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The leaders of the Alliance for a
Sustainable Future have identified useful tools
that foster important concepts. Understanding these
concepts and adopting these frameworks can provide
leverage necessary to cause sustainability.
The Natural Step
Framework
www.naturalsterp.com Revision of four human
systems would move all societal and economic
processes toward sustainability. The four systems
involve mining (extraction), manufacturing,
ecosystem maintenance, and fair and efficient
allocation of goods. Units of commerce, from the
household to transnational corporation, can and
should employ incremental change in each of the four
systems to ameliorate eventual disaster, which
becomes more costly when postponed and when there is
also likely less means available.
The
Earth Charter
www.earthcharter.org Developed over a
twelve year democratic worldwide participatory
process to embody the best wisdom on the planet for
how humans can live together on the planet for
thousands more years. The Earth Charter recognizes
the interdependence of all systems and therefore our
universal responsibility to the common welfare of
all living now anywhere and in the future. Sixteen
principles and values provide details to the most
comprehensive delineation of modern ethics.
The
Hannover Principles
http://www.mcdonough.com/principles.pdf
In
order to design anything new with sustainability as
a criteria, this set of design principles would
serve as ample parameters.
Biomimicry
is one principle of new
design that asserts we can find in nature some
examples in particular creatures or biotic systems
that are able to do anything we could need with the
least energy and waste.
The
Precautionary Principle When there is
insufficient proof that a new chemical, process,
technology, etc. is harmless, everyone involved
should proceed with significant caution. In other
words the burden of proof should be with the
developer who stands to profit to prove that the
“innovation” will not harm life or habitat.
The
new cosmology of the Story of the Universe,
as discovered through the lens of science,
proceeding from the “big bang” roughly 13.4 billion
years ago, to the baking of elements with higher
atomic structures inside galaxies and super nova
explosions, to the formation of solar systems and
the inexplicable emergence of life, which evolves
toward greater communion and cooperation,
subjectivity and consciousness, and unity. Inside
this story of how humans came to exist, we are kin
to every other thing, and we are conscious creative
agents on the front wave of an unfolding universe.
Social Marketing applies psychological
principles used in commercial advertising to foster
changes in behavior for the social good.
Tax Shifting
and
Full Cost Accounting If these means are
adopted as policies by our political economic
system, they would automatically lend appropriate
restraints to economic growth through marketplace
activities. Current prices of commodities do not
include loss of irreplaceable resources, destruction
of habitat, increased toxic emissions that increase
illness and human suffering, and further degradation
of the ecosystems that are capable of cleaning up
the air, water, soil, and seas.
Campaign Finance Reform
– a means of detaching the political democratic
process from influence by corporate interests.
Clarifying the Vision of an Attractive Imagined
Future – When relatively affluent people (most
Americans) cannot imagine how we and everybody
else will get access to money to live with --
i.e. what kind of work will people do and who will
pay for that work? – we stall, we hesitate to get
into high gear with setting aside current
non-necessities and employing all our resources to
get to that future.
Personal transformation programs
Self-development programs generally aim to lift each
participant out of disempowering beliefs and
emotional systems that alienate us from being whole,
living responsibly, and contributing our talents to
healing some aspect of society. On-going personal
development often leads to more mature systems of
moral concern and compassion, as well as, greater
effectiveness in causing change.
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