PRESS RELEASE

Revolutionary Earth Manifesto Launched at www.EarthManifesto.com.

HANNIBAL, MO. --- December 5, 2011

The wide-ranging understandings of a revolutionary Earth Manifesto have been launched into the public arena.  This compendium of ideas, insights, and progressive perspectives could make a far-reaching and salubrious impact on the policies and actions of the United States and the world.

The central idea in the Earth Manifesto is that human beings must begin to demonstrate much greater respect for Mother Earth by committing ourselves individually and collectively to more effective means of protecting the health of Earth’s providential ecosystems and her biological diversity.  To this end, a Sustainability Index has been created to evaluate the status of human activities and trends in order to provide a measure of progress toward a sustainable existence.

Revolving around this overarching worldview are an entire constellation of subsidiary ideas that support this vital purpose.  The Earth Manifesto contains philosophic explorations and fascinating insights and creative proposals and feminine perspectives and economic analyses and political diatribes and poetic appreciations and a fair share of ruminations and deep introspections.

The most important idea for the preservation of hope and well-being for our descendents is a proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations.  See the Earth Manifesto draft of this Bill of Rights for a clearer idea of the tenets of this expansive proposal.  A provocative and detailed explanation for this proposal is contained in Principal Reasons a Bill of Rights for Future Generations is Needed.  And common sense is being elevated once again to the pinnacle of our top priorities, like it was in the times of the great American pamphleteer and patriot Thomas Paine, with the understandings of Intelligent Precautionary Principles Enunciated --- Holy Cow!

A comprehensive set of specific supporting ideas and proposed initiatives are contained in the compendiums in Part Four:  (1) 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;  (2) Three Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good; (3) One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies;  and (4) a Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity. 

All of these ideas are at least tangentially oriented toward a marriage of humanism and human responsibility, of longer-term understandings, and of the ecological importance for us to act as better stewards of the resources and habitats and ecosystems of our home planet.

Chief Seattle, an Indian leader in the Pacific Northwest, made a wise observation in 1844 which provides the essential reason for the necessity for us to choose to live more sustainably:

“Whatever happens to the Earth, happens to the children of the Earth … All things are connected, like the blood that unites one family.  Mankind did not weave the web of life; we are but one strand within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

Perilous times require Big Ideas and higher purposes and broader perspectives and actions that are more responsible to the greater good.  The essays of the Earth Manifesto grapple with the most important issues that face our nation and world today, and provide clearly articulated and farsighted understandings and Big Picture worldviews.  They coherently and creatively combine economics and politics with philosophy, psychology, progressive thinking, common sense, and spiritual illumination to providentially propose positive ways forward.

The Earth Manifesto contains highly specific plans for improving our country and the world by making our communities healthier, our economy more stable and sound, our societies saner, and our actions more likely to be sustainable far into the future.  Propitious ways are also proposed for us to begin more sensibly protecting the environment and the resources critical to our survival and prosperity. 

Part One of the Earth Manifesto is being launched with an incisive exploration of U.S. deficit spending and national debt in Happy Harbingers in Good Ideas for a Better Future and in Sad Implications of the Two Dueling Santa Claus Strategies in Political Economics.  Also, Rapture Mania: Bizarre Beliefs and Epic Epiphanies provides a fascinating investigation of ideas about myth, reality, and the future.  And in Huckleberry Finn, the California Gold Rush, and Related Reflections, readers will discover a provocatively creative exploration of entertaining ideas and big issues.  Check them out!

The magnum opus of the Earth Manifesto is the Comprehensive Global Perspective: An Illuminating Worldview.  It is a manuscript that, in itself, represents one of the most expansive and widely inclusive collections of understandings ever compiled.  It includes perspective and analysis and a synthesis of ideas from many authors, philosophers, historians, visionaries, scientists, luminaries, politicians, and spiritual leaders.  Consisting of 121 Chapters, it is designed to help people make sense of the biggest issues facing the human race.  Some chapter titles are:  “The Astonishing Parable of Nauru”; “Searching for Wisdom in America”;  “Morality and Right Action”;  “Seductive Sirens”;  “A Vast and Rash Uncontrolled Experiment”;  “Our American Achilles Heel”;  and “Redefining Progress”.

Ultimate mysteries permeate existence.  So perhaps it is appropriate that this manifesto has now mysteriously materialized in our midst, springing fully-formed like the goddess of Wisdom from the head of Zeus.  This manifesto has been evolving continuously with the incessant unfolding of events and new developments, together with clearer evidence of wiser ways forward.

Part One of the Manifesto also contains a wide variety of intriguing observations and ideas and “big picture” perspectives.  They include Existence, Economics, and Ecological Intelligence, and A Feminine Vision of an Achievable Better World – Anima Should Rule!, and Gaia’s Geological Perspective, and A Quite Curious and Illuminating Biography of Mark Twain.  On the journey through many essays, these writings identify the most significant challenges facing humanity, and they suggest salubrious and achievable solutions to these big problems. 

These ideas transcend partisanship and ideology, and could thus override the rancorous political paralysis that grips our nation.  The reasonable force of these ideas may well streak into human awareness with the potent power of a visionary revelation, like a shooting star speeding into Earth’s atmosphere and illuminating a fiery trail of essential understandings.

The Earth Manifesto.com website has been published online for many years.  It evolves every month.  Some of the most interesting writings are found in Part Three, including an entertaining and informative story titled Tall Tales, Provocative Parables, Luminous Clarity and Evocative Truths -- A Modern Log from the Sea of Cortez.  John Steinbeck would have approved!  There are also cogent perspectives in the essay, Tyrants and Damsels and Associated Incisive Insights, and important foreign policy understandings are contained in Reflections on War, and in Sow Justice, Harvest Peace.

To gain the best understanding of these extensive ideas, review the titles and the descriptions of the essays on the Home Page, and read one of the links that strikes your fancy.  Or start from the beginning, and read the essays in the order they are presented.

The extensive writings in the Earth Manifesto are organized into Seven Parts, presented roughly in the reverse order of their evolving genesis, with the most recent writings first.  “LIFO, like!”  The Seven Parts are:

PART ONE.  Observations, Introspection, Illumination and Revelation.  This section includes vitally important current and historical and universal perspectives.

PART TWO.  On the Cusp of the Obama Era (Sept. ’08 - Nov. ‘08).  This section includes six essays about the tumultuous economic and social turmoil of the year 2008.

PART THREE.  Soliloquistic Expressions – A Feast of Ideas (Nov. ‘06 – Oct. ‘08).  This section contains sixteen creative, entertaining and important essays.  One of the best is Tall Tales, Provocative Parables, Luminous Clarity, and Evocative Truth:  A Modern Log from the Sea of Cortez.

PART FOUR.  Overarching Considerations -- Transformational Ideas and Enlightened Proposals.  This section includes a wide variety of smart, detailed, visionary and practical ideas for helping us to achieve the greater good.

PART FIVE.  A Marvelous Miscellany.  This section includes a rough draft of an Earth Manifesto Film Script.  Note that assistance is needed to make this into a vibrant and compelling film.  Also in this section is a list of Recommended Reading for a Broader Understanding and Appreciation of the World, as well as Twelve Delicious Recipes for Good Health and Gourmet Appreciation, which contains some very healthy and tasty recipes.

PART SIX.  Evolutionary Understandings: Blue Period (October 2004 – January 2006).  This section contains 32 essays concerning a wide-ranging variety of topics.

PART SEVEN.  The Original Earth Manifesto.  This manuscript began more than a decade ago as a passionate and philosophic outpouring of Big Ideas expressed in calligraphic form.  This original Earth Manifesto consists of 121 separate Soliloquies, each one a single page that explores its own compilation of ideas.  These Soliloquies offer fresh, cogent and far-sighted perspectives into the dominant worldviews of today, and into the state of our culture, society, economics, politics, psyches and souls.  These Soliloquies represent a comprehensive and enlightening synthesis of broad-minded understandings and insightful ideas and ecological truths.  All of them are interspersed with achievable actions which could help make human societies fairer and healthier, as well as more propitious to people in the future.

General Observations

It has been more than 235 years since the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776.  In many key aspects, the years from 2001 to 2011 have been an economic and political fiasco for the United States, so this is a good time for us to consider how to ensure that our nation helps to foster and preserve civil liberties and individual freedoms and human rights and national security while at the same time ensuring an achievable modicum of prosperity and social justice and intelligent planning priorities and ecological sanity and fiscal responsibility and good governance.

The well-being of life on Earth is being threatened by wasteful consumerism, greed and economic desperation.  Profligate resource exploitation, aggressive militarism and the impacts of rapid human population growth are creating profoundly unsettling risks, including degradations of vital ecosystems, vulnerabilities of industrial monoculture agriculture, and the production of large quantities of garbage, pollutants, toxins and greenhouse gas emissions. 

Our disregard for the healthy condition of Earth’s ecosystems arguably must give way to an every-day-is-Earth-Day attitude, and to behaviors and policies more considerate of the general good and prosperity in the long run. 

“Change you can believe in” is being subverted by the powerful influence of vested interests and the overriding impetus of the status quo in our change-averse political system.  Our economic institutions must be restructured to eliminate wrong-headed policies and subsidies that have been created by our representatives to benefit narrow constituencies.  Our democracy itself must be re-invigorated to purge it of the dysfunctional aspects that give overweening power to big corporations and lobbyists and the influential wealthy.  Merely bureaucratic regulations must be reduced, and intelligent incentives and laws must be implemented which are designed to foster the greatest good for the greatest number of people over the longest period of time.  The essential criteria for determining what contributes to the public interest and the common good should be honest assessments of what is fairest and most likely to be sustainable.

One particularly compelling line of thought that underlies the ideas in many of these writings is that the human race is ill-advisedly “fleecing the future” with our unsustainable short-term oriented actions.  Powerful interests strive to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible.  Common sense tells us that we should we should honestly be treating our home planet instead as a thriving and lasting concern, rather than like a business in liquidation.

We are acting as if we are collectively unaware, or in denial, or lacking in the most basic tenets of conscience and morality.  Must we not tread on the Planet more gently?  Must we not treat other people more fairly?  Would we not be wisest to strive with more determined and sustained commitment to finding ways of protecting our Constitutional civil liberties?  Must we not demand with tenacious intent that our business and government give greater consideration to the common good and to the well-being of future generations? 

General Douglas MacArthur once said, “I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations”.  Should we not give greater weight to these words, and reflect it in our public decision-making and foreign policies?  Should we not dedicate ourselves to creating societies that are more mutually secure by making the world more just?                                                                                 

The Earth Manifesto commemorates and celebrates the wonders and beauty of our home planet.  It strives to advance a vital revolution against the subtle madness that characterizes the world in its compulsive busyness, wasteful consumerism, laissez-faire exploitive capitalism, bubble economics, wrongheaded purposes, harsh inequities, stimulated fears, externalized costs, reactionary religious fundamentalism, uncontrolled population growth, and policies that stoke terrorism and encourage repression and aggressive militarism in response.

We must look beyond the ‘good old boys’, and beyond the conflict between ideologies of liberals and conservatives.  We must look deeper than the cultural conflicts between stereotypically strong, authoritarian, discipline-oriented, dominant paternalistic father-figure paradigms and more cooperative and protective maternal instincts which are oriented around empathetic understanding and fairness.  We must look directly to the important principles set forth by our Founders. 

Our true American values are those that have been cherished since the United States declared independence from Great Britain in 1776.  Colonial imperialism by the British had given our forbearers a powerful motive to establish a new representative democracy in which everyone has a voice.  A new nation was brought forth upon this continent to be governed by rules of law and a Constitution and a Bill of Rights which embraced idealistic and humanistic principles of Liberty, Justice, and the promotion of the General Welfare.  These documents included strong protections of free speech for all people, and freedom of worship and other guaranteed rights.  They also reflected a valid distrust of abuses of power, so they included a robust system of checks and balances within the federal government, and between it and the States.

Many years have passed since the Constitution was ratified.  In this interregnum, a multitude of progressive advances have been made that protect citizens from the worst characteristics of ruthless capitalism.  Laws and regulations have been established and reforms have been made that create important protections of privacy, civil rights, public health, food and drug safety, workers’ rights, and our enveloping environment.

These progressive advances stand above the opposing influence of entrenched interests that are vested in the status quo.  The purpose of these progressive advances has been to remedy the socials ill associated with modern civilization and to mitigate the corrupting effect of Big Money in our economic and political systems.  Misleading information, propaganda, deceptive spin, unethical dirty election tricks, institutionalized bribery, and a dominant paradigm of harmful ideologies and inflexible conventional beliefs work against these progressive advances.  In particular, the insecurities and fears of Americans have been manipulated by ideologues, and people’s biases and ignorance and nationalistic impulses have been exploited, in order to advance a regressive and repressive agenda in both domestic and foreign policies.

Business, consumer and investor goals have been given too much influence, and more important “good citizenship goals” and long-term prosperity have been subordinated to greed and narrow drives.  Too much power is given to corporations, investors, speculators and short-term-oriented profiteering.  This negatively affects our communities and workers and the environment.  These wrong-headed outcomes are promoted by political expediencies, accounting gimmicks, misleading economic measures of the GDP, irresponsibly shortsighted objectives, and most recently the Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited and secret campaign expenditures by corporations and unions.

Fairer policies must be cultivated, ones that wholeheartedly embrace honesty, true justice, real democracy, genuine freedom, healthy community, openness, balance, moderation, peace, and ecological sanity.  Faith in reason must prevail.  This faith must be tempered by smart priorities and wisely empathetic understandings and good neighborliness and proportional responses to risks and threats.

This Manifesto is, foremost, about the Earth and our vital interconnectedness with her biotic communities and her miraculously providential habitats and ecosystems.  These words concern an honest and true understanding of the inter-dependencies of our species with healthy natural ecosystems and the undiminished biodiversity of life on Earth.  We are slowly coming to the realization that we simply must give our beautiful home planet much more respect. 

There is an enormous amount of money to be made by ignoring this overarching understanding.  An enormous amount.  But this fact does not alter even one iota the transcendent truth that we must protect the providential terrestrial commons and the health of the ecosystems upon which our human prosperity and survival depend.

Life on Earth is amazingly resilient, but it is also vulnerable to rapid changes.  We must conserve and protect its remarkable diversity for our own sake, and for that of our descendents.  We can not indefinitely sustain wasteful, harmful and depletionary activities the way we have been doing so egregiously, at an accelerating rate, for the past 250 years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Tiffany B. Twain is the author of the Earth Manifesto.  She writes with optimism and a cheerfully bemused but vigilantly concerned tone.  She provides scathing insights into the unjust and foolish aspects of human societies worldwide.  She professes to be a ‘Depth Assessor’ and a very indirect descendant of the famous author and humorist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.  She asserts that what the world needs now is a greater clarity of perspective and a deeper connection to ancient human roots, along with more respect and a greater appreciation of the natural world. 

“Want Affinity?,” Tiffany Twain asks. “Anyone who has rafted on the mighty Mississippi River, or gone for a long walk in the woods, will recognize that at the core of our being, intimate to our souls, deeper than conscious awareness, and beyond aesthetics and philosophical speculation, there lies a basic healthfulness in our communing with the natural world, and in our willingness to protect it.”

Such observations -- and many, many more far-ranging ideas -- are explored in this lengthy manifesto.   Readers are urged to think for themselves about the ideas it contains, and to do their own part to contribute in some way to the improvement of conditions in the world. 

We can, indeed must, do better!!  As Dr. Seuss’ Lorax said, ‘UNLESS someone like us cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It’s not!’                     

For more information, contact Dr. Tiffany B. Twain at SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com.  Feedback is welcomed!

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