RESPECT FOR DIVERSITY
We must honor
cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual
diversity within the context of individual responsibility
to all beings. We must reclaim our country's finest shared
ideals: the dignity of the individual, democratic
participation, and liberty and justice for all.
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SOCIAL JUSTICE
We must respond
to human suffering in ways that promote dignity. We must
encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that
promote their own health. We must have a community
controlled education system that effectively teaches our
children academic skills, ecological wisdom, social
responsibility and personal growth. We must resolve
personal and group conflicts without just turning them
over to lawyers and judges. We must take responsibility
for reducing the crime rate in our neighborhoods. We must
encourage such values as simplicity and moderation.
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GRASSROOTS DEMOCRACY
We must develop
systems that allow and encourage us to control the
decisions that affect our lives. We must ensure that
representatives will be fully accountable to the people
who elected them. We must encourage and assist the
"mediating institutions" - family, neighborhood
organizations, church group, voluntary association, ethnic
club - to recover some of the functions now performed by
the government. We must learn the best insights from
American traditions of civic vitality, voluntary action
and community responsibility.
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GENDER EQUITY AND COOPERATION
We must replace
the cultural ethics of dominance and control with more
cooperative ways of interacting. We must encourage people
to care about persons outside their own group. We must
promote the building of respectful, positive and
responsible relationships across the lines of gender and
other divisions. We must proceed with as much respect for
the means as the end (the process as much as the product
of our efforts). We must learn to respect the
contemplative inner part of life as much as the outer
activities.
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COMMUNITY BASED
ECONOMICS
We must design
our work structures to encourage employee ownership and
workplace democracy. We must develop new economic
activities and institutions that will allow us to use our
new technologies in ways that are humane, freeing,
ecological and accountable and responsive to communities.
We must establish some form of basic economic security,
open to all. We must restructure our patterns of income
distribution to reflect the wealth created by those
outside the formal monetary economy: those who take
responsibility for parenting, housekeeping, home gardens,
community volunteer work, etc. We must restrict the size
and concentrated power of corporations without
discouraging superior efficiency or technological
innovation.
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DECENTRALIZATION
We must reduce
power and responsibility to individuals, institutions,
communities and regions. We must encourage the flourishing
of regionally based culture, rather than a dominant
mono-culture. We must have a decentralized democratic
society with our political, economic and social
institutions locating power on the smallest scale (closest
to home) that is efficient and practical. We must redesign
our institutions so that fewer decisions and less
regulation over money are granted as one moves from the
community to the national level. We must reconcile the
need for community and regional self determination with
the need for appropriate centralized regulation in certain
matters.
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ECOLOGICAL WISDOM
We must operate
human societies with the understanding that we are part of
nature, not on top of it. We must live within the
ecological and resource limits of the planet, applying our
technological knowledge to the challenge of an energy
efficient economy. We must build a better relationship
between cities and countryside. We must promote
sustainable agriculture and respect for self regulating
natural systems. And we must further biocentric wisdom in
all spheres of life.
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NON-VIOLENCE
We must develop
effective alternatives to our current patterns of violence
at all levels from the family and the street to nations
and the world. We must eliminate nuclear weapons from the
face of the Earth without being naive about the intentions
of other governments. We must constructively use
nonviolent methods to oppose practices and policies with
which we disagree and in the process reduce the atmosphere
of polarization and selfishness that is itself a source of
violence.
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PERSONAL AND
GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
We must be of
genuine assistance to grassroots groups in the third
world. We must help other countries make the transition to
self-sufficiency in food and other basic necessities. We
must cut our defense budget while maintaining an adequate
defense. We must promote these ten GREEN values in the
reshaping of our global order. We must reshape world order
without creating just another enormous nation-state.
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FUTURE FOCUS
We must induce
people and institutions to think in terms of the long
range future, and not just in terms of their short range
selfish interest. We must encourage people to develop
their own visions of the future and move more effectively
toward them. We must judge whether new technologies are
socially useful and use those judgments to shape our
society. We must induce our government and other
institutions to practice fiscal responsibility. We must
make the quality of life, rather than unending economic
growth, the focus of our future thinking.
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