The Green Party
and the movements surrounding it worldwide are rooted in the Four Pillars (Environmental
Wisdom, Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy, and Peace/ Non-Violence). In the United States, these the Four Pillars
have been expanded into the Ten Key Values, which are the basis for the Green
Party platform. These are the Ten Key
Values, each with a short description.
RESPECT FOR
DIVERSITY
We must honor cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious and spiritual
diversity within the context of individual responsibility to all beings. We
must reclaim our country's finest shared ideals: the dignity of the individual,
democratic participation, and liberty and justice for all.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
We must respond to human suffering in ways that promote dignity. We must
encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that promote their own
health. We must have a community controlled education system that effectively
teaches our children academic skills, ecological wisdom, social responsibility
and personal growth. We must resolve personal and group conflicts without just
turning them over to lawyers and judges. We must take responsibility for
reducing the crime rate in our neighborhoods. We must encourage such values as
simplicity and moderation.
GRASSROOTS
DEMOCRACY
We must develop systems that allow and encourage us to control the decisions
that affect our lives. We must ensure that representatives will be fully
accountable to the people who elected them. We must encourage and assist the
"mediating institutions" - family, neighborhood organizations, church
group, voluntary association, ethnic club - to recover some of the functions
now performed by the government. We must learn the best insights from American
traditions of civic vitality, voluntary action and community responsibility.
FEMINISM
We must
replace the cultural ethics of dominance and control with more cooperative ways
of interacting. We must encourage people to care about persons outside their
own group. We must promote the building of respectful, positive and responsible
relationships across the lines of gender and other divisions. We must proceed
with as much respect for the means as the end (the process as much as the
product of our efforts). We must learn to respect the contemplative inner part
of life as much as the outer activities.
COMMUNITY BASED
ECONOMICS
We must
design our work structures to encourage employee ownership and workplace
democracy. We must develop new economic activities and institutions that will
allow us to use our new technologies in ways that are humane, freeing,
ecological and accountable and responsive to communities. We must establish some
form of basic economic security, open to all. We must restructure our patterns
of income distribution to reflect the wealth created by those outside the
formal monetary economy: those who take responsibility for parenting,
housekeeping, home gardens, community volunteer work, etc. We must restrict the
size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior
efficiency or technological innovation.
DECENTRALIZATION
We must
reduce power and responsibility to individuals, institutions, communities and
regions. We must encourage the flourishing of regionally based culture, rather
than a dominant mono-culture. We must have a decentralized democratic society
with our political, economic and social institutions locating power on the
smallest scale (closest to home) that is efficient and practical. We must
redesign our institutions so that fewer decisions and less regulation over
money are granted as one moves from the community to the national level. We
must reconcile the need for community and regional self determination with the
need for appropriate centralized regulation in certain matters.
ECOLOGICAL
WISDOM
We must
operate human societies with the understanding that we are part of nature, not
on top of it. We must live within the ecological and resource limits of the
planet, applying our technological knowledge to the challenge of an energy
efficient economy. We must build a better relationship between cities and
countryside. We must promote sustainable agriculture and respect for self regulating
natural systems. And we must further biocentric wisdom in all spheres of life.
PEACE/NONVIOLENCE
We must
develop effective alternatives to our current patterns of violence at all
levels from the family and the street to nations and the world. We must eliminate
nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth without being naive about the
intentions of other governments. We must constructively use nonviolent methods
to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree and in the process
reduce the atmosphere of polarization and selfishness that is itself a source
of violence.
PERSONAL AND
GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
We must be
of genuine assistance to grassroots groups in the third world. We must help
other countries make the transition to self-sufficiency in food and other basic
necessities. We must cut our defense budget while maintaining an adequate
defense. We must promote these ten GREEN values in the reshaping of our global
order. We must reshape world order without creating just another enormous
nation-state.
FUTURE FOCUS
We must
induce people and institutions to think in terms of the long range future, and
not just in terms of their short range selfish interest. We must encourage
people to develop their own visions of the future and move more effectively
toward them. We must judge whether new technologies are socially useful and use
those judgments to shape our society. We must induce our government and other
institutions to practice fiscal responsibility. We must make the quality of
life, rather than unending economic growth, the focus of our future thinking.