The Earth Charter, completed and launched in 2000, is a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful world. It is the product of a ten-year, worldwide, cross-cultural dialogue on common goals and shared values. The objective of the consultation and drafting process was to help crystallize and articulate the consensus on shared values related to sustainable development taking form in the emerging global civil society. This essay endeavors to describe the Earth Charter consultation and drafting process and presents examples of how controversial issues and complex problems were addressed. Some issues were resolved quickly, and others...

We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that...

Some years ago in Hawai’i I attended an International World History Conference that was organized around the theme of oceans in world history. At the opening dinner of the conference Nainoa Thompson, a young Hawaiian sail master with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, told the story of the Hokulea voyages that re-created the earlier Pacific journeys from Hawai’i south to Tahiti. These voyages took place in the centuries of great oceanic migrations in the Pacific from approximately 700 AD to 1400 AD. Hokulea is the name given to the canoe built for these voyages and is translated as “Star of Gladness”...

The Earth Charter is the most important document in our time, as humans living on Planet Earth. It is important for several reasons. It is a way to open the human eyes so that every living thing will have value, spiritual value. It is a way to open the human heart so that nature will find a home. The human will finally learn to give thanks every day to all of creation. From the very souls of men and women and all of the children we can learn to give thanks.

We can offer special thanks every day to our...

Dave Hargett’s dream for Lake Conestee isn’t really visible from the parking lot of the Racecar Speedy Mart. The impressive nineteenth-century stone dam on the Reedy River in Greenville, South Carolina, is in clear view though, and the boarded-up textile mill, closed twenty years ago, crowds in everyone’s line of sight just off Conestee Road. To anyone driving past, the eighteen of us—two Wofford College professors, fifteen college students, and Dave—look a little suspicious, standing among the fire ant hills and stunted pines on the ridge above the river.

It’s early fall and in only the minute or...

I despair often, when I consider the challenges we face in attempting not just to hold the line on our ever-diminishing American wilderness, but to restore some of the elements—almost ghosts, now—that are so critical to the spirit and function of that wildness. The grizzly bear that feeds upon and then disperses in its scat the seed caches of whitebark pine, stored in mounds along the windiest, most remote ridgetops by the raucous-shouting Clark’s nutcrackers. The black-backed woodpeckers hammering on the drums of the remaining spars of burned and “unsalvaged” lodgepole in remote forests, swarming the dead and...

If you honor the sabbath in any way, or if you respect the beliefs of those who do, or if you merely suspect there may be some wisdom bound up in this ancient practice, then you should protect wilderness. For wilderness represents in space what the sabbath represents in time—a limit to our dominion, a refuge from the quest for power and wealth, an acknowledgment that Earth does not belong to us.

In scriptures that have inspired Christians, Muslims, and Jews, we are told to remember the sabbath and keep it holy by making it a day of rest...

When I was a boy, at our yearly family parties at Popo’s (Grandmother’s) house in Kapahulu, amid the kitchen smells of fried noodles, crispy gaugee, and roasted chicken, one Chinese aunt would gaze admiringly at me and say, “Stuart look like Hawaiian boy. Stuart no look like Chinese boy!”

“Ho shoo!” Popo would brag, “All the senior citizens at Paki Park ask me, ‘Your grandson part-Hawaiian? Your son marry Hawaiian?’ Yah, Stuart look like Hawaiian boy.”

Throughout my childhood, I passed as Hawaiian. Many years later as an adult, I began differentiating passing as Hawaiian and truly advocating Hawaiian indigenous...

Once I was a horse, an Appaloosa wild and full of speed. I would run fast—up and down sidewalks, around the school playground and our yard—just to feel wind rush with me and, sometimes, to run away from what I feared. In the late 1960s the world seemed to have moved beyond sense: race riots near our home, the Vietnam “war” and its casualties, killings of “good” men, and in my own family palpable silence and bitterness.

At eight years of age I came to know and fear hatred-filled words spat on me because of my brown skin....

The morning after the 2004 presidential election my husband thinks that I’m sleeping and silently gets out of bed. It’s 5:00 A.M. I’ve lain awake an hour, wondering who will be our president come January. I remember a time when our country went to bed on Election Night knowing the outcome, but since the election of 2000, nothing is certain. I find Raven downstairs, listening to the radio in the Vermont dark.

“Still undecided,” he says grimly.

“How can that be?”

“Florida went to Bush, so he’s in the lead. There are two points between him and Kerry.”

“Are all...

Among so many other fine things, the Earth Charter proposes a new way of seeing that gives rise to a new ethic. The new way of seeing is understanding the inter- and retro-connections of all with all, for “Our environmental, economic, political, social, and spiritual challenges are interconnected, and together we can forge inclusive solutions.”¹ Likewise, the new ethic, consistent with the new way of seeing, is based on the four creative energies of ecologically healthy human reality, called Parts in the Earth Charter, namely: (1) respect and care for the community of life; (2) ecological integrity; (3) social and...