By SYD BAUMEL

"This is brilliant! I haven't been so excited since fifth grade when I learned that the UN was starting," says Seattle animal activist Nancy Pennington. It "has caught my attention and passion like no other movement before," exclaims Australian political activist Kerri Smith. Brazilian academic Farhang Sefidvash describes it as "a wonderful way of implementing cooperation, which is the new law of human survival in the globalized world." And back in the USA, Noam Chomsky calls it "ambitious and provocative," adding, "Can it work? Certainly worth a serious try."

What is it that's generating such enthusiasm among grassroots activists and global justice gurus alike, from counter-economist Hazel Henderson ("a creative proposal to accelerate progress toward a sustainable global economy") to Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee ("what we need is politicians who will give this issue high priority")?

Something you've probably never heard of. 

It doesn't help that it has a snoozer of a name or that it's a simple, yet braintwisting, concept that gives new meaning to the words "thinking outside the box." 

"It took a long time to sink in. This is not a quick bite," says Eileen Weintraub, a Seattle animal advocate who coordinates the movement's modest Northwest contingent. "It's hard to convince others of its worth in a few words."

Ironically, the concept materialized in a flash to London businessman John Bunzl five years ago. 

"[T]he idea . . . came to me in a split second and completely by surprise," Bunzl writes in the British journal World Review. "Not, as it happens, while I was in the bath, but while I was doing the washing up after a Sunday lunch. It was the most powerful feeling I have ever experienced and left me convinced that I was not the idea’s inventor, but merely its recipient or trustee."

The idea, which Bunzl later named The Simultaneous Policy, is a Bach fugue of interlocking components: of rigorous problem analysis and an ingenious plan for solving them.

The principal problem is something global justice activists know all too well: corporate-driven globalization with nary a thought for people and planet. Its side effects include environmental destruction, global warming, unfair trade and a ballooning gap between rich and poor. It may be global, but its effects are as local as the nearest mega factory farm, corporate tax cut or boarded up family storefront. 

For Bunzl, the problem is as primal as a bunch of schoolboys scuffling over a donut and trampling it into the dirt in the process. It's a downward spiral of destructive competition when only constructive cooperation would allow everyone to have a bite. As Bunzl put it at a WTO symposium a couple years ago, it's a global rut

With a growing majority of the world's population now having the right to vote, Bunzl's brainchild is a massive international voting bloc that would tell politicians: boys, don't fight, cooperate, or we won't vote for you!

The Simultaneous Policy (SP) would tell politicians exactly how we the people want them to cooperate. Any person who adopts SP by filling out a simple form (available on the SP website at simpol.org) can join with expert policymakers - individuals and NGOs - in drafting the contents of SP: the international laws and regulations that single nations dare not pass alone for fear of putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage in the cutthroat global economy.

But how to get our insecure, bickering nations to bite? How to get them to sign on to SP's program to globalize the social, economic and ecological values most of us - even politicians and not a few CEOs - hold dear?

Bunzl's answer? Make politicians an offer they can't refuse:

Bunzl, who has been reality-testing his baby with brainy global problem-solvers like Henderson, Helena Norberg-Hodge and Ed Mayo since 1999, seems to have a reasonable answer for everything, whether in his 2001 book The Simultaneous Policy: An Insider's Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet, the SP website at simpol.org, or the SP listservs where the 46-year-old family man never tires of fielding queries and thinking aloud with other adopters. He readily acknowledges that the success of SP depends on a providential synergy of factors - mass voter adoption, mass political party adoption, mass media attention, among others. But, like Chomsky, Bunzl believes it just might work. And besides, "If we don't try, we'll never find out."

Last November, PoliticsOnline was impressed enough to include the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation in its annual "Top 25 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics." Although the total number of SP adopters is still small, they're fittingly international, representing over twenty developed and developing nations on five continents. This year the first few national SP organizations are expected to incorporate, starting with "Simpol UK." Their mission will be to campaign locally to change the world globally.

For Weintraub, SP is heir to Seattle. "I came to SP as a way for Seattle folks to enter the global dialogue they started during the WTO '99 protests. Powerful and transformative ideas are beginning to be shared the world over." SP, she thinks, could turn those ideas into reality.