Values

The Earth Restoration Project and Website are predicated on the following assumptions and core values:

1.) Biodiversity and ecosystem integrity.

The richness and diversity of life on earth is intrinsically valuable and should not just be preserved in remnant form, but actively restored on the largest possible scale.

Life on earth, in all of its virtuoso richness and diversity, is a masterpiece of design far beyond the capacity of any mere mortal even to comprehend, let alone, to reproduce by artificial, technological means. The complex structures and ecosystem relationships that have evolved in nature over billions of years are intrinsically valuable to all life as well as beautiful to humans, and should therefore not merely be preserved in remnant form in museums, photographs, parks and zoos, but rather, should be massively restored, to whatever degree possible, no matter how long such restoration may take and no matter how difficult the task may appear to be, at any particular moment in time.

2.) The power of hope.

For too long, the environmental movement has lived in a state of “learned helplessness”, under the mushroom-cloud assumption that we are playing a game which cannot possibly be won; fighting a rearguard action in which the only conceivable strategy is a continuous staged retreat.

No more.

It’s time to reverse the foundational assumption that the planet’s major environmental support systems cannot or will not ever be restored. They can be restored and will be, if only enough individuals can be fully empowered to begin thinking and acting as if restoration, both local and global in scale, were in fact possible!

But it would be foolish to think that such goals can be met in a few years or decades. Just the preliminaries could take a century to accomplish, and that the ongoing job of restoration must continue—joyously--throughout the next millennium.

3.) The power of information.

In this our Information Age, information is power, and effective use of complex technologies requires an abundant supply of very high quality information. Those who consistently have an information advantage will also have an insurmountable political and economic advantage. Conversely, information overload—and disinformation overload—are the greatest challenges of the Information Age.

The value of information lies not in the raw quantity available, but in quality of its interpretation and use. The best way to develop high-quality information is to create an open information-sharing channel with maximum bandwidth, in tandem with an information evaluation service that is open, democratic, and extremely powerful in its ability to link theory with underlying fact and to subject every theory to extreme torture-testing in an open marketplace for ideas.

Effective information evaluation services must be predicated on a system for perpetual re-evaluation and continuous quality-improvement.

4.) The power of idea and belief.

The wanton destruction by humans of our own living environment is grounded in patterns of human behavior that are arbitrary and susceptible to change. The job of biosphere restoration is therefore not merely a technical problem. It is a metaphysical, psychic, and spiritual problem. If we wish to halt and reverse this trend, radical changes in human behavior will be necessary. The conventional wisdom is that existing patterns of human belief and behavior can and will never change. And on this subject, as on so many others, the conventional wisdom has always been wrong.

Human behavior may be grounded in genetics, but it is radically susceptible to the vagaries of belief. Throughout human history, human culture, values, ethics, and patterns of belief have changed radically in continuous direct response to changes in the climate, the environment, technology, and our own evolving social dynamics.

Never before has the survival of the human species, the quality of human life, or the fabric of human civilization, been more gravely threatened than it is today by the specter of global exhaustion of natural resources and breakdown of biological support systems. As human social and economic systems begin to break under the strain of famine, drought, flood, and the geometrically accumulating global effects of a massively depleted and heavily toxified biosphere—human belief systems must and will change in response. Why not begin that change here and now? Why not guide, lead, contribute to it in the most thoughtful and skillful way possible?

This project is predicated upon a conviction that the systematic, wholesale redesigning of our belief systems and concomitant patterns of behavior is THE great work of this new century and millennium, and that beneficial adaptations to foreseeable and unforeseeable social, economic, political and environmental crises will be far more likely if those who see and care enough to act, immediately engage the great work of designing a new metaphysic for a new millennium.

4.) Integration and synthesis.

Complex, interlocking, global environmental problems call for equally complex, sophisticated and comprehensive solutions. In today’s complex world as never before, intellectual leadership requires an ability to think synthetically, to link widely separated dots, to cross disciplinary boundaries, and to think far outside of the extremely narrow conceptual “silos” of traditional academic or professional specialties.

We live in a culture hopelessly overloaded with information “noise”, wildly fragmented and desperately in need of coherence—a culture which glorifies specialization and blind, hedonistic, materialistic self-gratification while disparaging holistic thought. But we live in a world in which the most crucial human survival skill is the one least cultivated—or even allowed--in any traditional academic or corporate setting: an ability to think both deeply and comprehensively, and to navigate skillfully through vast seas of information-overload. We urgently need integration and synthesis.

5.) The power of the media.

Information is power, and high-quality, real-time information about breaking news and current events is an essential nutrient for any activity in our data-driven Information Age.

We propose that the Earth Restoration project should be democratic in character, and democratic systems of governance rely fundamentally upon an unimpeded flow of accurate, high-quality, and timely information. Unfortunately, due to the near-complete capture of the journalism industry by corporations and/or governments which are themselves, inept and/or, all too often, deeply corrupt, journalism in America and around the world is in a coma just at the very moment when it is urgently needed for comprehensive collection, synthesis and interpretation of information about current events.

The conceptual wavelength of contemporary professional journalism worldwide is essentially the attention span of a two-year-old, at a time when the complexity of events and the urgency of our need for sophisticated, intellectually powerful interpretation of the news has never been greater. The conventional media are feeding lethally toxic junk food to a public whose state of near-perfect ignorance and whose bulimic addition to disinformation is clinically diagnosable as a near-terminal state of intellectual starvation.

News presentation and reportage is foundational to the shaping of public opinion and human belief systems, which in turn, drive economics, politics, science, technology, and all other human systems. The business of promoting constructive and healthy change in human social systems is fundamentally the business of cultivating and shaping public opinion. No sane, rational person could deny that our conventional journalistic guilds and media industries have systematically inculcated in the public systems of belief which are inimical to the health of the planet. If our belief systems are ever to change, it will first be necessary to replace the traditional media and news services with a package of alternative media services which offer a frame reference within which a “sustainable” future is indeed actually conceivable.

In a complex information-rich culture, high quality news analysis is vital because we are all on information overload and urgently need interpretation services to guide our decision-making by helping us to make sense of the data stream. Information by itself is of little value until it has been interpreted. The future of our relationship with the biosphere is predicated upon the ways and means by which we perceive and interpret current events.

6.) Intellectual leadership.

There is a congenital, systemic lack of conceptual and intellectual depth in the leadership of most governments, corporations and institutions, which makes the systematic design-development of complex solutions to complex problems, all but impossible in any traditional setting.

In every hour of every day, millions of corporations across the globe cheerfully squander the future of humanity and life on earth in exchange for the vapor-ware of quarterly and annual profits. Governmental bureaucracy can be, and very often is, shamefully corrupt, politicized, short-sighted and muddled. And not-for-profit organizations are all too often a perfect mirror-image of for-profit corporations in their obsessive devotion to money, status, and nominal “access” to power.

Because of the extreme complexity of environmental problems in today’s world, the restoration of biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, and planetary environmental systems, will require, first and foremost, conceptual leadership. Thought is a prerequisite to right action. Action without thought is not “action” at all, but merely, Brownian motion.

7.) The power of collaboration

If it takes a village to raise a child, it will take thousands, perhaps millions of people to undo the cumulative environmental damage wreaked by a global population of 6 billion rising to perhaps 10 or 12 billion by mid-century.

History offers many dramatic examples of how the power of individuals can be amplified by many orders of magnitude through free, open, effective collaboration.

Among many other benefits, collaboration in an open and free society can powerfully accelerate any human endeavor by leveraging the intrinsic efficiencies of diversity and specialization—and the creative synergy that can and often does result from human interaction.

Only through an effective, fully open and free system of collaboration amongst hundreds or thousands of individuals can the grandiose mission of this project be fulfilled within a time frame that will make meaningful global environmental restoration (in concert with a sustained and sustainable human civilization) feasible.

8.) Autonomy and individual initiative.

The greatest stored and as-yet unleashed potential energy for human accomplishment is that of the individual mind and will, were it ever freed from its enslavement to a vast array of mutually-contradictory conventional “wisdoms”—the extant conventional patterns of belief and behavior that have inexorably driven the human race and with it (by the year 2050, as estimated by biodiversity expert E. O. Wilson) fully half of all other species on earth, to the brink of an untimely extinction.

The power of individual initiative can never be overstated. And ironically, the most effective environment for collaboration is one which offers maximum reverence for and protection of individual autonomy.

Maximum human efficacy and productivity are possible ONLY when the freedom and power and autonomy of each individual is—not just offered minimum protections—but meticulously cultivated and systematically enhanced.

The conventional wisdom of the corporate age has been that the only way to sustain any institution, corporation or government, is to systematically disempower its individual constituents. And on this subject the conventional wisdom is and has always been wrong. The most effective way to truly empower a political movement is to empower individuals.

Such empowerment of individuals as opposed to institutions is a primary goal of this project.

9.) Open systems.

There will never be only one “right” idea, or right action, but rather, many different competing ideas and possibilities, and the best way of determining quality and viability amidst a myriad of competing ideas is to vigorously test them both through debate in an open marketplace for ideas, and also through direct implementation and experimentation in the field.

10.) Persuasion, consensus.

The reliance upon coercion in human affairs is intrinsically inimitable to a stable and harmonious biosphere. We believe in the rule of law and in the principle of non-violence, both of human to human, and of human to nature. But we also believe that powerful forces of destruction must be met with powerful, direct action to prevent further catastrophic damage to our biosphere. We mean business and we understand that destructive power must be met with real power.

11.) Minimalism, economy, and financial self-sufficiency

Economy and self-sufficiency are primary core values of this project.

It will be established as a not-for-profit corporation, and as such its leadership and management team may utilize all of the traditional means of developing financial support, including foundation funding, donations from individuals, government funding, donations from for-profit corporations, behests, endowments, a membership subscription program, and potentially, sales of products and/or services to its membership and/or the public.

However: “financial economy and self-sufficiency”, as the term is used here, has the following implications:

a.) Any party providing funding to the project must accept as legitimate this case statement, as amended at the time of the commitment of funds, with the understanding that the case statement is itself a work in progress which will be continuously elaborated and refined by the project leadership over time. The point being this: funding and programmatic growth should follow ideas and identified needs, rather than programs and policies chasing perceived funding opportunities.
b.) The project will avoid relationships with foundations, governments, or corporations, whenever such relationships will tend to vitiate in practice or in spirit, the core values enumerated here.
c.) The project may undertake activities—such as a web-based membership subscription service, and the future sales of products and services (for example, book sales, environmental restoration consulting services, strategic investments in companies providing sustainable products and services) that generate a direct flow of unencumbered funds to support the project’s operating costs.
d.) The financial statements of the Project and Institute will be fully transparent to the public.
e.) The Earth Restoration Institute is an idea bank—NOT a financial institution, bureaucratic sinecure, or subsidy machine. It is to be expected that the Project will be under continual pressure to raise funds and provide subsidies for initiatives dreamed up by individuals or groups. Although the Earth Restoration Institute may indeed provide pass-through funding for specific projects, generally our approach will be to insist that those promoting a certain initiative be, themselves, fully responsible for developing adequate funding for it; that every new initiative should be designed with an integral fundraising plan that guarantees full financial self-sufficiency from Day One.
If an idea is good enough, it will have a natural financial constituency. If management is good enough, it will succeed in identifying and penetrating that constituency market AS part of the project launch—not long afterwards. To the degree that revenue is necessary or desirable, the responsibility for fundraising should be entirely upon the shoulders of those promoting the initiative. Such self-sufficiency also offers the powerful incentive of maximum freedom from meddling or competition from financial intermediaries.
Self-sufficiency follows logically from the core value of respect for individual autonomy and initiative.
f.) The term, “financial and logistical economy” or “efficiency” encompasses a core value of “minimalism”—e.g., of minimization of consumptive footprints and conservation of both natural and human resources. Every initiative undertaken should reflect a spirit of fiscal as well as resource-consumption “conservativism”, favoring and systematically cultivating, for example, the use of volunteers over paid staff, favoring business plans which minimize costly travel and infrastructure, while maximizing the innovative use of both hard and soft technologies to reduce costs. 

12.) Direct Action.

Thought or intention without action is as feckless as action without thought. Theory by itself will neither preserve life on earth, nor restore global environmental support systems. Likewise, passive information-gathering, without active analysis, interpretation, translation into policy, and direct action—would also be pointless. Thought requires action for its completion.