Earthly mandate

Rockefeller

Stephen C. Rockefeller, son of Nelson, member of the famous political and philanthropic family, stood quietly in a lecture hall at Florida Gulf Coast University last week and tried to change the world.

Dressed in blue blazer, green tie and the alert academic demeanor that has characterized his decades as professor of religion and dean of the highly rated Middlebury College, he hardly looked ready for the work.

But appearances are sometimes deceiving.

"I've learned that if you give people too much bad news," he said dryly, "they tune out. But if you give them a sense of creative possibilities, something happens."

All around him, in fact, it was happening, but with only the quietest fanfare.

While FGCU's President Wilson Bradshaw picked up a pen and began to scratch his name across a document, Mary Evelyn Tucker, a visiting professor at Yale University and a research associate at Harvard, along with prominent German, Indian, Mexican, and Australian academics, smiled encouragingly in his direction.

COURTESY PHOTO FGCU President Wilson Bradshaw, right, commits the university to champion the Earth Charter.

Not to worry, their attentive expressions seemed to suggest — this is just another average day trying to redirect the flow of history, and now you get to help, too.

By the time President t down the pen a few seconds later, he'd committed his university to champion the Earth Charter, a short steam-train of a document, if you will, created by leaders and representatives of every major religion, region, cultural ambition or nation on the globe to allow us to survive the 21st century and beyond, together.

"What happens to us all depends on the soil, on the water, and on our children — our children both here and in Bangladesh, for example, because we can no longer distinguish their interests," said Tucker, who authored the book, "Worldly Wonder: Religions Enter their Ecological Phase."

"To be sure, we're not perfect," Bradshaw admitted, assessing the weakness of any new recruit, "but we are committed."

Like a famous Bruegel painting in which the world carries on obliviously while a figure falls unnoticed from the sky, Bradshaw's signing commitment took only seconds.

No daily newspaper reporters stood by with poised pens. Outside, a bright morning carried on as always across the subtropical campus — the cypress and slash pines communed in windborne dreams beyond the boardwalks while an aural memory of Western Europe echoed in the sounds of bells over the hustling students, pursuing their own lives.

But suddenly they, too, were committed to a cause so significant that everything depends on it. Especially vision, their own in particular since it represents the future, insists Peter Blaze Corcoran, a professor of Environmental Studies at FGCU and director of its Center of Environment & Sustainability Education, who played a key role in what just happened at the university.

"At some point, one decides to live one's life through moral education," he says. Those who created the Earth Charter "see the critical importance in individual participation… Ghandi is reflected strongly: Peace begins with us. My life is my message."

ROCKEFELLER

The charter itself

Corcoran managed to front that message by gathering Rockefeller and Tucker together with others of their ilk for the key moment in the evolution of the university, and a week of strategizing about the Earth Charter on the southwest coast.

FGCU's Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education hosted the brain trust as part of the annual Rachel Carson Distinguished Panel Lectures, named for the famous champion of preservation and environmental protection, Rachel Carson.

Almost 10 years in the making, the Earth Charter might be the best single hope for moving the 21st century world of humans — with their cultures, expectations and outlooks now irrevocably bound together — away from a potentially disastrous collision at some not-too-distant crossroads of history. A collision, many fear, of toxic environments, the angry impoverished and the callous wealthy.

TUCKER

Advocates say the Earth Charter is not merely a greenie project of environmentalists hoping to find a fork in the road that leads away from such a collision — nor is it a do-gooder's social-justice chimera tossed out like the utopian fantasy of some pie-in-thesky fiction writer describing a better (or worse) future.

Instead, it's a breathtakingly trim model of pragmatics engineered and machined to principles; a 2,400-word bullet designed to be fit and fired from the breeches of every culture.

Professors Rockefeller, Tucker, Corcoran and people like Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet premier, and Maurice Strong, the Canadian statesmen and United Nations advocate, helped usher the Earth Charter into being.

They wanted something that worked, says Rockefeller, who retired from Middlebury to chair the charter commission and bring years of international dialogue into a single document. And maybe they got it.

"I would emphasize, that nobody can predict what will happen," he explains cautiously. "But the Earth Charter says, 'If you want to build something new and better, here are the guidelines.'"

Those guidelines come in 16 principles that insist not only on "ecological integrity," but on "social and economic justice," "respect and care for the community of life," and democracy, nonviolence and peace"

At a glance, the principles take into account who has what in the world and what they do with it (wealthy nations); who gets treated poorly (women, to start with); who deserves good food, water, education, safety (everyone); and how to go about resolving injustices in a world of more than 6 billion people, many of whom might not have their morning coffee or a vitamin pill, without bloodshed.

"This is long range — after all, the 'Universal Declaration of Human Rights' at the United Nations is 60 years old. The Declaration of Independence is more than 230 years old and it's not fully realized, either," Tucker says.

"So this is an invitation to become part of a global communion, a handshake across history."

A handshake, in effect, with students, since they represent the history yet to march.

"As teachers," says Corcoran, "we must provide our students with possibilities, with hope — the belief in unseen possibilities."

For any, in the words of the Earth Charter, "This requires a change of mind and heart."

EARTH CHARTER Q & A

Florida Weekly spoke to FGCU's Peter Blaze Corcoran, director of the Center for Environmental and Sustainability Education, along with Mary Evelyn Tucker of both Yale and Harvard universities, and Stephen C. Rockefeller, professor emeritus of religion and dean, Middlebury College, about the Earth Charter.

 

Here are some of their thoughts.

>>FW: Are you the new moralists, since the Earth Charter insists not only on environmental responsibility, but on equal rights and opportunities for all, including women? Some people don't believe in those principles.

>>Rockefeller: I haven't used that term "new moralists." I prefer to say we're developing a respect for cultural diversity, and that's a major challenge. But the recognition of the value in the Earth Charter as mutual — that's widespread. You can find in all great religions teachings that call for a respect of others. And it's the same thing with environmental protection — all great religions call for it.

>>FW: Are you concerned that your goals are unrealistic?

>>Rockefeller: What sustains me (in hope) is the experience I've had meeting with the extraordinary women and men who made this. What I say to my students is: You have a choice. You can sit here and be discouraged and depressed, or you can take action, and encourage remarkable people.

Look at how much has already changed: Look at the Soviet Union. Look at South Africa. Everything changed in those places without a shot being fired. There are forces at work that none of us understand, and I believe they'll bring us through our danger.

>>FW: What promise does the Earth Charter hold for you?

>>Tucker: We see ourselves as building an earth community. We are representing an international handshake around the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter gives me a sense of the future, as one person from Zimbabwe said to me. The tone, the persistence of the ideas (in the Charter), they can effect a change of consciousness and of conscience. The Charter is an invitation to become part of a global communion.

>>FW: What about the huge industrialized nations of Asia — would they buy into this?

>>Tucker: What happens in China and India will reshape the face of the planet in the 21st century. Pan Yue, the minister of environment in China, is now (supportive of the Earth Charter).

In China now, there are 60,000 protests a year about the environment — that's a major change. The Chinese are building cities for 10, 20, 30 million people at once, and they know they have to be sustainable.

>>FW: How hard will it be for Americans, who are still so new a nation and infused with the pioneering notion of limitless opportunities in the land and the market, to change and reduce their expectations?

>>Tucker: Once you introduce limits, people start to feel uncomfortable. There has been, in America, the sense that the American spirit and the opportunities are limitless. And I think it is still limitless — there is so much good will and entrepreneurial spirit in Americans, and that can be put to use in a new direction.

>>FW: Are you optimistic about our future on the planet?

>>Corcoran: For me as a teacher and a citizen, I see a great deal for students and citizens to despair about. If one takes a rational view only, then (we're in trouble).

So I'm not an optimist, but I am hopeful. I believe hope has power, and it remains to be constructed in our lives. Hope is a belief in possibilities unseen.

>>FW: Are you concerned about China, and its effect on sustainability or social justice?

>>Corcoran: Yes. If we lose China, we lose the world.

WHAT IS THE EARTH CHARTER?

The Earth Charter is 16 key principles laid out in 2,400 words, It was developed by educators, religious and spiritual leaders, and statesmen and women from across the globe to give governments and individuals from each culture and religion reason to take it up. It provides a "blueprint" for economic, environmental and social behavior its creators hope will allow human beings to survive together.

 

THE 16 PRINCIPLES (each is explained in-depth, and the explanations provide pragmatic steps. To read the document in full, go to www.earthcharter. com).

1. Respect earth and life in all its diversity. 2. Care for the community of life with understanding compassion and love.

3. Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful.

4. Secure earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.

5. Protect and restore the integrity of Earth's ecological systems, with special concern for biological diversity and the natural processes that sustain life.

6. Prevent harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, apply a precautionary approach.

7. Adopt patterns of production, consumption, and reproduction that safeguard earth's regenerative capacities, human rights and community wellbeing.

8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability and promote the open exchange and wide application of the knowledge acquired.

9. Eradicate poverty as an ethical, social and environmental imperative.

10. Ensure that economic activities and institutions at all levels promote human development in an equitable and sustainable manner.

11. Affirm gender equality and equity as prerequisites to sustainable development and ensure universal access to education, health care, and economic opportunity.

12. Uphold the right of all, without discrimination, to a natural and social environment supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being, with special attention to the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities.

13. Strengthen democratic institutions at all levels, and provide transparency and accountability in governance, inclusive participation in decision making, and access to justice.

14. Integrate into formal education and life-long learning the knowledge, values, and skills needed for a sustainable way of life.

15. Treat all living beings with respect and consideration.

16. Promote a culture of tolerance, nonviolence and peace.

The panelists

 

Peter Blaze Corcoran, author, professor of Environmental Studies at FGCU and director of its Center of Environment & Sustainability Education. Most recently coeditor, with FGCU Professor A. James Wohlpart, of the newly published book of essays by internationally renowned writers and leaders of the movement to sustain, "A Voice For Earth: American Writers Respond to the Earth Charter," (University of Georgia Press, 2008).

Stephen C. Rockefeller, professor emeritus of religion and dean, Middlebury College. Son of Nelson Rockefeller, and board chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an influential philanthropic organization. Key contributor to the Earth Charter. Author of, among other books, "Spirit and

Nature: Why the Environment is a Religious Issue" (Beacon, 1992).

Mary Evelyn Tucker, senior lecturer and research scholar at Yale University, most recently author of "The Sacred Universe" (Columbia University Press, 2009), and Christian Future and the Fate of Earth" (Orbis Book, 2009). Key contributor to the Earth Charter.