It's All Related

Integral Ecology

 

Everything is connected -- It's all related

○ "Our separation from each other is an optical illusion... Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.” -- Albert Einstein

○ "A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons close to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from our prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all humanity and the whole of nature in its beauty." -- Albert Einstein

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An epiphany of nature

While hiking Yosemite's Cathedral Peak, a realization dawned...

John Muir: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe... a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

Nature's Way, "It's All Connected"

"Relational Reality"

SJS/Siterunner:

Recalling the 1990s and Eco-politics

Personal memories become sign posts as we look back at turning points in life's journey.

Let's look back for a moment. Charlene Spretnak's eco-vision, "The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics" , published by Santa Fe's Bear & Company, was an inspiration for the development of a global green politics.

In the early 1990s, your GreenPolicy360 siterunner first met Charlene Spretnak and I was inspired by Charlene's writing as one of the founders of a new Green politics and a new green paradigm. Charlene and her women's group, in its diversity, brought forward a 'relational' understanding with Green Key Values (KVs as we called them).

As a key drafter of the founding U.S. Green Party platform, I worked to place key values, a "values-based politics and the concept of 'interconnectivity' at the center of a green politics that captures an interrelated view of life on earth.

We were speaking of an integral ecology and threads of a "Relational Reality". Interconnections and interrelatedness are there to see all around us if we look carefully and closely, and take time to 'be' with nature and appreciate the amazing beauty of nature. Green values can help us see and experience new, fulfilling ways of 'being'.

The real world politics of this era also witnessed new ideas in the end of a 'binary' war between Soviet Union style communism and U.S. led capitalism. The Berlin Wall's fall and collapse of the Soviet system brought worldwide openings and opportunities with immense challenges for political leaders. In my small place in the world, now on Camino del Monte Sol in Northern New Mexico, I went on to my New York Graduate New School writing in political economy. I called this macroecomic writing, ala Thomas Kuhn, "Eco-nomics". This critical thinking is a 'body of ideas' going beyond old strains of 19th and 20th century capitalism and socialism. I began multi-year serious work to develop a green economics as an alternative to business-as-usual. Sustainability, and an expanding rights agenda looking to solve environmental and social crisis, were top of mind and front of the agenda.

During this time, I was fortunate to work with Jerry Brown in the drafting of a 1992 presidential platform, and a campaign that came close to prevailing with insurgent political ideas.

With more good fortune I met Kenny Ausubel and at Seeds of Change we started up of the Bioneers network in Santa Fe. In the early 1990s, a common saying of ours was "it's all connected". In speaking of the natural biological world, we wrote of interrelatedness, biodiversity, earth science and systems, sustainability, and health. We began a publishing initiative that produced seminal books and with many threads we went on to 'bioneering' green ideas over three decades.

Relational Reality In Action

The Bioneers 30th annual conference in 2019 again brought together transformational environmental thinking.

Kenny Ausubel, co-founder of the Bioneers with Nina Simons, explained the Bioneers foundation of ideas with wonder in one of his (and our) first books, "Seeds of Change: The Living Treasure". Biodiversity was "nature's strategy of survival". Ongoing Bioneers' lessons are found in a deep, rich ecology of nature, a guide for humanity, a community, a network, a web of relationships.

Over three decades, the Bioneers have continued to explore the richness of life on earth.

Here, in 2020, is one of myriad examples delving into the web of life...

The Bioneers talks with Merlin Sheldrake about the Entangled Life

• https://bioneers.org/interview-merlin-sheldrake-entangled-life-ztvz2007/ - Article

• https://bioneers.org/interview-merlin-sheldrake-entangled-life-video-zstf2007/ - Interview

• https://bioneers.org/entangled-life-ze0z2007/ - Excerpt from the Book

Biodiversity and interconnections (sympatheia συμπάθεια: affinity of parts to the organic whole, mutual interdependence) are key to understanding the natural world, our place within it, and science from small to large, new ways of seeing that bring insight, comprehension and connection. We spoke of all species having a place, a vital role in protecting and preserving life, and how ancient wisdom needs to be recalled.

With GreenPolicy360, we are envisioning an eco-politics, eco-nomics, connection and community.

With our associate, Strategic Demands, we have moved into international relations.

It's all related / Security is indivisible

Our values-based politics looked to quality of life as an 'integral ecology' and a goal of mine in the Green founding platform was to bring forward the ideas of a world connected... an 'integral ecology'. At core, this is a concept we speak of with #StrategicDemands and #NewDefinitionsofNationalSecurity. With global security at risk, we look deeply at how global security has connections across national lines, how green ideas of connectivity have led to new visions, new opportunities, new challenges.

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QUALITY OF LIFE (From the US Green Party founding platform)

Our overall goal is not merely to survive, but to share lives that are truly worth living. We believe the quality of our individual lives is enriched by the quality of all of our lives. We encourage everyone to see the dignity and intrinsic worth in all of life, and to take the time to understand and appreciate themselves, their community and the magnificent beauty of this world.

(Excerpt from A History of Green Politics in Action)

Relational Reality, Green Values & the Green Platform

SJS/GreenPolicy Siterunner: In the early, formative years of the Bioneers, our group of 'bio pioneers' looked to nature's lessons as guides for knowledge and action. We often talked about how "It's all connected, it's all related" as we went about our organizing work, writing, and publishing. Today, Bioneers continues in its third decade. The message continues on, learning from nature, sharing lessons, wisdom that is deep and needed in our time.

In the 1990s your GreenPolicy360 siterunner brought these ideas of interconnectedness into the drafting of the US Green Party platform, and Global Green Charter. The Green Key Values (KVs) were introduced to us in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Charlene Spretnak and her Santa Fe publisher at the time, Bear & Company.

Charlene's work to bring forward the original Green Key Values was inspirational during the formative years of the green movement.

Beginning in the 1990s in Santa Fe, I set to work on developing a "serious, credible, platform-based" US Green Party. Our green politics group explored the initial Green Party roots and work of Charlene Spretnak, including the "key values" statement that was a foundation from the 1980s for the Green Party. Charlene and the women who pulled together a values foundation for the policy and positions to be developed became my own starting point in proposing then drafting the founding Green Party platform. Connectivity, as we were exploring in Santa Fe with the Bioneers, the Santa Fe Institute, St John's "Great Books" program and political strategy for organizing became a "tapestry of threads". We proposed a national Green meeting a plan that I presented for a "40 state organizing effort". The strategy was adopted, including a proposal for a new platform, a presidential campaign, a first nominating convention (in Los Angeles, the "city of angels".) High hopes were floated and incorporating extensively from the works I drew from History of Ideas study at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in NYC, became a basis for the Green platform. Tying ideas together was a Whole Earth philosophy, one of seeing a big picture, and relationships that draw us together as 'planet citizens'. Connectivity based on values, a "relational reality" became a key element as I drafted an initial platform from 1995 to 2000. The comprehensive Green platform was adopted in 2000, on the cusp of a new century and millennium, as the US Green Party was formed and in 2001 formally approved as a "national committee of a national party" by the US Federal Election Committee.

Green concepts of living systems, 'it's all related' connectedness, go far beyond Green parties. A green perspective is vital and vitally needed, a new vision for the 21st century, of common bonds, protecting and preserving life, valuing the use of science and physics and acknowledging the challenges we all face in our Anthropocene era. Planet Earth is literally "in human hands".

Earth system science and relational reality, in a values-based vision of inter-connectedness and "the Commons", now continue beating at the heart of 'out in front' green politics and global green work.

Environmental protection

Generation Green

Planet Citizen Action

Planet Citizen Vision of Living Earth

Cradle to Cradle design by William McDonough

Steven Schmidt Founder/Siterunner: In the 1990's, a Bioneers group of visionary environmentalists was organizing the first decade of global conferences having moved the original venue in the 'city of St. Francis, Santa Fe' in New Mexico to the 'city of St. Francis, San Francisco' in California. Your GreenPolicy360 siterunner was starting up publishing works for the Bioneers and staying in San Francisco, on occasion, on Green Street. The Deputy Superintendent for the Presidio national park and I would talk about how the former Army base was being converted, design principles for a people's park and how she remembered lessons of Bill McDonough, 'Professor McDonough' from her days studying architecture at the University of Virginia and Yale. William McDonough was in the process of envisioning and bringing together impressive new ways of seeing the interconnections between design and the environment, ways to build with 'smart' design principles. His Hannover design principles were, I remember, one of the first serious looks at 'relational reality' as we were referring to it in the original green transformational ecological work we were up to... Step by step, year by year, many of these original ideas became threads, both in the world of McDonough and his followers, students and clients, and among us and our friends, associates, activists and 'global green team'.

A tip of our GreenPolicy360 hat, an h/t to Bill/William/Professor McDonough, a true Planet Citizen who has created a legacy with his work, a body of thought and ideas, Green Best Practices that will continue on...

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Small to Large, Top to Bottom

From the large charismatic species to the small and unseen micro-organisms, the living world is integrally connected

It's All Connected, It's All Related

"Tiny Blue Green"

More than Meets the Eye

"A single kind of blue-green algae in the ocean produces the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take"

~ from "The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One" by Sylvia Earle

Visit:

www.tinybluegreen.com @GreenPolicy360

TinyBlueGreen

"Tiny blue-green"... essential to preserving life on the planet.

The Unseen and the Seen

The "Tree of Life" 1.0

 

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Pathways Forward, Going Green

At the Bioneers 2019 Conference -- 30 Years On & Yes, What a Trip It's Been

Looking back & looking forward... Video of memories & moments over the years

Growing Transformative Solutions, Everyday a Vision of Possibilities and Change

• https://bioneers.org * https://bioneers.org/about/history * https://conference.bioneers.org * https://bioneers.org/the-green-new-deal

Day 2 - https://bioneers.org/bioneers-2019-day-2-zmaz1910/

Activists, organizers, coalition builders step up and join in.

Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature

Kenny Ausubel @ the Bioneers ... www.bioneers.org

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George Monbiot Writes of the Big Picture, the Biggest Challenges, Survival

Only shifts commensurate with the scale of our existential crises have any prospect of averting them. Hopeless realism, tinkering at the edges of the problem, got us into this mess. It will not get us out.

Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide...

Radical action needed to confront climate change by George Monbiot @TheGuardian

Climate News @GreenPolicy360

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Your Moment to Become a Planet Citizen

www.planetcitizen.org ○ www.planetcitizens.org

 

New Visions of Security in a Changing World

Environmental Security & National Security

Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a New World by Roger Morris and Steven Schmidt

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Why We Need to Rethink Climate Change / Podcast with Timothy Morton

Earth and Space, Politics

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'Key Values', a Green Party Vision, a Whole Earth Ecology & Politics

Integral Reality & Relational Reality

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Green_Key_Values_Spiritual_Dimensions-Spretnak-1.pdf

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Green_Key_Values_Spiritual_Dimensions-Spretnak-2.pdf

http://www.greenpolicy360.net/mw/images/Green_Key_Values_Spiritual_Dimensions-Spretnak-3.pdf

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We are stardust...

Stardust Origins

"Planet Citizen" --- Planet Citizens --- Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists

PlanetCitizen --- Planet Citizens --- Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists

"Atoms that comprise life on Earth

the atoms that make up the human body,

are traceable to the crucibles

that cooked light elements into heavy elements

in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures.

These stars, the high-mass ones among them,

went unstable in the later years.

They collapsed and then exploded, scattering

their enriched guts across the galaxy.

Guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen.

And all the fundamental ingrediants of life itself.

These ingredients become part of gas clouds

that condense, collapse, form the next generation

of solar systems.

Stars with orbiting planets.

And those planets now have the ingrediants for life itself.

So when I look up at the night sky

and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe,

we are in this universe,

but perhaps more important than both of those facts

is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up --

Many people feel small, 'cause they're small and the universe is big,

but I feel big.

Because my atoms came from those stars."

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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