Kebetulan ketemu majalah yang nampaknya menjadi media "Green Party" nya Amerika: nama majalahnya:
==================== *** Yes!magazine *** ==================== <http://www.yesmagazine.org/> Nama executive editor: Sarah van Gelder *** di bawah ini saya cantumkan contoh artikel di majalah itu, merupakan naskah prasaran (presentasi) dari David Korten, seorang "Green activist" di dalam sebuah acara "Green festival" di Seatle bulan April 2008 kemarin, yang judulnya: ================================== "Navigating the Great Turning: ---------------------------------- >From Empire to Earth Community" ================================== Betul, bahwa kritik David memang terutama di arahkan kepada Amerika. Tetapi tentu saja sosok "Emperial" Amerika merupakan sosok yang sebenarnya 'umum' dan juga kita jumpai pada bangsa-bangsa lainnya pula di dalam sejarah selama ini. Jadi mestinya sasaran "dakwah" tulisan ini bukan hanya kepada pemerintah Amerika. Dr. David Korten adalah seorang aktivis yang menentang kencenderungan globalisasi korporasi (corporate globalization) dengan latar belakang yang unik: -> veteran pilot USAF dalam perang Vietnam -> MBA & Ph.D dari Stanford University Graduate School of Business *** Masalah yang disorot dalam prasaran dia krisis sumber daya alam dan daya dukung lingkungan hidup yang makin terasa saat ini. Penyebabnya, menurut si penulis ada 3: (1) pola hidup konsumtif yang tidak terkendali (2) ketimpangan sosial antara pihak yang kaya dan pihak yang miskin *** dan penyebab yang paling dia soroti: (3) "Kenyataan" bahwa dunia saat ini sebenarnya bukan di kendalikan oleh pemerintah-2 yang demokratis tetapi oleh lembaga-lembaga keuangan global ... *** Tetapi mungkin terlepas fokus tulisannya, saya ingin menggaris bawahi dua paragraph di bawah ini: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >> >> We weren't born with the Empire story in >> our heads. Its not in our genes. It got >> there because it is a constantly reoccurring >> theme of the cultural stories we turn to for >> answers to our most basic questions about >> ourselves and our possibilities. >> >> It got there from the economic, political, >> and religious institutions that perpetuate >> it and reward those who serve its values by >> showering them with financial success and >> promoting them to positions of unaccountable >> power. >> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> ----( ihsan hm )----------------------------------- <http://yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2640> =================================== Navigating The Great Turning: ------------------------------- >From Empire To Earth Community =================================== by David Korten ** David Korten's presentation ** at the Seattle Green Festival, April 2008 ................ It is such a joy to be part of the Green Fest with its powerful message about the world of justice, peace, and sustainability that we are creating together. We are all well aware of the crisis unfolding around us. The day of reckoning for our reckless human ways that many of us have for decades warned would be coming is here. The future is now. Peak oil, climate chaos, financial collapse, and spreading social disintegration are all consequences of deep cultural and institutional dysfunction. The imperative to address them presents us with an epic test of our human intelligence and creativity. When I was a student in business school my professors always told us. Go for the Big Picture. If you find a problem, don't just treat the symptoms. Look up stream to find and deal with the cause. Although we face a daunting variety of problems, the big picture of the human confrontation with the reality of our Mother Earth becomes crystal clear once we step back and take a look upstream. This big picture has three critical elements. *** The first element is environmental collapse driven by our relentless growth in consumption and population. >From the perspective of our Earth Mother our human excesses have for millennia been little more than the normal nuisance one expects from children. Somewhere around 1970 we passed a threshold. Our human consumption became more than a nuisance, it began to exceed what our Mother could bear and began to threaten her very life. We see the results in climate chaos, depletion of fresh water and fertile soils, the collapse of fisheries, the erosion of denuded forest lands and melting ice caps. We are building up toxics in the water, soil, and air. We are killing our mother and thereby ourselves. We must grow up fast and accept our adult responsibilities. The implications are pretty straight forward. Remember those scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all available resources to life support. There it is the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system. No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more. Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote. How many of you have watched Annie Leonard's video "The Story of Stuff" I must have watched it a dozen times. It's a brilliant exposition of the consequences of an economic system designed to make money for rich capitalists without regard for human or natural consequences. I'll return to this in a minute. The second piece of the big picture is an unraveling of the social fabric of civilization that is a consequence of extreme and growing inequality. A world divided between the profligate and the desperate cannot long endure. It intensifies competition for Earth's resources and drives an unraveling of the social fabric of mutual trust and caring essential to healthy social function. In 2005 Forbes Magazine counted 691 billionaires in the world. This year, only three years later, it counted 1,250, nearly double, and estimated their combined wealth at $4.4 trillion. These are the people who get the big tax breaks. According to a United Nations study, the richest 1% of world's people now own 51% of all the world's assets. The poorest 50% own only 1% assets. That is why we call them poor, because they don't own any assets. When the rich own everything there is nothing left for the poor to own. A poor family wants a small plot of land to grow some food. A billionaire wants that land for a 20,000 square foot vacation home he may reside in for no more than a few days a year. Can you guess who gets the land? They tell us economic growth is essential lift the poor to prosperity. All too often economic growth lifts the yachts and swamps the naked swimmers. Most growth in consumption in recent years has not been at the bottom where it is needed. Its been at the very top among the already super wealthy. Our real resources are shrinking, but whatever resources are left, the rich can easily buy them. Speaking of billionaires and their yachts, I love the quote from one clueless billionaire commenting on the rising price of oil. "So it used to cost me $30,000 to fill the tank on my yacht. Now it costs me $60,000. Its no big deal." For the super rich, if we run out of oil, there is always enthanol. Meanwhile desperate mothers watch helplessly as their babies die for lack of food. We cannot grow our way out of poverty. The only way to end poverty and heal our social divisions on an already over stressed planet is through a redistribution of resources from rich to poor and from nonessential to essential uses. Ooops. Can't you just hear the right wing wind bags? Hey, that Korten guy, he's talking about equity. He must be a communist. ... Natural wealth was created by our Earth mother and is therefore a common heritage of all her children, including all non-human species. None of us has a right to abuse that wealth or to monopolize it to the exclusion of our sisters and brothers. ******************************************************** This brings us to the third element of the big picture: -------------------------------------------------------- the governing institutions to which we give the power to set our priorities and our collective course. We might wonder how such injustice could happen in a world governed by democratically elected governments. The answer is simple and alarming. Our world is not governed by democratically elected governments. It is ruled by global financial institutions in the service of financial speculators who exchange trillions of dollars daily in search of instance unearned profits to increase the fortunes and the power of the richest people on the planet. ********************************************************** They bring down governments that displease them, and buy and sell the largest corporations like commodities. By design and law the defining priority and obligation of these governing institutions is to generate financial profits to make rich people richer, in short to increase inequality in a world in desperate need of greater equity. To this end, the corporations rise or fall at the pleasure of the speculator, assault of our eyes and ears with advertising messages intended to get those of who are already have more stuff that we need to buy more stuff. So what does this big picture overview tell us about what we need to do? How much suffering will changing our ways impose? Well, we need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature. There can be no trade offs between justice, sustainability, happiness, and democracy. They are all inseparably linked. Does any of this agenda sound like unbearable hardship? And exactly how is a more just distribution of resources going to hurt the poor? I'm going to say a lot more about fabricated cultural stories that obscure our ability to see the possibilities before us. The story that protecting the planet will impose unbearable hardship is one of those fabricated stories. Now. Think about this. Wouldn't it be nice if it turned out the choices we must make together to survive together are the same as the choices we need to make to create the very world everyone wants? If that were true, they we should be able to just get together and make it happen. Wouldn't that be cool? Maybe we should start a conversation to find out to find out what people truly want. Actually that conversation started quite some time ago. One of the most profound experiences of my life was participating in the civil society portion of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. I was part of a gathering of some 15,000 people representing the vast variety of humanity's races, religions, nationalities, and languages. Our discussions centered on defining the world we wanted to create together. These discussions were chaotic and sometimes contentious. But at one point it hit me like a bolt of lightening. For all our differences, we all wanted the same thing: healthy children, families, and communities with healthy natural environments living in peace and cooperationand not just for ourselves. We wanted it for everyone. Out of our conversations grew our shared dream of a world in which people and nature live in dynamic, creative and ultimately cooperative and balanced relationship. The Earth Charter, which is the product of a continuation of this discussion, calls it Earth Community, I've lived in a lot of exotic places: Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Indonesia, the Philippines, even California, Florida, and most exotic of all: Washington, DC. I've experienced a lot of different kinds of people. As I reflect back on that experience I realize that for all our differences, with the exception of a relatively few people who suffer from some debilitating psychological dysfunction, we are a lot more alike than we generally realize. Most of us want to breathe clean air and drink clean water. We want tasty nutritious food uncontaminated with toxins. We want healthy, happy children, loving families, and a caring community with a beautiful healthy natural environment. We want meaningful work, a living wage, and security in our old age. We want a say in the decisions our government makes. We want world peace. This doesn't seem excessive. So far so good, but if we are really going to get the Empire story out of our heads, we need to know how it got there so we don't find it sneaking back in like that troublesome file on my computer that keeps reinstalling minutes after I thought I had deleted it. We weren't born with the Empire story in our heads. Its not in our genes. It got there because it is a constantly reoccurring theme of the cultural stories we turn to for answers to our most basic questions about ourselves and our possibilities. It got there from the economic, political, and religious institutions that perpetuate it and reward those who serve its values by showering them with financial success and promoting them to positions of unaccountable power. Profound social change takes place when an important cultural story changes and the impetus to challenge imperial rule rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire. Democracy took hold when we replaced the story of the divine right of kings with the story that the powers of government derive from the will of the people.
