The Ten Key Values of the Green Movement
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.
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.
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.
FEMINISM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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