2007.02.03: February 3, 2007: Headlines: Directors - Bellamy: Unicef: United Nations: Minneapolis Star Tribune: Carol Bellamy writes: We need an Earth Corps to work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals
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2007.02.03: February 3, 2007: Headlines: Directors - Bellamy: Unicef: United Nations: Minneapolis Star Tribune: Carol Bellamy writes: We need an Earth Corps to work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals
Carol Bellamy writes: We need an Earth Corps to work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals
"We propose to establish an independent, nongovernmental, all-volunteer Peace Corps for the whole earth, an Earth Corps. What would an Earth Corps actually do? It would work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. They include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and women's empowerment, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development. Volunteers would work to monitor and reverse global warming, clean up polluted rivers and toxic waste sites, teach basic computer skills and business practices to the recipients of micro-credit loans, provide information and medical care and so forth. Together, working with our neighbors, and in voluntary service settings around the world, we can make a difference -- perhaps the critical difference. " Carol Bellamy was the first returned Volunteer (Guatemala 1963–65) to be confirmed by the Senate as director of the Peace Corps.
Carol Bellamy writes: We need an Earth Corps to work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals
Carol Bellamy and Eric Utne: We need a global force of volunteers
You know the Peace Corps. How about an Earth Corps?
Carol Bellamy and Eric Utne
There's increasing talk these days, in Congress and on the talk shows, about bringing back the draft. While President Bush and most elected officials say a return to the draft is out of the question, others are calling for compulsory national service, giving inductees the option of serving either in the military or in an alternative service, like the Peace Corps, City Year and Teach for America.
National service is a worthy idea -- after all, at least 30 countries, including Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Chile and Israel, require every 20- and 21-year-old to serve one or two years in either military or alternative national service. But national service is not enough. The crises we face are global crises, and they need global solutions.
We live in a time of unprecedented planetary crises -- global warming and climate change, species loss, the depletion of groundwater and fossil fuel, the pandemic spread of HIV/AIDS, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and small arms, the expanding gulf between the rich and poor, the conflict between secularism and fundamentalism -- the list goes on. These crises are coming to a head in the next 10 to 20 years. Something must be done about each and every one of them now.
We need to think beyond governments and national borders. It's time to go beyond the idea of national service, to global service. It's time to mobilize a vast, planetary force of school-age children, college-age students, midlife adults and retirees to address urgent human and environmental needs.
The scale and severity of the crises we face go beyond what even coordinated international governmental action can remedy. Millions of people, of all ages, from every nation, need to take on these crises simultaneously if we have any chance of leaving a viable planet for future generations.
We propose to establish an independent, nongovernmental, all-volunteer Peace Corps for the whole earth, an Earth Corps.
What would an Earth Corps actually do? It would work with existing service organizations all over the world to recruit and help citizens address the U.N. Millennium Development Goals. They include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and women's empowerment, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.
Volunteers would work to monitor and reverse global warming, clean up polluted rivers and toxic waste sites, teach basic computer skills and business practices to the recipients of micro-credit loans, provide information and medical care and so forth.
Together, working with our neighbors, and in voluntary service settings around the world, we can make a difference -- perhaps the critical difference.
Carol Bellamy is the president of World Learning and the former executive director of the Peace Corps and UNICEF. Eric Utne is the founder of Utne Reader magazine. Bellamy and Utne are in the initial stages of forming the Earth Corps Coalition. For more information, go to ServeYourPlanet.org.
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Headlines: February, 2007; Carol Bellamy; Carol Bellamy (Director 1993 - 1995); Unicef; United Nations; Vermont
When this story was posted in February 2007, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; Directors - Bellamy; Unicef; United Nations
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