Knowledge partnerships for a sustainable, equitable and stable society

Continued exponential and asymmetrical growth in both population and individual economic productivity would propel world society along a path that is environmentally unsustainable, economically inequitable, and hence socially unstable. Terrorist activity in September 2001 may be vivid evidence of that instability. Revolutionary developments in communications technologies can, however, enable partnerships among scholarly disciplines and among societal institutions to harness rapidly expanding human knowledge (broadly construed) to pursue goals in both population and individual economic productivity that would lead to a sustainable, equitable, and stable world society. Such a knowledge‐based strategy could enable us to pursue the vision of a global society in which all of the basic human needs and an equitable share of human wants can be met by successive generations while maintaining a healthy, physically attractive, and biologically productive environment. Several scenarios are presented to illustrate the promise of cooperative efforts to pursue this vision, and to highlight some obstacles to that pursuit.