Category:Environmental Protection

Whole Earth One Connected System Astro-Gerst 2014.png

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world

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Noel Preston: On my study wall there hangs a beautiful photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 17 during their space journey to the moon. It shows Earth our home, the blue planet set against the inky blackness of space. Earth appears as a ball-like, single organism.

We are a privileged generation to have this image and, associated with it, an understanding of the cosmos in its magnificence.

But we are also the generation that is responsible for unprecedented damage to Earth‟s life systems – a system that has been almost five billion years in the making. In our time, the collision between our human story and the Universe story demands some accounting and reconciliation, as well as a revision of the narratives by which we live.

Keywords: spiritual ecology; cognitive shift; new ways of seeing; relational reality

Environmental movement

Environmental Protection, Environmental Security ... Interconnected, Intergenerational...

"It's All Related"

~ Eco-Politics, Relational Reality

~ Ecology Studies

~ Integral Ecology

"Relational Reality"

~ Relational Reality

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A Green Philosophy, Green Living

Charlene Spretnak

Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11552280-relational-reality

http://www.charlenespretnak.com/relational_reality_116771.htm

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Fritjof Capra -- Is There Room for Spirit in Science? & Charlene Spretnak -- The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics / Relational Reality

Green Politics

by Charlene Spretnak & Fritjof Capra

Relational Reality, Green Values & the Green Platform

SJS / Siterunner: It's all connected, it's all related.

"It's All Connected"

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, an integral ecology and 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. I began my green writing with an understanding of building on a strong and lasting foundation. This was a values foundation and a core set of green values, that grew to become the new platform's Green Key Values (KVs).

I was fortunate, having moved from Los Angeles in 1987, to Santa Fe, New Mexico to be introduced to the work of 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 to me.

Beginning in the 1990s in Santa Fe, I set to work on developing a "serious, credible, platform-based" U.S. 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, joined up with an political strategy that I carried over from the Brown presidential campaign of 1992. A whole earth perspective and an 'eco-nomics' were far along ib our thoughts. These core values, ideas and positions brought together 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 vision of inter-connectedness and "the Commons", continue at the heart of our green politics and global green work.

'It's all connected' is green politics, a web of life, relational reality in our world.

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Charlene Spretnak: We are part of nature, not on top

• 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

Green Values: A Green Platform Foundation

The Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the US: The 'KVs' of the Founding Platform

The U.S. Green Party "Ten Key Values"

https://www.scribd.com/doc/253446615/The-Ten-Key-Values-of-the-Green-Party-of-the-US-the-KVs-of-Founding-Platform-approved-in-Denver-CO-2000

The Ten Key Values of the Green Party of the US are often referred to as "the KVs" and act as a values foundation for the policy platform of the Green Party.

The Key Values were approved in 2000 at the national party convention in Denver, CO along with the founding national Green political platform.

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Steven Schmidt - GreenPolicy Siterunner writing to Charlene Spretnak in the Green Horizon Magazine, Fall - 2013

As the person who held a serious responsibility in redrafting the Key Values statement and changing the question format that came out of the 1984 Green meeting, I can say (and have said in numerous speeches, talks, articles and posts) that the Key Values are the values foundation on which we constructed our founding national Green Party Platform.... I often have explained our Green Key Values underpinning in speeches and in my writing over the years. The values of the Greens are a beginning point, an appropriate and a deeply held core set of beliefs that suffuse our platform... I was careful as I drafted platform language during these initial years and engaged with Greens in an extended process. I always pointed out the special, distinguishing role the Key Values hold...

Steven J Schmidt

Clearwater, Florida

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The challenge was to construct a successful model on which to build a growing, vital, U.S. Green party. The model adopted came from an unlikely place: a small state in the hinterland far from centers of power. In 1994 in Santa Fe, named after St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the land and animals, the New Mexico Green party proposed a statewide slate of Green candidates that would run a serious and credible campaign based on their founding platform. The campaign was one of the most successful independent, third-party efforts in the United States in nearly four decades and became a model for the national Green “40-State Organizing Effort” launched in December 1994, which led to the founding of the national Green platform and the first presidential campaign in 1996.

-- SJS / 2014

As I look back at the drafting of the U.S. Green Party's Key Values adopted formally as I presented them to the 2000 national Green Party Convention in Denver, along with the founding Green Party national platform, it remains for future greens, whether formally affiliated with the Green Party in the US or greens who share core values of Green parties to do their best in bringing the values and positions of green thought into reality.

The politics of the present era clearly demand the independent, future-oriented vision of green, environmentally focused 'planet citizens'...

-- SJS / 2015

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The drafting of the Key Values in the 2000 Green Party Platform

History of US Green Party Founding Platform & First Presidential Campaign

German Historical Institute / Boll Foundation

Green Parties Conference, Published 2006

US Green Party National Platform - Official National Platform

Approved in 2000 / National Green Party Convention / Denver, CO

http://gpus.org/committees/platform-committee/2000-platform/

Green Party founding platform / 2000 / PDF

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Science & Spirit: New Ways of Seeing & Being

Is There Room for Spirit in Science?

Book Review: A Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luisi

I am sure Fritjof Capra will need no introduction for the vast majority of you, as he is one of the world’s leading thinkers in systems theory, and the author of so many influential books such as The Tao of Physics -- The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter -- The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture -- The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living and Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius. Fritjof has described The Systems View of Life as “the realisation of a dream” and it has been written with his friend and long-time collaborator Pier Luigi Luisi who is one of the world’s leading authorities on the origin of life and self-organisation of synthetic and natural systems. The result is a text-book which presents, for the first time, a coherent systemic framework which integrates four dimensions of life – biological, cognitive, social and ecological.

It then discusses the profound philosophical, social and political implications of this new paradigm...

If we begin with some basics, this is first and foremost a textbook written in an academic style with numbered sections for easy cross-referencing, and is therefore targeted at undergraduate and post-graduate university students. It will of course also be of interest to researchers, practitioners and enquiring readers who are interested in discovering more about the profound shift in the scientific conception of living systems, the primary insight of which is the move from the machine metaphor of life to one where life is perceived as a network of inseparable relationships.

This primary insight looks quite innocuous in the written word, and it may be that people, in our highly-networked world, may wonder what the fuss is about. The shift becomes more pronounced when understood in terms of autopoiesis, one of the major foundations of the systems view of life, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s.

In this view, living systems continually recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. They go through structural changes while preserving their web-like pattern of organisation. Hence there is both stability and change – a key characteristic of life. Instead of thinking of “mind” we change to a conception of the process of cognition. This has developed into a rich field known as cognitive science which transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, neuroscience, psychology, epistemology etc.

- The central insight is the identification of cognition (the process of knowing) with the process of life. Cognition is the activity involved in the self-generation and self-perpetuation of living networks. The interactions of a living organisation with their environment are cognitive actions. Cognition is immanent in matter at all levels of life.

- The brain is not the only structure through which the process of cognition operates, the entire structure of the organism participates in the process of cognition. The first scientific theory which overcomes the Cartesian split of mind and matter which are now seen as two complementary aspects of life which are inseparably connected.

Part I of the book examines the mechanistic world view, not only providing a much-needed historical perspective on science, from antiquity to our modern era. Right from the start, the authors note that:

- Physics, together with chemistry, is essential to understand the behaviour of the molecules in living cells, but it is not sufficient to describe their self-organising patterns and processes. At the level of living systems, physics has thus lost its role as the science providing the most fundamental description of reality. This is still not generally recognised today.

This book can be seen as a synthesis of all of Fritjof’s previous works into one unifying framework, perhaps notably The Web of Life... it is also an integration of the last couple of decades’ scientific developments...

To read The Systems View of Life is to journey through a study of order and complexity in the living world, understanding the shift from a mechanistic world view where quantification is primary, to understanding the behavioural qualities of complex and chaotic systems, arriving at the understanding the patterns of organisation and processes of living systems.

In systems thinking therefore, “organization, structure and process are three different but inseparable perspectives on the phenomenon of life.” The problem though, for many scientists, and also people who are involved in modeling complex systems, is that they do not give these three perspectives equal importance “because of the persistent influence of our Cartesian heritage.”

There is a fourth perspective which is added to these three domains, and that is the domain of meaning. Social networks are “first and foremost networks of communication involving symbolic language, cultural constraints, relationships of power and so on.” In adding this domain, the systems view of life in extended into an analysis of power, social structures, leadership, communities and the concept of the living organisation.

A whole chapter is dedicated to the inexhaustible topic of the relationship between science, religion and spirituality. While there are frameworks such as the integral theory of Ken Wilber which make claim of being a “theory of everything”, The Systems View of Life takes a measured and contemplative path looking at the areas of agreement, and also disagreement, such as the Buddhist perspective on consciousness whereby consciousness is seen as not emerging from either the brain or matter.

The important insight in this section is the way in which spirituality is defined as something separate from religion, thereby integrating human values into the overall systems approach. This includes the concept of ecoliteracy – “our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology, or principles of sustainability” – not just an intellectual understanding, but the deep ecological awareness of the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and of the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are embedded in, and dependent upon, the cyclical processes of nature.

Since this awareness, ultimately, is grounded in spiritual awareness, it is evident that ecoliteracy has an important spiritual dimension.

The Systems View of Life examines the ecological dimension, and this includes a look at how sustainability is defined and taught, the manner in which global problems are interconnected, the fallacy of unlimited economic growth, global finance, as well as offering a number of systemic solutions to the problems of energy, climate change, industrial agriculture and biomimicry and ecodesign... Many of these solutions are technically and financially viable, the impediments are political will and the lobbying power of the US fossil-fuel industry...

The unified approach of The Systems of View of Life can contribute greatly to an analysis of the interrelations, especially as it has at a fundamental level both cognition and consciousness, a dimension which is vital in understanding the growing unrest and popular protests which are now emerging across this vast country to give just one example.

One recurrent theme discussed by systems practitioners though is the question of why it is so difficult to help people make the jump from a mechanistic world view to a networked world view.

In this new systems view of life, we have to change our understanding of living systems as machines to a view where cognition plays a role in dynamic... processes: Cognition, then, is not a representation of an independent existing world, but rather a continual bringing forth of a world through the process of living.

The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision is a book which it is hard to do justice to. For those already acquainted with a systems thinking background, there is much to contemplate, and there is of course plenty of reference material to explore in further detail for future study. For students the book provides an indispensable and I feel unequalled introduction to contemporary systems theory, a university textbook I did not have access to but would have loved to have had in the late 80s and early 90s...

Now with collaboration across governments, businesses and civil society, we can make the transition to a sustainable future, one which embraces “qualitative growth” enriching humanity and the environment with prosperity and a higher level of conscientiousness, one that truly understand the rich web of life.

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