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I can hardly find fault with Petersen's vision of a post 2012 world. I mean, come on, who could object to a world that is safe, equitable, cooperative and sustainable?
It's when he outlines his strategy for actually getting there that he loses me. While fully acknowledging the "political and bureaucratic roadblocks that are placed in the path of progress" he then outlines a number of requisite steps that, in my humble opinion, don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of coming to pass.
If you are not into the woo-woo aspects of 2012, then A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change might be just the book for you. Not only do you not have to contend with the Long Count Calendar, baktuns, and haabs, you won't even find the word Maya in it. Maybe that's because the book was written by professional futurist, John Petersen, who first appeared here in an earlier post on The Mystery of 2012.
Petersen is the quintessential futurist: founder of The Arlington Institute ("a research institute that specializes in...global futures"), publisher of the on-line FUTUREdition Newsletter, and former board member of the World Future Society (an organization which I helped co-found way back when).
All of the chatter around the Mayan 2012 phenomenon inevitably gives rise to comparisons with Y2K, the computer bug that was widely predicted to have catastrophic effects when the world's computers ticked over at midnight on December 31, 1999.
Of course, as in all such comparisons, there are both similarities and differences. But 2012 skeptics will most likely gleefully jump on the comparison to point out that nothing much happened then, so, ipso facto, nothing much will occur on December 21, 2012....... and they might be right......or not.
