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An Open Letter to
President Obama and the American People
December 12, 2012
President
Barack Obama
The
White House
1600
Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington,
D.C. 20500
President
Obama and my fellow Americans,
The purpose of this letter is to introduce the
online Earth Manifesto, and to make
you aware of its primary message that humanity needs to be more responsible by
choosing to leave a fairer legacy to future generations. We are already pursuing courses of action
that will leave our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren a legacy
of depleted resources and damaged ecosystems.
To compound this inequity by leaving our descendents a burden of
enormous debt obligations is foolish.
We stand before a great crossroads in the history
of our country. Daunting challenges lie
before us, many of them highly complicated and contentious. Many of the substantive issues that face
humankind were not discussed at all in the 2012 presidential campaign. The failure to talk about crucial challenges
is dangerous to our collective well-being, and to all people in future
generations. We should stop burying our
heads in the sand and begin to pay close attention to big problems during our
elections and in American political discourse in general.
These challenges include resource conservation,
protecting the environment, reducing greenhouse emissions that are causing
ominous changes in global weather patterns, and dealing with global poverty and
malnutrition, overpopulation, overfishing of the oceans, and the destruction of
coral reefs, rainforests, and other vital ecosystems. Many domestic problems also require committed attention, like
improving public education, coping with segregation by race and class in
schools, dealing with foreclosures in the housing market, preventing risks
associated with corporations becoming too big to fairly regulate and “too big
to fail”, reducing the high levels of incarceration in U.S. prisons, stopping
the war on drugs, and reducing the unaffordable costs of America’s military,
security state, and wars. We need to
talk about these things, and boldly deal with them!
Professor Jared Diamond makes a valuable observation in his
insightful book Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed. He
contends that we need a paradigm shift in how our leaders think. America needs leaders with “the courage to
practice long-term thinking and make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions
at a time when problems become perceptible, but before they reach crisis
proportions.”
Two
starkly diverging choices were presented to the electorate in the last national
elections. Unfortunately, both
Republicans and Democrats are allowing giant corporations and rich people
control to our economic and political systems and to increase the concentration
of wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Also,
both political parties have been ineffective in preventing enormous costs from
being externalized onto society and future generations. We need to
begin to address these detrimental trends and make the world a better
place for all. If we continue to let
the forces of greed, exploitation, power abuse, fraud, fear, dishonesty,
denial, shortsighted expediency, hubris, reactionary social conservatism and
religious fundamentalism dominate our societies, then the future will be more
bleak than necessary. Instead, we
should boldly embrace fair-minded, farsighted, honorable, progressive,
pluralistic, and common sense initiatives to create a more just, more
peaceable, and more likely sustainable world.
This
Earth Manifesto could easily change the world, and make it a better place. First of all, it could help progressive
politicians get elected. Second, it
could help chart a way forward that could become a common-sense consensus
guideline for our great nation in the coming decades.
The
United States is engaged in a titanic struggle between competing interests that
all are striving to maximize their own perks, privileges and power. In the process, the greater good of
humanity, and of people in future generations, is being sacrificed to unfair
economic and social policies, short-term-oriented expediencies, unaccountable
prerogatives for giant corporations, deceitful political skullduggery, and
profligate deficit spending.
The
Earth Manifesto provides overarching guidance to our national and international
decision-making with the following ideas and understandings:
·
A Proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations
·
Sustainability Index:
An Assessment of Progress toward
Sustainable Existence
·
Uncommon Sense and Fair-Mindedness
·
A Clear-Eyed Patriot Issues a Clarion Call for a
Second American Revolution
·
One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform
Our Societies
·
Intelligent Precautionary Principles Enunciated --
Holy Cow!
·
Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and
to Fix Both Social Security
and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues
·
A Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity
True
good leadership involves a willingness to honestly address difficult issues,
and NOT to sweep them under the rug. It
seems to me that denial and deceit, especially by Republicans, are masking the
real nature of the unsustainable trends in our economy. It is disturbing that Mitt Romney was
effective in the first presidential debate on October 3, 2012 by glossing over
his stated positions and the extreme inequalities and ideological stances of
Republican candidates.
It
would have been folly for the American people to trust such a devious candidate
who pandered to the right wing so slavishly to get his Party’s nomination, and
then tried to put a smiling face of fair-mindedness on his positions. His Etch-a-Sketch shifts in promises were
highly suspicious, and he seemed to be willing to say anything to get
elected. He represented positions on
taxes, women’s rights, corporate prerogatives, opposition to environmental
protections, and unfair increases in the concentration of wealth in the hands
of the few that are highly negative to the future well-being of the American
people and life on Earth.
“There
is nothing more important in a democracy than a well-informed electorate. When there is no information or, much worse,
wrong information, it can lead to calamitous decisions that clobber any
attempts at vigorous debate.”
--- The character MacKenzie in HBO’s The Newsroom
Ecological insights similar to those of the Earth
Manifesto were revealed in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and also in the
provocative film Home that was
produced by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the renowned French aerial photographer and
ecologist. The film has visually
stunning images, evocative music and a compelling narration by the great
actress Glenn Close. Watch it online!
The film Home begins with these words:
“Listen to me, please. You’re like me, a Homo
sapiens, a wise human. Life, a
miracle in the Universe, appeared around 4 billion years ago and we humans only
200,000 years ago. Yet we have
succeeded in disrupting the balance that is so essential to life. Listen carefully to this extraordinary story
-- which is yours -- and decide what you want to do with it.”
There
is a provocative segment in the film about Easter Island and its Rapanui
residents who completely decimated the native forests on their remote island,
leading to an ecological collapse and the near extinction of the Rapanui
people. The parallels of our human
trajectory today, on a global scale, are daunting. We should adopt visionary precautionary principles, and stop
going down a similar path to the one that had such catastrophic consequences for
the Rapanui. Crucial
understandings like this are also explored in Chapter #7: A Vast and Rash Uncontrolled Experiment in
the Earth Manifesto’s Comprehensive
Global Perspective – An Illuminating Worldview. Recognition is given therein to the foolish risks that humanity
is taking by our rashly indulgent experiment.
Just
after the segment of the film about the Rapanui, Glenn Close makes the
following observation: “Since 1950, the
world’s population has almost tripled, and since 1950 we have more
fundamentally altered our island, the Earth, than in all of our 200,000 year
history.”
These
are some of the reasons why revolutionary changes are needed in the way we are
living on the planet. The ideas in the
Earth Manifesto represent a positive and auspicious way forward, and one that
would be much fairer to people in future generations than either the status quo
or conservative ideologies. It is my
hope that these overarching considerations are heeded in all future national
decisions, reforms, and the formulation of new policies.
THANKS
for your consideration!
Sincerely,
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
Contact at:
SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com
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