PR Straight Talk

Al Gore won The Nobel Peace Prize today. The Nobel Committee’s decision was a powerful acknowledgement of the urgency of global warming, a crisis that evidences itself by severe glacial meltdowns in the polar ice caps, and with many scientists predicting irreversible rises in ocean levels that in 50 years or less could mean catastrophe for the world’s coastal cities.

The announcement, flashed around the world today, means something else – and perhaps something connoting a certain hopefulness. It reminds me of the sense of global coming together that occurred when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and humanity palpably and viscerally experienced the words that came out of Mr. Armstrong’s mouth upon putting his foot upon the lunar soil: “That was one small step for a man – one giant leap for Mankind.”

An evolutionary next step for our species. Neil Armstrong, in that one act, represented every human being becoming extraterrestrial. Our species had lifted itself to another orb, to experience a view of the wondrous blue ONE planet – Mother Earth - that birthed it. Which was more miraculous – a sense of humankind reaching another level on its evolutionary trail – or the profound realization that our home is one world, without boundaries – proof beyond words that our separation is an illusion.

The announcement about Mr. Gore’s Nobel Prize brings to the fore, in a different yet similar way, the consciousness that we live on one planet, that we are one human family, and that the peril we face environmentally is OUR problem – not an American problem, or a European problem, or an Asian or African problem, or a Republican or Democratic problem - but our problem.

This awareness has the potential to bring humanity together, to work together, to help heal the planet, and to bring it back into balance. Technology, and communications through technology has already been creating a convergence on our planet. Humans’ ascent into outer space was one major starting point. The Internet as one powerful expression of this coming together is another. Television via satellite has created still another. A global warming crisis and a prestigious award to highlight the challenge for all of us takes it a step further. The potential exists for increased dialogue and understanding of our common problems, of our common humanity, and for a decrease in tensions that separate and divide us.

The potential exists. But there is a danger. Without a rise in an individual and universal spiritual experience of the human heart – without more kindness and cooperation – the evolution we experience technologically can take us into directions too terrible to contemplate.

We need to work together creatively and shed our competitive tribal instincts while honoring our cultural, religious, ethnic and gender diversities. We need to experience a growing reverence for all life, to work towards uplifting communication – including communications in public relations and advertising that honors and upholds a universal value system that reveres our planet as the precious home it is for all of us – and that the beauty of life, and the great positive potential for creative growth inherent in life – can be that which guides us and sustains us.

That, it seems to me, is one of the key signs of hopefulness in the Nobel Prize Committee’s announcement today.