Global Crises Need Global Response: It's time for an independent, non-governmental, all-volunteer Peace Corps for the whole earth, an Earth Corps.

In the fall of 1960, on the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union at 2:00 a.m., Senator John F. Kennedy challenged a group of students to face the most inconvenient truth of their time—the cause of peace—by living and working in developing countries.

He said, "How many of you are willing to spend not merely one year or two years in service, but to contribute part of your life to this country? I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past..."

A few months later, on January 20, 1961, he spoke these famous words to all Americans in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country..."

Since that time, more than 182,000 Peace Corps Volunteers have served in 138 countries, working on everything from AIDS education and environmental preservation to school construction and information technology. Many other service organizations, in this country and abroad, have arisen since then as well, like Americorps, CityYear, and Teach for America. By some counts there are now more than one million environmental and social justice organizations worldwide, most of them non-governmental.

But concurrent with this proliferation of voluntary service organizations is a proliferation of unprecedented planetary crises—global warming and climate change, species loss, the depletion of ground water 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 and on. These crises are coming to a head in the next 10-20 years and something must be done about each and every one of them now.

The scale and severity of the crises we face goes beyond what non-governmental organizations and even coordinated international governmental action can remedy. Millions if not billions of people, of all ages, from every nation on Earth, need to take on these crises personally and to address all of them simultaneously if we have any chance of leaving a planet for our children and future generations that has a similar quality of life to the one our generation has enjoyed.

But who or what can mobilize tens of millions of people to address these crises? National service of some sort, either in the military or alternative service, is well established in many countries, such as Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, Israel, and dozens more. But national service is not enough. We need to think beyond governments and national borders. The crises we face are global crises, and they need global solutions. It's time to go beyond national service to global service. It's time to mobilize a vast, planetary force of school-age children, college-age students, mid-life adults, and post-career retirees to address these urgent human and environmental needs. It's time for global understanding, global compassion, and global citizenship.

It's time for an independent, non-governmental, all-volunteer Peace Corps for the whole earth, an Earth Corps.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and Director-General of the World Health Organization, recently summed up the need for a massive, worldwide citizens' movement this way: "In our globalized world, the threats we face are interconnected...whatever threatens one threatens all. We must respond to HIV/AIDS as robustly as we do to terrorism, and to poverty and as we do to (nuclear arms) proliferation...We need to inspire greater determination to make this world a better place...we have no choice but to tackle the whole range of threats (simultaneously)...(In this way) we can all make a difference."

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 UN's Millennium Development Goals, the absolute minimum steps necessary to ensure planetary survival. They include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, 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 to people at risk of HIV-AIDS infection, 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 between the continuation of life on earth or the end of life as we know it.

If JFK were alive today he might be saying, "Ask not what your planet can do for you. Ask what you can do for your planet."

— Carol Bellamy and Eric Utne

Carol Bellamy is the President of World Learning and the former Executive Director of the Peace Corps ('93-'95) and UNICEF ('95-'05). 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 info see the website: ServeYourPlanet.org.