Please find attached the Newsletter of the United States Association for the Club of Rome - Issue n. 1 of December 2011 - "Letter from the President".

Calin Georgescu, Secretary General of the Romanian Association for the Club of Rome and Chairman of the Club of Rome - European Support Centre, attended and delivered the welcoming speech to the STRATAGEM Workshop with Dennis Meadows held on September 7^th, 2011, in Vienna.

STRATAGEM is a PC-based management training game on energy environment interactions. It was developed by Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Ferenc Toth, and Norman Marshall. The game provides an opportunity to get accustomed to the management of a complex system and to analyze the effects of decisions on production and consumption of food, goods and energy and concerning investments and trading.

STRATAGEM simulates in a simplified form the national economy of a country that has reached a stage of development like that found widely in Latin America. The game covers a time span of two generations (60 years), split in 12 periods. A cycle of the game consists of one set of decisions by the team (input parameters) and a description of the newly calculated state of affairs at the end of that planning period (output parameters).

The game contains sufficient complexity to tax the analytical and management skills of any participant. It serves to illustrate a number of important guidelines that are easily overlooked in practice when investment programs are developed to enhance the productivity of a region's energy, environmental, and human resources.

Roberto Peccei – “You have to use the ingenuity of the people”

In your speech delivered at the National Bank of Romania you said that Romania has a real possibility to play an exemplar role. Can you develop more on this statement?

Naively, we would like to have the whole world to move to the next step, to move to a sustainable pattern. But that’s not going to happen like that. It will happen in patches and it is way important to imagine that certain regions and countries will decide to be that patch. I always argued that California is in this way a patch for the United States. I can see in this way that you can do certain things that will make you an example for sustainability. How much you will achieve I do not know, that’s why I say that you have to use the ingenuity of the people. Lots of progress and best practices will come from different regions and I guess that it is better for you to develop the best practices.              

What are the means by which a country can achieve this progress?

I guess that the five missions from my father’s book “Agenda for the End of the Century” (1984) are still relevant today both at national and global level. And these are: human settlements - acceptable standard of living for the population without devastating irreversibly the environment; preserving the nature - to re-establish harmony between humans and nature; governance and society - to expand the human solidarity from national to regional and global level and to transfer this behavior to institutions and the political arena; human development - the most valuable asset to prepare for the future is the human resources; a nonviolent society - nonviolence should become one of our core values, not only at the level of human society but also in the relation between human society and nature.

Speaking of people, do you have any Romanians among your colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles?

I do actually. There are two mathematicians, one is Luminita Vese and the other is Sorin Popa, the Head of the Department of Mathematics. 

Please find attached the speech delivered by Prof. Peccei at the Conference “The Global Crisis as seen by Aurelio Peccei”, March 15th, 2011.