Possibly the most central challenge for each of us hoping to become Citizens of Planet A is to become response-able for the future. How can we develop our internal strength sufficiently to stay focused on the regenerative future arising?

This includes learning how to negotiate competing truths in the public sphere and how to nurture our well-being in the face of deteriorating environments. 

On the other hand, if you keep company with others who can see the green shoots of a better future, this gives confidence where there was none before. Gaining and giving attention to new forms of intelligence and agency enlivens any space. Transforming our experience of living on this planet in real time.

According to the Human Givens principles, human beings are designed to experience nine essential emotional needs that help them to survive through becoming social. These are the need for: status; belonging; autonomy; connectedness; privacy; meaning and purpose; achievement; and intimacy.

We are also designed to get these needs met ourselves through the use of our given resources: the ability to remember, imagine, have rapport, empathise and observe ourselves. When our communities and work spaces are designed to help us get our needs met in balance, we create the conditions for each of us to become response-able.

Each of us experiences a developmental arc from childhood to adulthood (now understood to be fully developed at 24). Somewhat, but not entirely correlated with that are advances in psychosocial capacity for agency - we move through different responses to our environment as if on a ladder, slowly developing new ways of acting.

As children we react emotionally, putting our own wants first. As young adults we are often motivated by security and a growing ability to structure our lives. Later we can be more strategic in our relationships with others. To move into full adulthood we will also experience, at some point, a waking up to the rights of all people which will change our own ways of acting.

According to integral teaching, if conditions allow, maturity means becoming aware of these different styles of agency within us and learning to integrate them. At the same time, we can see society as made up of these same variety of behaviours, and design new ways of working to accommodate this diversity.

Increasingly people are taking up practices of training attention, developing the capacity to listen to each other and visioning. Some of these are done individually and others collectively. Mindfulness practice has grown exponentially over the past 20 years at all levels of society - from schools to business and government.

However, there is no guarantee that becoming more attentive within a culture that is itself unreflective - never questioning its own basic precepts and continuing on the same path - will make the difference we need in this moment of urgency.

Planet A offers a context for personal development practice - helping anyone developing their response-ability, to be able to take action with others doing the same.

• Study the science of emotional needs and resources (the Human Givens model is one, Damasio and Panksepp are others)

• Study integral theory, and join practitioners of all kinds at Emerge

• Identify a practice that will help you to own your own thoughts and be centred, in this age of chaos and competing theories about the future