Relocalization and the Ten Key Values
While I don't think anyone involved with sustainability and relocalization would disagree with the core values expressed by the Green Party, the critique that Green campaign platforms tend to be long on idealism and tend to come up short on realism is more than a little valid. Lots of rhetoric, little actual policy. However, for anyone who believes it is more important to vote your values, the Green Party offers the only available choice today. As Eugene V. Debs said, "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it." I really can't think of any other word to use for people who think that the left-wing of the Corporate War Party can be reformed than delusional.
As a long-time Green, former candidate, and platform author for the Green Party's mayoral candidate here in Tucson last year, I was asked to develop a presentation on how the Green Party could be shown to be relevant to people's lives and the pressing issues they're becoming more concerned about.
I covered the reasons why we need to institute systemic change (the Triumvirate of Collapse), then the responses (sustainability, relocalization, and reconnecting with nature), and then how each of the Green Party's Ten Key Values completely support this response and don't deter from it in any way. This unique and systemic combination provides a political and social framework for embedding ecological wisdom, social justice, and economic equity into policy decisions and lifestyle choices. By providing resiliency in rapidly changing times, this framework has the potential to become a beacon of sanity and hope for people becoming disillusioned with the two party status quo that is currently unraveling, as it unfortunately unravels the rest of the web of life with it.
The presentation was filmed by local public access TV, and I hope to be able to make DVDs available soon. For anyone interested, I can send you a copy of the Powerpoint presentation I developed, but here are the introductory and summary remarks I made.
Introduction
The challenge of today begins with examining two questions that present us with a choice for how we want to face the future.
Do we simply assume collapse and chaos as the inevitable result of the end of a paradigm that is inherently unsustainable, whose greatest legacies are injustice, inequity, and destruction of our planetary life support system, and try to do our best to ensure that at least small pockets of humanity survive?
Or do we walk into the future with our eyes wide open, and do what's necessaary to mitigate the worst effects of catastrophe as we lay a foundation for a sustainable alternative by focusing on -- and providing the necessary support -- for the best aspects of human nature?
These questions can also be stated as: do we assume suffering is inevitable, and that we'll learn little without it (the foundation for most modern world religions), or do we finally decide that a creative, life-affirming universe provided us with the ability to do things differently? To do things in harmony with the creative direction of life on a planet from which we emerge and that provides all of our sustenence?
I'm not going to give a defense tonight on whether or not anthropogenic (human caused) global warming (more accurately referred to as catastrophic climate destabilization) is real or not. And the same goes for Peak Oil. We know that they're happening. The only scientific uncertainty is in regard to how devestating they're going to be, and how quickly they're going to slam into us and turn our nice, ordered lives upside down. How long will it be before what passes for Western civilization turns into collapse, chaos, and suffering?
Anthropogenic global warming is not just cause to worry about greenhouse gases that come from burning fossil fuels, even though this is the only angle that tends to get covered due to the misrepresentation and shallowness of corporate media -- the industrial growth paradigm is giving us deforestation, desertification, soil salination and topsoil loss, acidic oceans, shrinking aquifers, and New Orleans and parts of Alaska are slowly sliding into the sea. Hypoxia -- loss of oxygen -- is affecting large stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans which means these areas are losing the marine life that not only feed millions but which make up the very foundation of the global food chain.
No food chain, no food. You can't get any simpler, or more basic, than that.
What we can realistically do about all of this is the topic of tonight's presentation.
Summary
The possibility exists that we could become the first species in history to use our intelligence to reverse our direction upon discovering we're going down the wrong path. Instead, we're living out the definition of Fanaticism -- doubling our speed after learning we're going the wrong way.
The latter is all that's necessary to explain the troop surge in Iraq, the push to open up drilling in ANWR and other wilderness areas, and passing legislation to turn our productive cropland over to agrofuel production as food prices increase and people starve.
Relocalization provides a systemic and viable alternative to the destructive and exploitive status quo. It is a realistic process, that people can responsibly participate in, to create a sustainable future based on ecological wisdom, social justice, and economic equity.
Taking an honest look at what's really going on also gives us a couple of hooks into constituences that we wouldn't normally think of as allies in the creation of the largest cultural paradigm shift in history.
For example, in a throwaway culture where 99% of the stuff we buy is in a landfill or gathering dust in a closet within six months of its purchase, energy inefficiency and waste is equivalent to fiscal irresponsibility. Business and industry must embrace the simple fact that there is a strategic advantage to going net zero on GHG emissions because it allows them to avoid increasing energy costs and insufficiencies. Protecting the commons as the one true mandate of government is not anti-property rights. Ensuring a healthy environment provides the foundation for private property as it is entirely dependent on nature's infrastructure.
By realizing how the Ten Key Values support relocalization, the Green Party could focus a national spotlight on a realistic platform for change that addresses both the looming global crises and local quality of life issues. In fact, I'd say the future quite literally depends on it, and I see no indication whatsoever that either wing of the corporate war party has any intention of doing anything that doesn't support the status quo by taking any option for change off the table if it doesn't protect economic growth.
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June 20th, 2008
From words to action and policy
I couldn't agree more, and I find that the Greens -- as a political party -- have failed miserably to understand their role in the political system. In part because most people active with the Green Party were drawn in by the first two Nader campaigns, and in part because the rest were mostly brought in through other campaigns, most of which were never clear about the role of the Greens.
Most Greens -- I believe -- think their role is to be the most progressive political party. To be independent of corporate money, to challenge the unfair electoral system, and to put forward common sense solutions like single payer healthcare that are untouchable by whatever corporate party is in power (whether we are talking about state or national level politics). They think their role is to provide this more progressive alternative inside the electoral system.
It took me a long time being active in the party to come to a different understanding -- reading through books from 1984, seeing the futility of our "strategy", and talking to party members who were developing a deeper understanding of the work ahead.
The idea of an ecological political party is fundamentally different from every major party that's ever existed in human society. Where the Greens get boxed into being "environmentalists", the idea of an ecological political party goes way beyond this narrow box. An ecological political party must grapple with EVERY ISSUE within an ecological framework (ie, via their connectedness) -- the only holistic framework in which they actually exist. Our political system, however, splits issues into unconnected categories, where single-issue advocates can try all they want to make headway, and never get down to the root causes.
Relocalization in particular is where the ten key values come alive, and where all of these single issues can best be addressed. Community-based solutions are the key to global warming, peak oil, food security, economic security, and all forms of justice and sustainability. Of course our national level policy and global trade policy need to be fought aggressively and clearly... but simply removing federal subsidy of countless destructive enterprises would be a strong starting point for being able to turn things around locally.
We just laid down $300 billion for the farm bill -- which is subsidizing corn for ethanol, for feed to cows to fatten them up with deadly (to us) saturated fats because they can't digest the stuff, for high-fructose corn-syrup. The profitable industrial food system is then creating health epidemics that we pay extraordinary sums of public money to address, supporting a profitable private health industry which fails countless Americans. The contributions of our industrial food system to global warming are immense. We are dropping cheap subsidized foodstuffs into other countries and destroying the market for their farmers and forcing mass migration (yet we blame them for wanting to find jobs here).
And without a clear sense of the deep shade of green that makes up the Green Movement, a new shade of green has been plastered across our screens and airwaves, by polluters and profiteers like General Electric, General Motors, Chevron, and on and on and on.
The Green Party's fundamental distinction from the Dems and Republicans is that the corporate parties are wholly committed to the system of economic growth that is presently sending us to the abyss. The Greens need to get serious about enacting a true green economy, which will no longer prop up the unsustainable notion that GDP growth is a measure of achievement. We need to reevaluate progress and achievement in terms of fulfillment, happiness, and meeting people's basic needs. Our competitive individualist society is creating waste on scales unimaginable, and simultaneously destroying people's lives and the planet's vast ecosystems. And we have "successfully" exported this failed ideology across the globe.
Our bloated budgets which favor private industry over people's needs should be a clear target for the Greens. The corruption and influence-peddling that creates these budgets in the first place needs to be confronted directly. And at the same time, we need to develop the alternative agenda - filling in the gaps where our vision does not meet reality, framing new common sense policy that supports people and the planet (like taking the 299-to-1 ratio of bad-to-good in the farm bill and turning that on its head). The real work is at the local level, and as our municipal and state budgets reach breaking points, as energy and food costs skyrocket, as economic unraveling accelerates, we will be leaping into positions of government when the bureaucrats and politicians start to flee. We need to populate the local boards with ecological thinkers and community problem-solvers, run for municipal offices with bold new policies that begin to invest in our future rather than borrowing from it. We must stop the madness dead in its tracks, and start to tell another story, and commit to making that vision reality.
Please look at a recent post I added to relocalize.net:
http://relocalize.net/time_to_breathe_life_into_the_green_party
I also attached a strategy proposal from a Green-Rainbow Party member in Western Massachusetts last year, called "Relocalization: Strategy for Survival".
I think we also need to consider how we get great movers and thinkers like David Korten, Frances Moore Lappe, Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jim Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, Jim Hansen, et al, to begin to talk about the need for an ecological politics in this day and age. The sooner people recognize the limitations of our political system as it stands, the sooner we can begin to rebuild it from the ground up.
Thanks for raising these issues -- we need to get more clear, and more explicit, about where our political, economic, and social systems are doomed to fail, and the alternative systems that we need to develop.
Best,
Eli