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Revision as of 02:34, 11 December 2022
It's all 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
Ein Mensch ist ein räumlich und zeitlich beschränktes Stück des Ganzen, was wir „Universum“ nennen. Er erlebt sich und sein Fühlen als abgetrennt gegenüber dem Rest, eine optische Täuschung seines Bewusstseins. Das Streben nach Befreiung von dieser Fesselung [or Täuschung] ist der einzige Gegenstand wirklicher Religion. Nicht das Nähren der Illusion sondern nur ihre Überwindung gibt uns das erreichbare Maß inneren Friedens.
○ "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."
And additional translation into English from the original German:
○ "A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion. Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace."
- Einstein: "We are Of the Whole of the 'Universe'
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Evogeneao.com
Evogeneao supports the teaching of evolution by emphasizing its greatest lesson: LIFE ON EARTH IS ONE BIG EXTENDED FAMILY! Every human being is related genealogically not just to all other humans, but to all other living things. And not only organisms living today, but to everything that has ever lived. This view of life can be thought of as 'Evolutionary Genealogy'. Evogeneao (pronounced "ee-voh-gee-nee-oh") is a play on this term.
The Tree of Life
To illustrate evolution, explore the Evogeneao Tree of Life.
https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png
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GreenPolicy360 Siterunner/SJS:
The values foundation of the founding Green Platform in the U.S., that was carried forward into a 'Common Ground' platform with the European Green parties and into the first Global Charter of Green parties was a reflection of core Green values. In the start up days of the Green Party as it began to grow into a global political party and movement the ideas of connection were sown in innumerable means and ways across borders. We called these values of connection 'Key Values' and the 'Four Pillars' as new Greens were endeavoring to build values-based multi-types of diverse green organizing initiatives.
Here, as a principal drafter of the founding U.S. Green Platform, I again point to Charlene Spretnak and her work in the 1980s, the women who set in motion a set of values, a beginning to 'out in front' Green Politics. Charlene was being and becoming a 'Planet Citizen', although she did not call herself one at that time. My introduction to Charlene changed and deepened the writing of original Green platforms, our values, our positions and policies that followed with integrity, and our calls to action.
Today as we move forward, we look to science, expansion of rights and our accompanying responsibilities, the dynamic change surrounding us that we observe, acknowledge and must act upon, and our connections that bring our world together.
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An epiphany of nature
- Nature's Way, "It's All Connected"
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/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.
Listen to the Ancient Wisdom, eco- not ego-centric thinking, a Children's Agenda, Grandchildren, Seventh-Generation vision, preserving and protecting Life on Earth
...laws around the world are based on a flawed logic that became popular during the Industrial Revolution, perhaps best characterized by Francis Bacon’s late-16th-century notion that nature should be “tortured” or “put on the rack” to reveal her secrets. That logic assumes that human beings are separate from and superior to nature. But modern science disproves that idea. Quantum physics shows that the universe is a singular whole composed of many interconnected parts, and Cullinan often compares humanity to one leaf on a tree of life. Still, legal systems remain mired in thinking like Bacon’s, and that, he says, has led to the world’s growing ecological peril...
"We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs, to make sure and to make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come...."
"What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?"
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Preserving & Protecting Life on Earth
With GreenPolicy360, we are envisioning an eco-politics, eco-nomics, connection and community.
"All living things have an intrinsic value, and each plays a unique role in the complex web of life. We must work together to protect endangered and threatened species."
- • April 22nd, Earth Day / https://www.earthday.org/campaigns/endangered-species/earthday2019
Siterunner / All Species projects build a sense of community while reestablishing our connection to the natural world.
GARY SNYDER, in his book "The Practice of the Wild", talks about riding in a pickup truck in Australia with an aborigine. As they were traveling along, the man was telling stories at an 'amazing pace, too fast for them to be told properly'. Snyder wonders why the hyperactive story-telling. He finally discovers that important knowledge of the man's tribe is recited as the tribe moves along in the bush. Each feature of the landscape relates to a specific story or part of a story.
At the speed of a moving pickup, of course, the stories had to be told faster....
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.
Climate change, global warming are transnational challenges: Climate change solutions must be transnational
Understand we are indivisible and greenhouse gas emissions pumped into our atmosphere impact us all
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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GreenPolicy360 Siterunner:
As a quick look inside the drafting of the founding Green Platform of the U.S. Green Party -- and its extensions -- I should again talk about the Earth System Science/Complex Systems Science work of the Santa Fe Institute over the years. Its work, ideas, science advances had a profound impact on your siterunner's work with Green values, positions, polices and inter-relationship within a green perspective... small to large...
Small to Large, Top to Bottom
From the large charismatic species to the small and unseen micro-organisms, the living world is integrally connected
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“With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live."
-- Sylvie Earle
"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
"Tiny blue-green"... essential to preserving life on the planet.
- The Unseen and the Seen
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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
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"From up here it is surprisingly obvious, our world is one connected system" -- Astro Alexander Gerst"
- Your Moment to Become a Planet Citizen
GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: With our associate, Strategic Demands, we have moved into international relations.
It's all related / Security is indivisible
New Definitions of National Security
New Visions of Security in a Changing World
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Why We Need to Rethink Climate Change / Podcast with Timothy Morton
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'Key Values', a Green Party Vision, a Whole Earth Ecology & Politics
Integral Reality & Relational Reality
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We are stardust...
"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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Significant -- https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Stardust_Origins
A Humble Moment to Consider Our Species' Place in the Universe
"Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together--surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
"Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
That Dot: We Are Significant
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
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- Anthropocene
- Atmospheric Science
- Biodiversity
- Biogeosciences
- Bioneers
- Biosphere
- Climate Change
- Climate Policy
- Earth Science
- Earth System Science
- Ecology Studies
- EOS eco Operating System
- Eco-Spirituality
- Environmental Protection
- Environmental Security
- Green Politics
- Green Values
- Microbiology
- Microorganism
- Nature
- New Definitions of National Security
- Ocean Ecosystem
- Planet Citizen
- Planet Citizens
- Planet Citizens, Planet Scientists
- Resilience
- Seventh Generation Sustainability
- Strategic Demands
- Sustainability
- Sustainability Policies
- Whole Earth
- Wildlife