Dr. Tony Prince wrote:

Dear Friends,

I recently came across the "Five Key Points" of the text below on a
website concerned with the relationship between law and ecology, so I
pass them on in case they are of interest to some of you. The author
is James Thornton, who is a solicitor in England and Wales and also a
member of Supreme Court of the United States, and the essay the
passage is taken from is called "The Long Dream". You can find it,
together with other relevant material, on Thornton's website, at
<www.clientearth.org>. A similar website, also dealing with the
application of law to protection of the environment, is that of the
Centre for Earth Jurisprudence at <www.earthjuris.org>.

You will notice, as I did, the Buddhist language ("compassion...
enlightened understanding") in the first paragraph below, and the
emphasis on the importance of "transparency to the Transcendent" in
his fifth point -- the phrase "the Transcendent" looks as though it
might have been carefully chosen to cover both the Buddhist Nirvana
and the monotheistic God. Whether Mr. Thornton really has any personal
connection with Buddhism or not I don't know, but his five points
certainly seem to be worth thinking about, perhaps in conjunction with
the recommendations of the Earth Charter.

Best wishes to all,

Yours in the Dharma,

Tony

Five Key Points

We need to devise a radical set of guidelines for the positive
transformation of our society. These guidelines must be clear, since
environmental issues quickly become complex. The guidelines must be
born out of compassion but not require an enlightened understanding to
implement. They must capture a positive excitement about how we can
make a better world.

I will lay out five areas of concern involving our relationship with
the Earth, our productive activities, our intellectual constructs, our
relationships with each other, and our relationship with the
Transcendent. In each of these areas, I employ the notion of
transparency and advocate progressively more transparency.

1. Transparency of the Works of Humankind: We need to redesign all our
activities from manufacturing to agriculture, power generation to
housing and transport, so that they fit harmlessly within natural
systems. Almost no real effort has gone into making human activity fit
with nature. No wonder we are rending life’s fabric. The ecological
footprint of the average American is now 23.5 acres per person, while
the average African’s is 2.5 acres. Our goal: raise the quality of
life for all people, while working to give human activity an
ecological footprint trending towards zero.

To rebuild our infrastructure so it is transparent while creating a
more just global society - the long dream - we need four more levels
of transparency:

2. Transparency of Nature: We need to study nature in far greater
detail than we ever have, so that we understand the solutions nature
embodies about how to live in a sustainable way. Example: we are only
now learning in detail how photosynthesis happens; this could make
clean harmless power from sunlight and water, just like plants.

3. Transparency of our Thought: The way we think is autistic: our
economics, law and psychology focus only on humans, ignoring other
sentient beings. Until we make other sentient beings and our
relationship with them an integral part of our law, economics and
psychology, we will not be able to form thoughts that capture
sustainable policy choices. Goal: reformulate economics, law and
psychology from the ground up so that we can think properly about a
sustainable society. Until we do this, a sustainable society is a
pipedream.

4. Transparent Human Relationships: Bush’s style of democracy is as
opaque as a dictatorship; it prevents citizens from having access to
information about how decisions are made and what the results of those
decisions are. We need a transparent government. We needed
transparency in corporations. We need all human institutions to be
transparent. Justice requires accurate information. Tyranny and
economic injustice, at home and abroad, flourish on a lack of
transparency.

5. Transparency to the Transcendent: We each need a transparent
relationship with the Source of all being, however we conceive It. If
you are fully transparent to the source of being, you are fully
enlightened, and fully human. This way of conceiving of the
transpersonal realm applies to the central experience in all faiths.
Our goal: find a diction for transpersonal experience that allows
discussion without sanctimony, and allows us to get faith groups to
see the environment, broadly reconceived to include human health and
equality, as the top political priority.

處世而不住