Ten `Key Values' That Make for a Greener World

LACKING a national platform, the Greens have what they call ``aspects of a coherent unified world view.'' John Rensenbrink, Environmental Studies professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and a national spokesman for the Greens, explains the ``10 Key Values'':

Ecological wisdom

``Realigning the relationship between the human and the natural world. Key basis to the whole green move. [If you] take something from nature, you give back.''

Grass-roots democracy

``Another key element in the Green philosophy. Means a couple of things: personal self-help, and impowerment from below.''

Personal and social responsibility

``We want business to be responsible to the social and environmental impact of their decisions. And we want individual persons to accept their responsibility as consumers. [That means] not going in for consumer luxuries that will pollute and waste resources.''

Nonviolence

``We apply ... the principles of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, and the Solidarity movement in Poland.''

Decentralization

``To bring back economic decisionmaking to the community. Over a period of time, breaking up the big corporations.''

Community-based economics

``We want to stimulate cooperative enterprise along with individual private enterprise, and we want to extend and develop municipal ownership of energy sources.''

Postpatriarchal values

``That means reevaluation of male-female relationships. And a new partnership relationship between the two sexes in all fields.''

Respect for diversity

``In a word it means development of a multicultural society where there is mutual respect that goes beyond tolerance.''

Global responsibility

``Some powers of the nation need to be shifted to the United Nations, to take care of issues like ozone depletion and nuclear fallout. And also to encourage a global improvement in the problem of the disparity between the developed and the less developed countries.''

Future focus/sustainability

``The native Americans have a saying that the present leadership also has to take account of the future to the seventh generation. And that's what we need to begin to do in our society.''