Primary goals

1.) Environmental master planning.

To develop and continuously refine a set of coherent master plans for the restoration of ecosystem integrity, biodiversity, and the essential life support systems of the planet. Such master plans would (for example) suggest ways and means of adjusting human population growth, reducing carbon emissions, transforming regional, national and global energy and food production and economic systems to achieve “sustainability”, protecting and linking existing natural areas, promoting biodiversity, and addressing a host of threats to environmental support systems (air and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, invasive species, etc.) Such plans to be developed at many different scales, and to be continuously revised as the sociopolitical and environmental context continuously changes. And with recognition that the best-laid plans are experimental in nature and a framework for inspired improvisation—NOT commandments written in stone and requiring an army of doctrinaire true believers for their dissemination.

2.) Socioeconomic theory-building and design work.

To fully engage with and coherently address the need for concomitant social, political, cultural and economic change that may be foundational or prerequisite to the mission of global and local environmental restoration. To acknowledge and embrace the interrelatedness of science, technology, raw data, and environmental management theory and practice, with culture, economics, politics, and metaphysics.

3.) Cognitive Retooling for Paradigm Shift.

To thoroughly explore existing belief systems to determine where and how they are--or are not-- compatible with a "sustainable" future for humanity and all life on earth.

To promote the evolution of existing belief systems--and/or the design of new belief systems--to create a moral and spiritual platform that is compatible with long-term preservation and restoration of our planet’s life support systems.

4.) Networking Services. To create an “Earth Restoration Website” that will serve as a platform for the development of Earth Restoration master plans at every conceivable geographic and temporal scale

5.) Information management.

To provide within the Earth Restoration Website an information repository and data management service that will allow earth restoration activists convenient access to timely, comprehensive, reliable, quality information and data regarding all aspects of environmental assessment and restoration.

6.) Recruitment and empowerment of citizen activists.

To seed, cultivate and fertilize individual initiative and the maximum empowerment of individuals for constructive independent (or collaborative) engagement in the great work of restoring the life support systems of Planet Earth throughout the next century and millenium. To a very large degree, the accomplishment of the ambitious goals of this project will depend upon individual creativity and initiative.

7.) Community-building.

To provide within the Earth Restoration Website all the amenities necessary desirable for the establishment and cultivation of a large community of like-minded individuals.

8.) News and entertainment services.

To create a comprehensive set of alternative multimedia news and entertainment services, ultimately spanning all media, to inform both opinion-makers, leaders, and the world public about events, ideas, threats to global (and local) environmental systems, to provide a web publishing platform for extremely high-quality analysis, opinion-editorial writing and public debate; to provide graphical, cartographical and visual insight into environmental and/or socioeconomic problems and solutions; to make environmental issues and stories come alive through the transformation of science and data, through art, into inspiration and motivation.

9.) Empirical testing of restoration theory.

To provide real-world testing environments for theory and in-situ training grounds for the project management team, the Earth Restoration Project will “adopt” four or five site-specific environmental restoration pilot projects, at four different scales from local to regional to national/continental to global and international, initially and hypothetically identified as follows:

a. Local micro-regional scale: development and implementation of a 50-year master plan for restoration of the 50-mile long urban river corridor of the Jordan River, and its wetlands delta in the Great Salt Lake

b. Regional scale: development and implementation of a “Colorado Plateau Ecosystem Heritage Preservation” master plan, to create a system of land reserves to protect and link core wildlands in such a way as to systematically and strategically preserve and restore ecosystem integrity and biodiversity for this entire region of high, cool desert, with an existing wildlands core of about 10 million acres.

c. Continental-scale: participate collaboratively in the development of implementation strategies for a “Spine of the Continent” system of reserves and public-lands management initiatives encompassing perhaps 100 million acres and providing connectivity to major keystone species of animals and plants, throughout the Rocky Mountain cordillera from Alaska to Central America; provide a web platform for the presentation and marketing of the SPINE plan to the public.

d. International/global scale: Participate and help to design, coordinate and implement a major international “carbon sequestration” and “carbon credit exchange” program focused on the Darien region of Panama, which contains a large area of undisturbed rainforest habitat judged to be one of the 20 most important “biodiversity hotspots” in the world.

Below the level of these overarching goals, the more specific goals and objectives of the Earth Restoration Project will ultimately be those contiuously identified and committed to by those individuals or groups who share the values enumerated above, and who take the initiative, either independently or in collaboration with other like-minded individuals, to help restore the environmental integrity of the planet, using the platform provided by this project as their information, communication, and/or operations node.

Over the next century and millennium, thousands of environmental restoration goals may be set, achieved, recalibrated, and/or discredited and abandoned, within the large arena of this project.

It may be necessary in some situations for the Project leadership to formally disassociate itself from goals established or actions taken by ERP users or members, when they are judged by the project leadership to be inconsistent with the values articulated herein. Some ideas may prove to be misguided or dangerous; some, perhaps many, experiments undertaken in good faith, will surely fail. Project members and participants should feel free to act on their own instincts and out of their own value systems, so long as the reasoning and values behind those actions are openly articulated, and so long as all participants understand that individual ideas and actions do NOT necessarily reflect a consensus or the will of the majority or the “project” as a whole, except when some consensus-building process on any particular policy or initiative, is deliberately and openly undertaken within the Earth Restoration Project community.

None of us can know with any certainty, at the very outset, what the eventual, specific goals, mileposts or objectives for Earth Restoration should or will be. The development and continuous redefinition of such goals is itself, in a sense, an overarching goal.