Mission & Goals
The Security and Sustainability Guide“Our goal is to highlight insights from important contributions to the public body of knowledge on the condition of our planet and humanity.”
– Michael Marien Ph.D.
The Security & Sustainability Guide seeks to encourage learning about who is thinking and doing what in the broad sectors of security and sustainability, and to encourage consideration of security and sustainability goals together.
There are thousands of guides to countries and cities, as well as flora and fauna. We believe that it is time for a guide to the rapidly growing number of security and sustainability organizations. We are attempting to do just that but this is no easy matter, because human organizations are in flux, intertwined, and more difficult to classify.
To this end, the SSG identifies more than 2,500 organizations that are explicitly or implicitly working to achieve one or more of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals regarding climate, oceans, forests, hunger, poverty, inequality, education, etc.
Why Security and Sustainability?
The world cannot have security without sustainability, nor can they have sustainability without security. These global goals have expanded in their definitions, and their inseverable interconnections are becoming increasingly visible.
Progress towards long-term sustainability is difficult when nations and sub-national groups are expanding arsenals and fighting ruinous wars within and between porous national borders. Especially if one or more nuclear weapons are ever detonated by design or default—still an ominous possibility.
Then there are further complications with widespread and costly fears about cybersecurity, actions by terrorist organizations and violent “lone wolves,” economic instability and rising inequality, and devastating pandemics spawned by drug-resistant superbugs or new bioweapons.
It is quite a mélange, but all have some direct or indirect concern with national and/or global security and/or sustainability.
We believe that the fundamental challenges facing humanity and its planet are generally understated and therefore underappreciated. And the new organizations that are rising to deal with these challenges, as well as older organizations expanding their programs, are similarly underappreciated.
Message from the Principles:
We have learned a lot from preparing this Guide—about organizations that we always had only a dim knowledge of, important organizations new and old that we never knew about, and about the many UN-related organizations. In these uncertain and stressful times, we are especially excited about the many new ideas and initiatives listed here that may lead to accelerated action and progress in addressing challenging security and sustainability issues.
We welcome feedback as to important organizations that we have overlooked—doubtlessly many—and suggestions on how to make this Guide more useful and user-friendly, and how to distribute this information as widely as possible.
# # # Michael Marien, David Harries, Michael Sales
Note: Our project is a Constant Work In Progress.
This material is not copyrighted because it is a work-in-progress. If you use it—and we hope that you will—we ask that you cite our efforts in the usual scholarly manner.