Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the Nobel Committee:

I am writing to ask you to award the coming year's Nobel Peace Prize to key figures in the field of Sustainable Development constituted as follows:

1 - Greta Thunberg, 16-year-old climate activist from Stockholm, Sweden whose School Strike for the Climate, as well as her clarity and simple, powerful self-expression, have led her to become one of the leading voices in the world today on the matter of the climate and ecological destruction resulting from the current unsustainable model of economic growth that dominates policy makers and nations around the world.

2 - Herman Daly, former World Bank Senior Economist, widely recognized as the father of Ecological Economics, a practical alternative to the current mainstream growth economics, which ignores the limits to Earth's resources and its ability to absorb our wastes. His work spawned legions of sustainability practitioners, consultants, managers, researchers and implementation by enlightened institutions, corporations and governments.

3 - Pope Francis, for his strong advocacy of sustainable development in the face of society’s present unsustainable economic mainstream, which puts at risk poorer peoples and nations, and eventually all of humanity. He courageously returns the world's focus to the damage the current economic system is doing to people and planet. His 2015 Papal Encyclical, Laudato Si', transformed conversation, bringing into clear focus the conflict between our present unsustainable, consumptive, and wasteful economic model and the well-being of humanity and natural systems.

Herman Daly formulated and refined seeds to be planted and cultivated by a host of practitioners and teachers of Sustainable Development. Pope Francis has tirelessly cultivated and promoted the field by illuminating the need for a sustainable alternative to current development patterns that marginalize, exploit and harm people and Nature, creating inequity, strife, suffering and tearing apart the very fabric of Nature that supports all of life on Earth. Greta Thunberg is a young visionary who has struck a chord with millions of people aware the biosphere is unraveling under 150 years of nearly uninterrupted exponential economic growth.

The award of this Peace Prize is not only deserved, but will help stimulate a paradigm shift from the present unsustainable economic growth model to a sustainable one where a) improvements in the quality of life are valued more highly than increases in financial wealth and the gross amount produced and discarded (GDP), and b) wealth and well-being are more equitably distributed than with the current system that is predicated upon the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

Since the Peace Prize has only twice been shared by three nominees, it is left to the Nobel Committee how best to make the intended award. Shared by two of the three suggested nominees, it will still recognize the critical importance of truly sustainable development to world peace and the avoidance of future suffering.

This is a most timely award and I urge the Nobel Committee to consider further elaboration of why these candidates are worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize at the website NP4SD.org. I sincerely appreciate your consideration of this forward-looking Peace Prize.

**your signature**