Speaker
Robert Atkinson
The Way of Unity: Building a Worldwide Enterprise for Flourishing Communities and Planetary Well-Being
Bio
Robert Atkinson, PhD, is a developmental psychologist, educator, and four-time Nautilus Book Award-winning author whose work bridges storytelling, human development, and the evolution of consciousness. His latest book, The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace, offers a framework and study guide for collective progress; earlier titles include Our Moment of Choice, A New Story of Wholeness, and The Story of Our Time. Professor emeritus at the University of Southern Maine and a recognized authority on life-story interviewing, he directs StoryCommons and founded the One Planet Peace Forum.
The big questions
The kind of questions this session opens up.
- We keep calling “us versus them” human nature. What if it is only a habit we have not outgrown yet?
- If humanity is, in the deepest sense, one, why does almost every system we have built assume the opposite?
- What becomes possible the moment a civilization stops treating cooperation as weakness?
- Is human oneness a comforting idea, or the most practical one we have been too afraid to act on?