The human community is an element of the Earth community, not the other way around.
All human endeavors are situated within the dynamics of the biosphere. If we wish to have sustainable institutions and enterprises, they must fit well with the processes of the Earth.
The ideology of industrialism, in both capitalist and communist countries, insists that modern society lives on top of nature and should rightly use and despoil the rest of the natural world as we desire— because any loss of the ecosystems is merely an “externality” in economic thought and because any problems can be addressed later by a technological fix.
We are now living through the painful consequences of that arrogant, ignorant perspective.
Many of our children suffer from accumulations of mercury and other toxins in their neurological systems, environmentally related cancer is on the rise, and our air and water are increasingly polluted. Meanwhile, our ecosystems are being compromised by the spreading presence of genetically engineered organisms.
Our houses and buildings, manufacturing processes, and industrial agriculture were all designed with the assumption of an endless supply of cheap and readily available fossil fuels. Pollution and despoiling the land were not part of the thinking.
We should however, be optimistic about the alternatives that now exist. These could be encouraged through tax policy and the market incentives of fuel efficiency.
We should also challenge the grip of the oil, automotive, and automobile insurance industries that have managed to block or roll back progress in public mass transit.
The gutting of subsidies for the railroads has meant not only fewer passenger routes but also the addition of thousands of large freight trucks on our highways, decreasing public safety and increasing pollution.
We should be committed to extending the greening of waste management by encouraging the spread of such practices as reduce, return, reuse, and recycle.
We should strongly oppose the recent attempts to roll back the federal environmental protection laws that safeguard our air, water, and soil. The health of the life-support systems— the ecosystems on our continent — is of paramount importance.
Inherent in the efficient dynamics of those ecosystems is a vital profusion of biodiversity. Therefore, the we must call for a halt to the destruction of habitats, which are being sacrificed to unqualified economic expansion. We humans have a moral responsibility to all of our relations, many of which are facing extinction because we carelessly and permanently halt their long evolutionary journey.
Let us also supports the spread of organic agriculture and the careful tending of our nation’s precious remaining topsoil.
We should support planetary efforts to slow the ever-increasing numbers of humans pressuring the ecosystems, and we must especially support the reduction of consumption of the world’s raw materials by the industrialized Northern Hemisphere.
We should be appalled by our country’s withdrawal from serious efforts to limit greenhouse gases that are contributing mightily to global climate disruption. We must strongly urge the United States to adopt an actively responsible position in this crisis and to take significant action to address the problem.
Sources: Green Party
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Green Party Platform on the Issues
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progressiveissuesblog 