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February 20, 1997
Dear Environmental Organization,
In 1992, 1700 of the world's leading scientists, including 99 Nobel laureates, issued a Global Warning to Humanity stating that "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course." Five years later, the United Nations, the Worldwatch Institute and the British government have emphatically underscored the point.
In a recent speech to diplomats from 100 countries gathered in Nairobi, UN Environment Agency director Elizabeth Dowdeswell said, "politicians lack the necessary sense of urgency to step back from the environmental precipice." Worldwatch pointed out that "Western governments are spending up to $500 billion a year subsidizing the destruction of oceans, atmosphere, and land." The Panel on Sustainable Development, set up by British conservative Prime Minister John Major five years ago, reported that nothing less than "a different philosophy in local and national government" will be able to avoid potentially crippling social and economic decline.
The problems are not unfamiliar: A projected doubling of world population by the middle of the next century, with 95 per cent of the increase expected in developing countries. Inefficient resource use and wasteful consumption in rich countries. A continuous increase in global emissions in all three major categories: sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. Over 1.5 billion people living now with severe water shortages, a number expected to nearly double by the year 2050.
We at V.O.T.E. Action Committee believe that the American people know that there is a great deal wrong. We know that the planetary environment is deteriorating. We know that the system is corrupt and rapidly becoming dysfunctional. We know, in the words of Ronnie Dugger, that: "we are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hireling" and that this situation spells disaster for democracy. And we know that voting, "playing with the levers every two years" as someone has described it, doesn't change a damned thing.
But we want to suggest something really radicalthe idea that the problem is not human or even corporate greed. The problem is not that forces of evil are triumphing over forces of good. Instead, the problem is precisely in behaviors and actions that seem to most of us to be optimal, legitimate, and just; in effect, the problem represents the hidden costs of making possible the American Dream.
Our survival on this planet now depends on our ability to pose and begin to answer some fundamental questions. What is the world view? What are the rules under which we operate? How do these govern our behaviors and our modes of consciousness? How do we change these rules, this world view, both of which have now become dysfunctional in terms of our survival and well-being?
V.O.T.E. Action Committee believes that it is time to stop looking at and attempting to treat the symptoms of our problems. Instead, we must realize that our problems are deeply rooted in the way we think; that is, in thought. As physicist David Bohm has written,
"What is the source of all this trouble? I'm saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. It's like going to the doctor and having him make you ill...
"The more general difficulty with thought is that thought is very active, it's participatory. Thought is always doing a great deal, but it tends to say that it hasn't done anything, that it is just telling you the way things are. But thought affects everything. It has created everything we see in this building. It has affected all the trees, it has affected the mountains, plains, and the farms and the factories and the science and technology. Even the South Pole has been affected because of the destruction of the ozone layer, which is basically due to thought. People thought that they wanted to have refrigeranta nice safe refrigerantand they built that all up by thinking more and more about it. And now we have the ozone layer being destroyed!"
The problem is really in the way that we think about the environment as natural resources and ourselves as human resources. Yet for what purpose? To whose end, besides that of maintaining the coherence of our present thought system with all its attendant ills.
If we are to avert ecological catastrophe, it is absolutely essential that we address these questions. It was abundantly clear in the recent presidential election that our conventional leaders prefer to "comfort us with clichés." Instead of addressing the critical issues of deforestation, species loss, climate change and what the Nobel laureates called "unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand," politicians spend their time studying polls and convening focus groups to determine the winning message.
This is a time for visionaries, not sycophants. V.O.T.E. Action Committee has made a commitment to align itself with one of the promising new political movements in our countrythe Green Party. Among the key values of this party are ecological wisdom, social justice, nonviolence and respect for diversity. The Green platform is, in the words of their recent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, "the most majoritarian" of any party in the country.
We invite you to join the Greens because their values and platform represent a far-sighted and radical departure from the conventional parties and because we desperately need to form an electoral alternative. If your organization is a 501 (c) (3), by obtaining and filling out a one-page form from the Federal Elections Committee, and by keeping a separate set of records, you can pursue political work of this kind. Find the people who aren't registered and register them Green. Find the people who are reluctant Democrats (or even Republicans!) and register them Green. Get political, but do it in a new way, a transformative way.
We at V.O.T.E. Action Committee stand ready and able to help you to make this kind of transition. Just contact us for the information you need.
E-mail us at vote@pacific.net
or voteaction@hotmail.com
Phone us at (415) 868-1338 or (415) 868-2868
Fax us at (415)-868-1338
Snailmail us at P.O. Box 677, Bolinas, CA 94924
The time for action is now.
Sincerely yours,
Lewis D. Seiler
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