A new place at the table

More than anything else, the first pictures of our world as a beautiful blue‐green and white globe hanging in the eternal black space of the universe, which the astronauts brought back from the first moon mission, have hammered home to everybody the fact that this is really, for better or worse, one world. In the words of Barbara Ward, a “spaceship earth.” People have begun to realize that we live in a period of history which represents, as John R. Platt has put it, a “great world transformation.” We are no longer living in a slowly evolving, steady‐state world, but in a new kind of world where we are witnessing constantly and at an increasing rate quantum‐jump events, or what Kenneth Boulding has called a systems‐break. These shifts in global, social, economic, and technological balance are of the greatest importance to all planners. In our now hopelessly intertwined world economy, these quantum‐jump events not only influence the large multinational giant corporations, as so many still naively believe, but small, local businesses as well.