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   co-globalizing  earth - South Pole/Africa  gaia’s children
birthing a future of partnering human kinship with all life

As Oren Lyons speaks of the power of the good minds, William Commanda of honour, respect and responsibility for The Sacred Instructions, Elizabeth Sahtouris of how the principles essential to the health of living systems are empowered participation of all parts and continual negotiation of self-interest at all levels of organization, and Tom Atlee of co-intelligence, so we begin devoting this space to the challenges we face in creating a globalized world that cares for all of Gaia's children.

The Daniel Pennock Democracy School
Why Democratic Self-Government is Impossible When Corporations Wield
Constitutional Rights Against Communities to Deny The Rights of People

Created by the The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
and
Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD)

co-globalizing gaia's children
Table of Contents
local content
web links
Essential Reading
        IFG Teach-Ins
People's Declarations Presented in Seattle
Impacts of Corporate Globalization on Communities
Holistic, Ecological Science / Sustainable Stewardship
Biological koyaanisqatsi - GMOs/GE foods/seeds
Related Information, News and Analysis 		Concentrated Information
WTO-Specific Focus
Information on Genetic Engineering
Petitions, Support Ecology, Feeding People
Significant Organizations

It is not enough to resist and protest the call and lure of The Song of Money. Renewal is the essential complement to resistance. We must rededicate our selves, listening anew with all our attention, to the Song of Life. Equally essential is to define what kind of world do we want? The group mind that manifested in Seattle during the fall of 1999 was listening to the Song of Life. Nurturing this group mind, that champions and supports the furtherance of all life on earth (including the human species), will help into being the co-globalizing of gaia's children.


Indigenous peoples, undoubtedly, are the ones most adversely affected by globalization and by the WTO Agreements. However, we believe that it is also us who can offer viable alternatives to the dominant economic growth, export-oriented development model. Our sustainable lifestyles and cultures, traditional knowledge, cosmologies, spirituality, values of collectivity, reciprocity, respect and reverence for Mother Earth, are crucial in the search for a transformed society where justice, equity, and sustainability will prevail.

Essential Reading


4/14/00 IFG Washington D.C. Teach-In Speech Transcripts

  Robert McChesney: Global Media and Democracy
  Randall Forsberg: Monopoly Militarism and the U.S. Monopoly on the Militarization of the World
  David Korten: One World -- One World Government; Bretton Woods or The United Nations?
  Ralph Nader: Challenging Autocratic Governance That Serves The Interests Of Global Corporations

11/26-27/99 IFG Seattle Teach-In Speech Transcripts

  Maude Barlow: The Global Water Crisis and the Commodification of the World's Water Supply
  Susan George: On Overthrowing the Permanent Government
  Martin Khor: On What the Plot is For Seattle
  Vandana Shiva: The Global Campaign Against Biopiracy and Changing the Paradigm of Agriculture
  Mae Wan Ho: The Biotechnology Debate has United the World against Corporate Rule
  David Suzuki: The Dark Side of Genetics and The Implications of the Biotechnology Revolution



The economies of the 21st century were being built on a metaphysics that has died in the 17th: That matter is dead, and life forms are merely atomistic constitutions of dead matter. It is not an accident that there is constant regression in this period where the one reference, where the one phrase that is constantly used in debates on genetic engineering, particularly from the U.S., is the need for "Sound Science".



People's Declarations Presented in Seattle


Biopiracy is the rape of our biodiversity, our intellectual and cultural heritage. It is a rape of a very very fundamental kind that goes back into the past, exists in the present and goes into the future. The WTO rules legitimize this rape. . . . The present rules are basically high-tech rules for slavery. It's just new kinds of slavery. But it is worse than the slavery on which this nation's prosperity was built. It is worse because this time it is enslaving all life -- not just human. 
 

Analysis of & Responses to the Impacts of
Corporate Globalization on Living Communities

Water

General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)

Stop the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
-- Democracy Before Trade:

Militarism:

Biotech:

Agriculture:

General:

Local copies of Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly:


I suggest we be clear that our goal is not to reform global corporate and financial rule -- it is to end it. The publicly traded, limited liability corporation is a pathological institutional form and financial speculation is inherently predatory. As a first step both must be regulated. The appropriate longer term goal is to rid our economic affairs of these institutional pathologies -- much as our ancestors eliminated the institution of monarchy.



Holistic, Ecological Science - Sustainable Stewardship



Related Information, News and Analysis


WTO rules runs roughshod over local laws and regulations. It relentlessly pursues the elimination of any strictures on the free flow of trade, including how a product is made, by whom it is made, or what happens when it is made. By doing so, the WTO is eliminating the ability of countries and regions to set standards, to express values, or to determine what they do or don't support. Child labor, prison labor, forced labor, substandard wages and working conditions cannot be used as a basis to discriminate against goods. Nor can environmental destruction, habitat loss, toxic waste production, and the presence of transgenic materials or synthetic hormones be used as the basis to screen or stop goods from entering a country. Under WTO rules, the Sullivan Principles and the boycott of South Africa would not have existed. If the world could vote on the WTO, would it pass? Not one country of the 135-member states of the WTO has held a plebiscite to see if their people support this concept.



Links

Concentrated Information


What marched in the streets of Seattle? Slower time strode into the WTO. Ancient identity emerged. The cloaks of the forgotten paraded on the backs of our children. It is not the fast things that will prevail. In the end, that which is slow is powerful.


WTO-Specific Focus



Janine Benyus, author of a wonderful book called Biomimicry, pointed out that humans assigned one group of people called biologists to study how other species make a living, while a totally separate group of people called economists were to figure out how humans make a living. Now we have the opportunity to look at economics in terms of biology -- to look at the experience of four-and-half billion years of self-organization, to see how young species are acquisitive and territorial and grabby, and mature species co-operate, as in a rainforest. Where is the leadership? Distributed leadership. Everything shared and recycled. What a great economic model!
The Big Picture, Elisabet Sahtouris, 8/12/99


. . . Intentionally or not, people like Friedman serve as cheerleaders for injustice when they ridicule all who dare to dream of the world that might be. In the name of realism, he contributes to a sense of powerlessness among those inclined to work for change -- thus making it possible for a small elite, acting in secret beyond democratic accountability, to shape the institutions of power to serve their narrow and exclusive ends.


At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom -- not democracy, and not ecological stewardship -- is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification.
          I want to take my few minutes here tonight to sound the alarm about one aspect of this. You're going to hear so many different areas of concern around the WTO. What I want to address is the potential impact of the WTO on the very source of life which is water. The destruction of aquatic ecosystem health, of the increasing water scarcity, are in my opinion the most pressing environmental problems facing human kind.


Information on Genetic Engineering



Everything in globalization and trade liberalization could have been achieved by the kind of coercion that's built into the IMF and the World Bank. I believe the one aspect that the IMF and World Bank could never have achieved is establishing this new form of empire-over-life through genetic engineering and patenting.


Petitions, Support Ecology, Feeding People

Please send dave other worthy petition/click-to-help links



The other great myth about the World Trade Organization is that it's supposed to end protectionism. For me, the rules of WTO are the highest form of protectionism because they are giving protection to activities and entities that should not exist. In fact the one thing that has been achieved through the WTO is the protection of the biotech corporations, which now call themselves the "life sciences" corporations -- though every thing they do is anti-life. The entire empire over life that the life sciences corporations are building is based on a protectionism in the form of monopoly rights of ownership through patenting and intellectual property rights over life. It's also protectionism in the form of protecting the corporations from bearing the responsibility and liability of the costs they generate for people and the environment.


Significant Organizations


. . . We do not yet know how to cope with the fact that there is no master map of reality. If each of us carries our own picture, and the pictures are necessarily incompatible, how do we work together at all scales from the personal to the global? Fortunately, we do have an image which can help us grasp the issues with reasonable clarity. We can think in terms of holographs. These provide three dimensional images of reality. Their most remarkable quality is that a portion of the holograph produces the same overall picture as the whole but the quality of the resolution gets steadily worse as the amount of the originating film is reduced.
          We can therefore think in terms of each of us having a holographic perception of the universe. This perception is inevitably fuzzy because we cannot have all the material necessary to get a clear picture. Each one of us can, and will, use different ways to improve the clarity of this picture. Some will use meditation and prayer. Some will use conversation and dialogue. Some will study. Some will find knowledge and wisdom through various religions and spiritual paths. This holographic model opens up considerable space for looking at the process of fundamental change from a very different point of view.


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