History

The World Ethic Forum was born in the late 2010s as an initiative from Linard Bardill to explore our intra- and interconnectedness with all forms of life and how it translates into different sectors of activity. From 2021 onwards, the World Ethic Forum evolved into its current form as a global organism engaged in an initial seven-year arc of inquiry.

Origins

The World Ethic Forum was seeded in 2018 around singer-songwriter, author, and storyteller Linard Bardill. At that time, a group of engaged elders from Switzerland had started gathering out of concern for our relationship to the natural world, and a sense of civic responsibility. An attempt to bring the Rights of Nature into the Swiss Constitution failed, but the first idea of the World Ethic Forum was born of those encounters: a vision to create a body balancing the World Economic Forum and exploring an ethic of interconnectedness.

Linard Bardill negotiated early partnerships with Pontresina and the World Future Council, Selina Lucarelli joined shortly afterwards to coordinate a first event in late 2021, and Luea Ritter was invited to co-design and facilitate the experience.

Discrepancies quickly came forward between the intention to develop a truly transformative event honouring the ambition of a radical investigation into new ways of relating, and a Business As Usual format centred on prestigious keynotes and limited participation.

Serendipitously, COVID-19 yielded more time by imposing delays. In October 2021, a small gathering with core supporters – including Andreas Weber and Martin Ott – resulted in the crystallisation of a central proposition around the term Radically Shared Aliveness.

In the months that followed, the proposal was redesigned thoroughly to meet the potential of the initiative, including the introduction of the Firekeeper Circle and Participatory Action Research framework, and the articulation of an initial seven-year arc.

The Journey so far

In August 2022, the first gathering of Firekeepers, followed by a public event, marked the official beginning of the World Ethic Forum’s current seven-year journey of exploration.

Over two and a half days of intense exchanges, a process began to take shape. From then on, interactions, observable dynamics and experiences in the Firekeeper Circle revealed seven Thematic Strands. Those strands mark the key faultlines that call for deeper exploration, and shared understanding; our foci points for the work ahead. Over the course of the past years, dedicated working groups have formed around them with the aim to explore, learn from, uplift and work on collective practices and capacities for shifting the deeply ingrained patterns within these respective areas. This work honing and sharpening the respective Thematic Strands – and cross-pollinating across them – may lead to concrete proposals, offerings and invitations to a wider ‘field’ for enabling a culture of care and kinship, rooted in radically-shared aliveness.

Since that initial gathering, we’ve held a yearly public event and a yearly in-person gathering of the Firekeeper Circle, as well as regular online interactions and other associated activities. See our Event Archive for more details.

Over the period, we evolved along four main dimensions:

  • Connecting: We are primarily dedicated to building a network of people and organisations from different sectors, cultures, and nations, who contribute through their actions and thoughts to a culture of radically shared aliveness. This includes in-depth engagement with land and place and the more-than-human. Weaving this formal and informal mycelium network underpins everything we do.
  • Shaping: The path before us is one that no footsteps have yet marked. As such, we’re engaged in an ongoing and iterative design journey to sense and manifest the shape of the World Ethic Forum as an original being. In particular, we organised our working groups and established our Participatory Action Research strategy around seven Thematic Strands.
  • Enlivening. Our work demands that we cultivate a willingness to meet ourselves, reconnect with everything we are, recognise our patterns, and work with our shadows, individually and collectively. We began the inner journey to unravel deeper systemic wounds or tensions, including collective trauma-informed dynamics – listening with open ears and hearts to what a radical shared aliveness calls us to become and do.
  • Bearing. Our inquiry demands that we access deep layers of fractured relationships: in ourselves, between each other, and with all that is alive. For this, we must dare to stay with the messiness – cognitive, relational, and emotional. Together, we’ve learned to be ripped open, stay with the confusion, becoming almost a microcosm of macro-dynamics, and daring to lean into the many tensions and fractures experienced within and among ourselves.