The Challenge Before Us
Excerpts from a Green Party Policy Statement

We have the ability to produce more than we can consume. To match consumption with capacity, we stimulate demand through advertising, planned obsolescence, and the arms trade. The results are all around us. Rather than continuing this race to bury ourselves in a sea of our own waste, we must turn our attention to finding a secure place within the natural order.

We must come to grips with the problems of economic inequality, resource depletion and overpopulation. The goal must be to create the conditions necessary for true world peace.

By emphasizing competition rather than cooperation, sharing has become foreign to us. The growth of our technological society has alienated large numbers of people who are no longer connected to any natural rhythms. There are large classes of people for whom the only expression of their individuality is consumerism.

The Nature of the Solution

Our problems are linked by a common value system. A system founded on principles of hierarchical relationships and unlimited growth. We as a culture define tradition, social arrangements, religion, moral codes and technologies. We decide if they will manifest themselves as institutions of sustainability and subsistence or exploitation and destruction.

The transition from an economy founded on growth and the abuse of our natural resources to community economic development founded on the sustainable management of our resource base will eventually have to take place. The question is whether we will be forced to change more quickly than our social and economic structures can withstand because of environmental degradation and resource depletion, or whether we will start now with managed change to minimize economic and social dislocation.

Sustainability

Activities are sustainable when they:

* use materials in continuous cycles
* use continuously reliable sources of energy
* come mainly from the qualities of being human
(i.e. creativity, communication, movement,
appreciation, and spiritual and intellectual
development)

Activities are not sustainable when they:

* require continual inputs of non-renewable
resources
* use renewable resources faster than their rate of
renewal
* cause cumulative degradation of the environment
* require resources in quantities that could never be available
for people everywhere
* lead to the extinction of other life forms

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