National Strategy for Sustainability

Contributed by Sharon Abreu

From Rob Wheeler on Jan. 25:
Dear Friends,

If you have not already heard our proposal urging the Obama Administration to develop and implement a National Strategy for Sustainability made it into Change.org’s Top Ten Ideas for Change in America – out of more than 7700 Ideas entered and 600,000 votes cast. Our proposal to create a Sustainable America will thus be featured in Change.org’s National Advocacy Campaign. During the coming week we will be discussing our ideas for the advocacy campaign with the folks at Change.org; developing our own leadership team to work on and help coordinate our activities; and sharing our ideas with you about how we can move forward on this.

I was fortunate enough to be able to say a few words at Change.org’s launch event at the National Press Club on January 16th. The panel of speakers included Chris Hughes, Director of My.BarackObama.com and co-founder of Facebook; Jose Antonio Vargas, Political Reporter for the Washington Post; Lee Brenner, Political Director at MySpace; and Joe Trippi from John Edwards’ and Howard Dean’s Presidential Campaigns. I told them, and the room filled with Change.org’s participants and supporters, that there is probably not one community in America, much less country in the world, that is planning to make a complete transition to full sustainability; but this is what is needed.

I challenged everyone to think about how we could create a visioning process that would gather the best ideas from throughout America to develop a common vision, that includes all of the diversity that is the United States, for what a Sustainable America could and should be. I said that we will also need to develop a platform that shows everything that is already being done in America to create a sustainable future; and a redesign process that is sufficient for transforming how we do pretty much everything so that it becomes sustainable. I was pleased to look around the room and see how many people were nodding, like they totally got it.

Afterwards many of us from the Citizens Network for Sustainable Development (CitNet) and our friends got together to discuss the next steps in launching our own advocacy campaign. A few of the ideas that we’ve begun to discuss are: A) organizing a briefing and consultation in Washington DC bringing together civil society leaders, congressional representatives, and administration officials; B) sending a letter to the Obama Administration formally requesting that they invite the American people to join them in developing and implementing a National Strategy for Sustainability, along with suggestions for a broad outline of what such a strategy could include and how it should be developed and implemented; C) regional consultations to gather and discuss ideas for the types of things that could be included in a US Strategy for Sustainability; and D) developing an organizational development and strategy plan for our Campaign to Create a Sustainable America.

It is also just 3 months now until Earth Day, which could provide us with an excellent opportunity to raise awareness and invite people in local communities across the US to join us in our efforts to create a Sustainable America. If you have any ideas for things that we could do for Earth Day focusing on this would you please let me/us know.

The Campaign for a Sustainable America has been offered an exciting opportunity to partner with Betsy Rosenberg and EcoTalk Radio to produce a new interactive radio talk show that focuses on creating a Sustainable America, beginning with a 13 week pilot series that will start on February 16 or soon thereafter. Initially this will air and the shows will be archived on Voice America Green at https://www.voiceamerica.com; thus anyone anywhere in America or the world will be able to listen to the broadcasts by then clicking on Green Talk Network. I hope that you will tune into the broadcasts if possible or at least listen to the archives afterwards.

I also wanted to let you know that John Dernbach’s new book, Agenda for a Sustainable America, is now available and is a great read. See: https://agendaforasustainableamerica.com. It provides a comprehensive assessment of U.S. progress toward sustainable development and a roadmap of necessary next steps toward achieving a Sustainable America. Likewise one cannot go wrong by purchasing or taking a look at Huey Johnson’s new edition of Green Plans: Blueprint for a Sustainable Earth. Huey’s book details what is already being done in many other developed countries around the world and what we could learn from them as we develop our own Strategy for Sustainability or Green Plan. It’s available today on Amazon for less than $15.See: https://www.rri.org/pubs_book.html.

There will be many ways and many things that people and organizations can do to support our initiative. For starters we want to get as many leading Americans, organizations, and networks to endorse it as possible. Please let us know if you would like to endorse our Call urging the Obama Administration to lead our country in developing and implementing a National Strategy for Sustainability and invite your friends and associates to do so as well. You can also list your organization’s endorsement yourself on our Change.org webpage at:

https://www.change.org/ideas/view/develop_implement_a_national_strategy_for_sustainability

You will also find a whole list of Suggestions for Action that many of our supporters have posted on this page most of which should be included in our National Strategy Plan.

We now have almost 1200 members that have signed onto our FaceBook Cause Page dedicated to Creating a Sustainable America – in less than 3 weeks time. You can join too to support our organizing effort. Click here to join:

https://apps.facebook.com/causes/190111?m=64cfd329&recruiter_id=39077476

By the way, Commit to becoming the “Greenest” country in the world is the top idea under Energy and Environment in President Obama’s Citizen’s Briefing Book – so this is right in line with our proposal to create a sustainable America.

In case you didn’t notice there were also many references to sustainability during the Inaugural activities. We can use these as we make our case for the need to create a sustainable future in the United States:

Dr. Rick Warren’s Invocation

“When we fail to treat our fellow human beings and all the earth with the respect that they deserve, forgive us. And as we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ. Help us to share, to serve and to seek the common good of all. May all people of goodwill today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet.”

Rev. Joseph Lowery’s Benediction

“We know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. We come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.”

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

“It is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Thank you once again for your support, commitment, and for helping us to create a Sustainable America and World.

Sincerely,

Rob Wheeler | Send an Email | 717-264-5036

Citizens Network for Sustainable Development