Values
Page: II
s
Sustainable
Alternatives
The Fellowship of Humanity
Founded by EPIC Socialists
is a refuge and platform for today's
Eco-Socialists
Green Economists
Progressive Activists
&
Responsible
Anarchists
The Fellowship of Humanity is slowly building, step by step, a progressive eco-Humanist community and village on a human scale that responds to the real and obvious biological and spiritual needs of human beings. Most of us realize that we are animals, primates, closest to the great apes. Yet in American society we are expected to think and act like machines -- and worship numbers. We are rewarded for admiring, emulating, and increasing numbers -- which translates into precision, repetition, quantification, uniformity, conformity, consistency, efficiency, sterility, isolation, and stupidity. It is an engineer's society with the productive aspirations of engineers, both social and technologic engineers. Not only is our entire human environment engineered -- all its structures, buildings, products, transportation, and communications -- but our crops and our food too. All human activities are engineered, pleasantly packaged, and sold back to us as consumer goods. And in spite of our worship of efficiency, human waste is filling up the Earth. The human species has become so productive that the Earth is being killed under the weight and heat of our resourcefulness and wastefulness.
The future belongs to people whose community spirit incorporates both sustainable and exciting ideas and actions. Accordingly, the Fellowship of Humanity is in process of developing a spirituality in harmony with the ecology of the Earth. As in Latin America, it is important in North America to fulfill the natural yearning of human beings to comfort one another and all life around them; to be sensitive, responsive, and helpful to the needs of others -- including those in the plant and animal kingdoms; to solve problems that make a difference between life and death; to heal not only ailments but sufferings and conflicts; to enjoy being alive among others; to play with everyone and everything; to engage oneself in intriguing, challenging, stimulating, and rewarding activities; and to believe that one's own life has a good purpose. Progressive cooperative communities in Latin America today are examples to all the world -- and to the Fellowship of Humanity church community -- of conscious living on a human scale and humane.
The Dying Earth,
a Projection
of Runaway
Global Climate Change
At the Fellowship, we slow down and re-humanize ourselves. We remember we belong to the animal kingdom and the Earth. We advocate living a natural life. We step back from numbers. We advocate sleeping when we are drowsy, not because we have taken a pill; waking up when we are done with sleep, not because a clock has reached a certain number. We advocate working with our hands and basic tools, relying on motors as little as possible; working until we are tired of working, not working to commands or until a clock has reached a certain number. We advocate working on projects that suit the seasons, not working regardless of whether it's winter or summer; working in a time frame that suits our relationships with other conscious people and with the planet, not to make arbitrary deadlines. We advocate working for the real and obvious needs of people and within natural and reasonable time frames, not for the sake of money or wavering fantasies or vanities; working for the enrichment of our community as a whole, not to compare our material wealth with others; and we include all forms of local life in our community, plant and animal, not only human. We advocate eating wholesome food slowly together, not eating alone in a hurry; eating and talking honestly together, not drinking or smoking to force conversation or sociability.
We advocate including in our lives as many animals and plants as possible, not succumbing to any sterile rules of landlords and office managers; accommodating our lives, our housing, our communities, our transportation systems to the needs of animals, including ourselves, rather than machines. We advocate cultivating friendships with good and honest people among those whom we have met, not playing social or psychological or political games with acquaintances whom we think we have to manipulate or surpass.
We advocate devoting some four hours of our wakeful day to responsibilities that result in our survival and in our development of conscious, ecologic communities, not devoting ever more hours to making waste-generating products for money or just to look like we are busy. We advocate devoting another four hours of our day to following our own interests and intellectual challenges not waiting until we retire to do what we have always wanted. We advocate devoting four hours of every day to partnering with our partner in life and cooperating with our family, children, and pets, not just tossing them the tired, reluctant dregs of our exhausted energy at the end of a hectic day. We advocate spending another four waking hours on hygiene, grooming, and our favorite exercise, recreation, and physical challenges, not putting our body on the shelf until we get around to feeling up to using it. The remaining eight hours of our day belong to rest and nourishing sleep, not playing games with biology trying to stretch out our day with less and less sleep. It seems that, for the human being, some four hours a day is the optimum amount of time that it's good to spend on doing a single task, project, or discipline. To spend more time in one day on any endeavor is tiring and counterproductive. This means that half the eight-hour work day of most Americans is wasted in one way or another. It may take the form of shortening our life or miring us down in diseases of stress.
We look forward to the final chapter of the whip-lashing, unsympathetic Protestant Work Ethic everywhere, the end of the severity of Puritanism in the east and cowboy individualism in the west, and the collapse of corporate capitalism with its predatory banking system that extracts all the wealth of nations. We advocate re-humanizing our lives!
Annie Leonard
Analyzes Capitalism
in her "Story of Stuff"
And she goes on to
Analyze Cap and Trade
in her "Story of Cap and Trade"
The Fellowship of Humanity is in solidarity with Annie Leonard's analysis of capitalism and the sad and dangerous condition of America today: a society based on deceit, greed, arrogant self-serving self interest, destruction of Earth's living environments, destruction of alternative human societies and social experiments, and the perversion of the human potential to be cooperative into the cruel, competitive, irresponsible, domineering aggression and oppression we find everywhere and all around us today. And we are in solidarity with so many others who have eloquently articulated similar conclusions about American society -- we share their values: David Korten for example, Bob Banner, William Black, Grace Lee Boggs, Robert Bowman, Stewart Brand, Ellen Brown, Chuck Burr, William Catton, Ha-Joon Chang, Brian Czech, Noam Chomsky, Mike Davis, John Dear, Debal Deb, Barbara Ehrenreich, Riane Eisler, Robert Fisk, Laura Flanders, Tim Flannery, John Bellamy Foster, James Galbraith, Thomas Geoghegan, Amy Goodman, Al Gore, Glen Greenwald, Robert Greenwald, William Greider, James Hansen, David Harvey, Paul Hawken, Christopher Hedges, Richard Heinberg, Jim Hightower, Michael Hudson, Jesse Jackson, Derrick Jensen, Robert Johnson, Van Jones, Naomi Klein, Joel Kovel, Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, James Kunstler, Robert Kuttner, James Lovelock, Jan Lundberg, Chris Martenson, Bill McKibben, Cynthia McKinney, Guy McPherson, George Monbiot, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, Ralph Nader, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Dmitry Orlov, Michael Parenti, John Perkins, John Pilger, Jeremy Rifkin, Michael Ruppert, Robert Scheer, Vandana Shiva, David Sirota, Norman Solomon, David Suzuki, David Swanson, Matt Taibbi, Jonathan Tasini, John Vance, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Wolff, Alexis Zeigler, Howard Zinn. There are so very many intelligent progressive people today! Surely they, along with all of you and all of us, will make a difference.
Currently corporate capitalism in American society, and globally now, is out of control. Global capitalism -- globalization or imperialism by another name -- creates, by force, consumer societies world wide which collectively are commercializing or commodifying all human activity and humans themselves and consuming the veritable Earth in an ugly way. Practically all of what is produced for consumption today is turned into trash in a matter of months. As an unstoppable growth, turning everything and everybody into capital and trash at any cost, it's cancer -- as Joel Kovel calls it. Consumerism is genocide, as Alexis Zeigler says, destroying everything and everybody in the mad dash to production for the sake of money.
The Fellowship community and spirit advocates tirelessly for the opposite philosophy and vision: an eco-centric human scale village comfortable and stable in its bio-region, keeping up positive relationships with its natural vicinity, but at the same time exciting and dynamic in its spirituality, while mindful of, and connecting with, global humanity.
Smith and Bybee Wetlands by
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