YES! publisher Fran Korten, YES! co-chair David Korten, Neva Welton (David's book tour producer) and I just recently returned from the Chicago Green Festival, held April 21-22 at McCormick Place. YES! has been to just about every Green Festival, and this was surely one of the best so far in terms of sheer vibrancy and local interest. With its focus on just and sustainable solutions, the Chicago Green Festival was truly a celebration of the work being done to create "Earth Community."

Highlights included meeting enthusiastic readers of both YES! Magazine and The Great Turning (especially following David's talk on the mainstage); seeing YES! contributing writers Medea Benjamin, Van Jones, Riane Eisler, Frances Moore Lappe, and Greg Palast; catching up with YES! boardmember Alisa Gravitz (Executive Director of Coop America -- festival co-sponsor, along with Global Exchange), and running into other independent media friends at Democracy Now!, Mother Jones, and What is Enlightenment?.

Best of all, was deepening connections with several Chicago-based friends from the Omidyar Network, Emerging Futures Network, and Chicago Conservations Corps; likewise with Your Environmental Road Trip host and producer Mark Dixon, Conscious Choice editor Charles Shaw, and In These Times publisher Tracy van Slyke.

What did I love about Chicago? The public art, the dramatic architecture, the wind, and most of all, the down-to-earth people. I met some of the inspiring folks behind Beyond Today, a neighborhood group working for peace, sustainability, and social justice, others working on permaculture solutions in Illinois, others rehabilitating bicycles and sending them wherever they're most needed, and still others working at great independent bookstores like Transitions Bookplace.

It was fun making use of I-GO car-sharing (via my Flexcar membership) and the local bus system, CTA -- and even more fun, dancing at the Conscious Choice sponsored, and YES! cosponsored party the Funky Buddha. Can't wait to visit again.

Here's what Fran had to say about the Green Festival in an earlier issue of YES!: Get Your Optimism Fix

Hi all. I've been hearing from folks around the country who are working to create "Earth Community" in their own local area, and I'm eager to share these stories. Here's a story from Elise Lazar, in Salt Lake City, Utah, where David Korten participated in several community gatherings as part of his 2006 Great Turning book tour:

The inaugural event of the newly founded Sustainability Salon (a group of nine women, one man in Salt Lake City) was David Korten?s whirlwind four-venue, three-day talk on The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.The response was hearty and catapulted the group of ten up to 125.

Additional exciting results emerged: one as a possibility, the other as a definite. The 'possibility' was the request by The Osher Institute, an educational program affiliated with the University of Utah for non-matriculating students, to develop/offer a course on The Great Turning.

The 'definite' was from the Downtown Alliance, the city agency that runs Farmers' Markets and puts on ?First Night,? a downtown celebration of New Year?s Eve. With the fanfare of David?s visit thrusting our group into the limelight, we have been asked to create an event for this year's First Night festivities -- December 31-- which envisions a new relationship to the Earth.

Our concept for this is called, ?Rebirth the Earth? with the centerpiece effort being ?Love Notes to the Earth: A Commitment Ritual." "Love Notes" will involve individuals writing a commitment statement in response to the following lead-in, "Dear Earth, I know I have not been treating you well. I want to change our relationship. From this point on, I promise to ____"

The individual commitments will be written on prayer flags (1000 are being cut) which will be hung on green LED lights strung throughout the trees in the main center of the celebration. In addition, there will be poetry readings of original works (including one from our State Poet Laureate) based on the theme of ?love notes,? interspersed with drummers pulsing the ?heartbeat? of the earth.

Efforts are being made to have compact florescent bulbs donated or purchased at wholesale to give to those who make their commitment. This project will continue throughout the year as one of our commitments to the Great Turning!

The Sustainability Salon is a not-for-profit group of citizens whose focus is the promotion of dialogue regarding the future of our environment and culture.

Sounds like the Sustainability Salon is off to a great start! I hope you'll send us pictures from the First Night event.

Related links:
* Salt Lake City's First Night (Dec. 31)

An Inconvenient Truth
On a recent July evening, several Bainbridge Island residents gathered together for a screening of the global climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Drawing upon the discussion guidelines that YES! Executive Director Fran Korten had put together, the group met together afterwards. Here follows David Korten's reflections on the film and the community discussion.

Bainbridge Island and the Inconvenient Truth

Reflections by David Korten

Last night (July 14, 2006), I saw Al Gore?s film An Inconvenient Truth at the Lynwood Theatre and participated in the YES! Circle discussion of the film immediately after at the neighboring Treehouse Café.

During the movie my thoughts turned to the question of what the implications of global warming might be for Bainbridge. This led to the question, ?What if instead of looking for incremental steps that would make Bainbridge more sustainable? we started from the other end and asked ?What would Bainbridge look like if we took the challenge of global warming seriously and made a commitment to becoming a model of a sustainable Earth Community?? With this in mind, I posed the following question to my discussion group at the Treehouse Café, ?What if we set about to make Bainbridge car-free and food and energy self-reliant? What would it look like??

The group engaged the challenge with eager enthusiasm. These are some of the ideas generated:

1. Organize the island as a collection of compact villages, each with basic commercial facilities accessible to most residents by foot or bike providing convenient access to basic food and household items and to common facilities for high speed internet access, photocopy, and other high tech services for telecommuters. These compact villages might favor housing organized into co-housing/eco-village clusters with space for community gardens and common facilities for community events and shared meals, and for sharing laundry, shop tools, and garden equipment. These developments could benefit from the experience and expertise of our existing Winslow Co-Housing community.

2. Develop a transportation plan that connects the villages by public transit, bike lanes, and foot trails.

3. Encourage and provide technical support for home and community gardens, public access food processing and canning facilities for individual and group use, and energy efficient environmental building. This support could be provided through a mix of public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit initiatives.

4. Support local farmers and prevent any further loss of dedicated farm land.

5. Find approaches to educating our children in environmental issues that will inspire them with a sense of the creative challenge and opportunity presented by pressing environmental issues. IslandWood offers an amazing resource for this.

6. We also discussed the need to take water management seriously by exploring possibilities for water conservation, use of solar energy for pumping facilities, and approaches to reclaiming rain water that is otherwise lost to runoff.

It is noteworthy that every suggestion that came forward would at once increase our environmental security, build community, and improve the quality of life on Bainbridge. This discussion suggested to me a potential for the Sustainable Bainbridge initiative to spark an innovative, Island-wide, out of the box creative visioning process that would begin with defining some truly challenging benchmarks, such as those outline above, and then look at what they imply and how we might organize to approximate them.

Related Links:

• Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth - www.climatecrisis.net
• YES! Magazine's newsletter about An Inconvenient Truth
• Reader responses to YES! Magazine's newsletter
• David Korten's The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community - www.greatturning.org
• YES! Magazine issue on the 'perfect economic storm' and The Great Turning, "5000 Years of Empire ... Ready for a Change?" - (YES! Summer 2006, Issue #38)
• YES! Magazine issue on renewable energy solutions, "Can We Live Without Oil?" - (YES! Fall 2005, Issue #31)

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
-- John Muir

Reflecting on the July 4th holiday, and the place it often takes in the U.S. imagination -- a time for gathering with friends and family, enjoying a long summer weekend, watching fireworks, celebrating patriotism -- I find I'm most drawn to the idea embraced by many these days of celebrating Interdependence Day; that is, our interrelatedness with each other and everything on the planet.

I find inspiration for this holiday in the voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Muir, David Suzuki, David Korten, Joanna Macy and others. Martin Luther King, Jr., in my mind, couldn't have said it better:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
--Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute has gathered some research on Interdependence Day celebrations and declarations.

Atlee's own Declaration of Interdependence is wonderful:

We hold this truth to be self-evident:
We are All.
In This.
Together.

Therefore we live this truth
in our lives, communities and societies,
and thrive together into a long future
that we create together.

We are the world
that is awakening
to both the fact and the opportunity
of our interdependence --
fully, finally and beyond a shadow of doubt.

We are the world
who are making
ourselves a good world
that works for all people and all life.
Because we know the Greatest Secret
of All:

"We are All
in this
together."

-- Tom Atlee, June 2003

And I especially appreciate the David Suzuki Foundation's Declaration of Interdependence Between Humans and the Natural World. According to Atlee's research, this declaration was written by five members of the David Suzuki Foundation team in 1992 for the United Nations' Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

David Korten suggests in his new book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, that we are at an historical precipice -- wherein we have the opportunity to fully realize our interrelatedness and responsibility to each other and the planet, or to continue with our unsustainable practices of imperialism, exploitation and untempered consumption, leading us inevitably to the 'great unraveling':

We stand at a critical moment in Earth?s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations
? The Earth Charter (2000)

Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning.
-- Joanna Macy

By what name will our children and our children's children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, a dramatic dieback of the human population, and a fragmentation of those who remained into warring fiefdoms ruled by ruthless local lords?

Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forebears turned crisis into opportunity, embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the living Earth, and brought forth a new era of human possibility?

It is the premise of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community that we humans stand at a defining moment that presents us with an irrevocable choice. Our collective response will determine how our time is remembered for so long as the human species survives. In the days now at hand, we must each be clear that every individual and collective choice we make is a vote for the future we of this time will bequeath to the generations that follow. The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility.
-- David Korten, The Great Turning (2006)

Related Links:
Tom Atlee's research on Interdependence Days & Declarations
David Suzuki Foundation - www.davidsuzuki.org
The Earth Charter - www.earthcharter.org
The Great Turning - www.greatturning.org
YES! Issue #38, 5000 Years of Empire...Ready for a Change?
Articles in YES! - by Tom Atlee
Articles in YES! - by David Suzuki
Articles in YES! - by Joanna Macy

Today, David Korten's book tour takes him to Burlington, Vermont for the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) national conference.

This is a relatively new organization/network that's growing exponentially. YES! devoted an entire issue (Fall 2002, "Living Economies") to this emerging local economies movement, fully archived here.

YES! executive editor, Sarah van Gelder (see Sarah's blog here), will be there too, along with our island neighbors and friends at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

Check out the line-up of speakers:

4th Annual BALLE Conference - June 8-10, 2006

"Creating Sustainable Communities - Commitment to Place, Economic Justice, Environmental Stewardship"

? Michael Ableman, organic farmer and author of Fields of Plenty

? John Abrams, CEO, South Mountain Company, and author of The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place

? Bo Burlingham, Editor-at-Large of Inc. magazine and author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

? Ben Cohen, True Majority, co-founder of Ben & Jerry?s

? Bridget Croke, RecycleBank

? Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

? Gary Erickson, Clif Bar, Inc.

? Omar Freilla, Green Worker Cooperatives

? Gwendolyn Hallsmith, Global Community Initiatives

? Laury Hammel, Longfellow Clubs

? Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation

? Denise Hamler, Coop America

? Christopher Juniper, Natural Capitalism, Inc.

? David Korten, People Centered Development Forum, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community

? Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and Democracy's Edge

? Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First

? Michelle Long, Sustainable Connections

? Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism, Inc.

? Bill McKibben, journalist and author of The End of Nature and Wandering Home

? Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance

? Will Raap, Gardeners' Supply and Intervale Foundation

? Bernie Sanders, VT Independent Representative to the US Congress (invited)

? Michael Shuman, Training and Development Corporation, author of Going Local and The Small-Mart Revolution

? Greg Watson, Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust

? Judy Wicks, White Dog Café


UPDATE: See YES! Editor Sarah van Gelder's blog report of the BALLE Conference.