My grandmother, Eleanor Roosevelt, was instrumental in adoption by the United Nations of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was my first and most influential mentor, whose home became mine in my formative undergraduate
years at Amherst College. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin those undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I developed some measure of both.
In my adult years, particularly as Professor of Human Development at Hampshire College, I sought to nourish in succeeding generations of students a deeper knowledge and conscious embodiment of their own and engagement with others' life journeys.
Later, I became convinced of the need for a more capacious understanding of human development, rights and responsibilities — our need to nourish a movement based not only on human rights but the rights of all sentient beings - all life, as we are essentially one interactive interdependent ecosystem. As John Muir wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." It is a perspective common to the world's religions - especially Buddhism's conception of co-evolution and the sacred traditions of indigenous cultures. Like evolution and hope, it arises from the bottom up.
Paul Hawken began his book Blessed Unrest (2007) with an overview of a world-wide movement devoted to re-imagining and recovering social justice and environmental sustainability, in his view an organic and sacred web of tasks entailing "deep listening" as well as activism, essentially "restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world." They are ancient tasks of compassion possessed of an entirely new urgency, for "the planet has a life-threatening disease, marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change," fueled by thoughtless consumption and the rapaciousness of a capitalist fundamentalism devoted not to true sustenance but to a narrow conception of economic growth.
Whether such a diverse and loose collectivity of creative and resistant enterprise deserves the name movement is a matter of personal judgement; but with Hawken I think it is more than that, not less. It is, as he realized, not a singular enterprise, nor is it driven by a singular ideology. Readers of Reckonings will know that I am drawn to one use of the word "movement"--the progressive development of a musical composition, a poem or story. In that sense, writ large, movement is coextant with the generative and regenerative character of life itself.
During the past year I have been deeply intrigued by an expression of that
movement embodied in a gathering, predominantly of women, in Moab, Utah during the autumn of 2012. The gathering was called a Women's Congress for Future Generations. Their purpose was to begin work on a Declaration of the Rights Held by Future Generations and Bill of Responsibilities for Present Generations.
"This document," say its creators, "is not so much a product as a reflection of a process of relationship and movement building," so necessarily "a living draft... working documents to be amended in perpetuity, as an ever-widening circle add their voices to these statements, and as these rights and responsibilities are passed down from generation to generation."
A first working draft of the preamble and principles "was written collaboratively by Carolyn Raffensperger, Executive Director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, in conversation with Bob Gough, Osprey Oreille Lake, Polly Higgins, Peter Montague and Rebecca Altman in advance of the Moab gathering to facilitate group discussion. The rights and responsibilities were distilled from discussions held at the Moab Congress on the gifts and rights of all beings and the responsibilities present generations carry to honor those gifts and rights."
I invite readers of Reckonings to read that first draft, join in the challenges of its ongoing development, find their own ways of translating these working ideas into personal, interpersonal and organizational action. I would be very interested to know if/how such translation shows promise and works in your own local circumstances.
The blog in which the text (and some very preliminary sense of its evolution) may be found is available at http://celebratewcffg.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/declaration-of-the-rights-held-by-future-generations-and-bill-of-responsibilities-for-present-generations/.