vital to our survival. A ruinous globalization of economic and military empire must give way to a globalization based on the principles articulated in the Earth Charter.

In South Africa in August, 2002, President Thabo Mbeki spoke to us of a regime of "global apartheid", and others at this Earth Summit spoke of a "neo-colonialism" that is accelerating exploitation of resources and people. The "Jo'burg Memo" of the Heinrich Boell Foundation described how the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 had "launched a number of successful institutional processes" toward sustainable development, without "producing tangible global results", due to corporate globalization.

But crisis brings with it opportunity. The Earth Charter guides the way toward global sustainability, drawing on perspectives from poor as well as rich countries. Thus there are sections on "Respect and Care for the Community of Life" and "Ecological Integrity" but also on "Social and Economic Justice" and "Democracy, Non-violence, and Peace" (www.earthcharterusa.org).

Recently we helped achieve the endorsement of the Earth Charter by the Seattle City Council, as an implicit statement of global citizenship and a way to connect local to global sustainability. Our major long-term goal is democratic global governance, including a Global Parliamentary Assembly with strong participation by individuals and civil society. This is the only way that sky-high militarization and corporate globalization can be brought down to earth and kept there.

Recently we have been active in the Global Peoples Assembly Network to create a popular movement toward a Global Parliamentary Assembly. This once utopian concept is now being taken seriously. There will be direct elections to this parliament, probably only from limited parts of the world and with limited powers at first. But it is expected to gain in power over time, much like the European Parliament.

To us, Deep Democracy means citizen and civil society deliberation that makes representative democracy truly representative of the people and less corruptible. Many such concepts have been tested successfully but are not yet in widespread use (www.co-intelligence.org). Examples include citizen juries, wisdom councils, tele-democracy or e-democracy, and new methods of voting, in addition to many existing methods such as mediation and conflict resolution, stakeholder negotiations, neighborhood councils, and volunteer citizen panels.