If you want to know more

If this journey through seven valleys in pursuit of hope has interested you, and you want to know more and go further, the following are some sources for further information.

The official web site of the worldwide Bahá'í community is http://www.bahai.org. There you can find basic information about the Bahá'í Faith, learn about its founders, The Bab and Bahá'u'lláh, and what Bahá'ís believe. You can discover what Bahá'ís do, and access a Bahá'í Reference Library containing the sacred writing of the Bahá'í Faith. The site is available in multiple languages.

The Bahá'í International Community

The Bahá'í International Community represents the Bahá'í Faith at the United Nations and around the world. You can see what it does and read the statements it has presented to the United Nations at https://www.bic.org/.

National Bahá'í Communities

Many national Bahá'í communities have their own web sites where you can find information in their languages about the Bahá'í Faith and national and local activities. You can find links to their web sites at http://www.bahai.org/national-communities/.

bahaiteachings.org

This is a non-official web site with many interesting short essays on the Bahá'í Faith and its various teachings.

You can also find a short introduction to the Bahá'í Faith and some further links to Bahá'í resources on this web site.

Bahá'ís have joined with many others who share similar values to apply their spiritual principles to the practical problems in their professional areas of work.

International Environment Forum

The International Environment Forum is a Bahá'í-inspired professional organization for the environment and sustainability, with over 400 members in 76 countries. It is accredited to United Nations conferences in the science and technology major group, distributes a monthly newsletter, and holds annual conferences somewhere in the world. Its web site at https://iefworld.org is a useful source of information on ethical approaches to the environment and sustainability, and includes compilations from religious texts, reports of its conferences, and training materials on sustainable development, climate change, and rural environmental management, among others.

ebbf - Ethical Business Building the Future

Another association bringing values into business and organizations is ebbf - Ethical Business Building the Future (http://ebbf.org) with an active presence on the Internet and many international and local events around the world.

Arthur Lyon Dahl (http://yabaha.net/dahl/) is President of the International Environment Forum (https://iefworld.org), and a retired Deputy Assistant Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). He is a frequent consultant on sustainability, environmental assessment and indicators to the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, UNESCO and UNEP. He was Visiting Professor, University of Brighton, and for 13 years has taught advanced studies courses in sustainable development and environmental diplomacy at the University of Geneva and other universities, as well as on-line courses on sustainable development and climate change. He is a Visiting Professor at the European Center for Peace and Development, of the UN-chartered University for Peace, in Belgrade.

A biologist by training (AB, Stanford University; PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara), specializing on small islands and coral reefs, he has worked in the Pacific, the Caribbean and the Western Indian Ocean, and lived for many years in New Caledonia as Regional Ecological Adviser with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) where he organized the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (http://www.sprep.org). He also spent several years with UNEP in Africa. He was in the secretariat for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro 1992) and participated in the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg 2002) and the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20, 2012).

A life-long member of the Bahá’í Faith, he chose science as his field of service to humanity and the planet, and has always sought coherence between his values and his work. He represented the Baha'i International Community at the Stockholm Conference on Human Environment (1972), the UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15, 2009) and COP21 in Paris (December 2015). He participates frequently in interfaith activities. He has published over 200 papers and reports (http://yabaha.net/dahl/biblio.htm), and books including Unless and Until: A Baha'i Focus on the Environment, The Eco Principle: Ecology and Economics in Symbiosis, and, with Augusto Lopez-Claros and Maja Groff, Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The illustrations in this version of In Pursuit of Hope are photos by the author and fragments of paintings by Bahá'í artists Mark Tobey, Geraldine Robarts and Pehr.