3

Basic respect and appreciation of and love for the natural environment

Deeper Eco-Spirituality

Comprehension and respect for biodiversity in stability of symbiosis

Comprehension and respect for ecosystems as fragile habitats

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Deep-seated ‘Green Lifestyle’:

 Are We Ready for It?

By Kamayan Forum Journal

Editorial of the Kamayan Forum Journal, issue no. 68, October 2007

THE “GREEN LIFESTYLE” is for everyone who is ready for it. Are you among them? Are we? You’d be surprised that most of us still need to be reminded of its complete basics, especially the part that usually gets discussed the least: the Inconvenient Truth about the deepest of the basics: the oneness of all life on Earth, called the “Gaia Phenomenon,” where the planet itself is behaving, according to scientists, like one single organism. All plants and animals together are dynamically interdependent as part of the greater Oneness of All. Without full consciousness of this, the Green Lifestyle is in danger of fizzling out like the hollow fads that Humanity once had.

Well, we all feel we know a thing or two about Green Lifestyle, especially the details of what the “in” things have come to be when it comes down to a thousand things, from capsulized herbs and other health foods, to fashion statements, and the drive to reduce, recycle and reuse solid wastes, to nature-friendly houses and malls and ecologically-sound urban planning and industries.

Some other people are keeping in mind just a few basics, like the predisposition to seek and enjoy harmony with the rest of nature. The Prime Directive they would live by runs something like this: “Thou shalt seek to live a healthy life within healthy living quarters.”

Healthy Living would mean having healthy minds and bodies, with very little or none at all of any remedial or artificial food, with body organs functioning fully with total ease, in contrast to disease. And Healthy Living Quarters would mean having residences and work areas that are looking very vibrant with life precisely because they are really alive, in contrast to the drab “sophistication” of glass, concrete and metal that are all beautifully dead.

Harmony with Nature is nurturing and enjoying our life companions that keep us alive as we seek to keep them alive, in a throbbing web of living interdependence (which we call “symbiosis”). One who is imbued with this sense of harmony with Nature would keep flowering plants alive by enjoying more the sight of flowers rooted alive in nutritious soil than cut flowers that look good in vases after they had been sentenced to die and have actually started dying. One with this sense would never kill plants and animals for whimsical pleasure, not support the enterprise of those who have made a killing many times on such business of killing.

Green Lifestyles, to be sustainable, ought to be deeply rooted in real inner-core character of people claiming to live such lifestyles. Are we included among those qualified to live the Green Lifestyle well beyond being just an influence of the on-again off-again fads?

Let each answer these questions as honestly as personal integrity can make us answer them: Am I more wholesome and appreciative than cynical and destructive? Am I ready to lift my fingers, hands and arms to be of help to my fellow-humans in facing social or even personal problems or am I always ready to offer excuses to dodge responsibility and extra work at every opportunity? Am I true and fair to myself and to my dealings with our fellow-humans?

The Green Lifestyle is for all. It is for the sake and benefit of everyone – the unconscious stakeholders, the conscious but inactive stakeholders, and the conscious and active stakeholders. All consumers are stakeholders in effective environmental conservation, but most are unaware of this, and a big number of those who are aware but prefer to be inactive, prefer to be mere spectators in the crucial struggles precariously approaching the point where environmental destruction becomes absolutely unstoppable due to its momentum.

Cooperatives, by their essence, ought to be teaching everyone else about the imperatives and dynamics of synergism for common interests, like the survival of the human race and of life itself in this planet obviously is. But the cooperatives, still largely ignorant of its synergetic essence, are still unable to perform on this role of social responsibility, many are even unable to even just succeed and survive as cooperatives.

Unfortunately, the people who are really ready for the Green Lifestyle are not ready to consistently dignify and promote it in word and deed upon the essential truths that it carries, to motivate and enable many more people to adopt it and help promote it as well. This implies extra work for the people who get to see the light of wisdom much earlier than others could. The Green Lifestyle needs and deserves to be vigorously promoted, preferably by good example among many other people. After all, the Green Lifestyle is supposed to be lived together, to be lived in Green Communities. It will later be well-known as the norm in the consistent will, mind-set, and behavior of substantially-evolved humans.

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