Dialogue

November 29, 1999

The Washington Region Web Site:

Purpose:  

To reinforce the dialogue process and goals of the Green Infrastructure Land Network by maintaining good communication during intervals between personal meetings and to provide resources of many kinds useful to participants.  

Learning how to do “dialogue” is taught in person by Danny Martin.  Sociologist Daniel Yankelovitch says that dialogue is a process of successful relationship building, a practical tool accessible to all, that if done right can dissolve long-standing stereotypes, overcome mistrust, enable people at odds to share common visions and create bonds of community.  In his book, The Magic of Dialogue, Yankelovitch writes, “we penetrate behind the polite superficialities and defenses in which we habitually armor ourselves.  We listen and respond to one another with an authenticity that forges a bond between us.” 

The  web site should supplement and assist the personal process that Danny Martin and others conduct.  The site should start small and grow in ways that participants believe to be important.  Some areas of the web site will require password entry so that group privacy can be maintained, while others will be open to the public.

Content:  

Background information about the region:  Geological, ecological, social, historical, economic, political and philosophical.  

Regional resources:  A collection of specific people, organizations, government bodies which are important for participants to know about and to be able to contact; including evaluations of these and other comments that are thought useful by participants.  

A participants’ area on the site:  Includes short biographies of participants, family photographs, even, along with a collection of stills, backgrouond material, art, letters, that help illustrate places and situations in their communities that are important and have meaning for people.  Also: issues for them and what they want to accomplish. 

Participants keep a running work diary they post in their personal web site area that reflects what they’re doing-  issues that concern them, approaches they’re taking to problems; successes or frustrations that can encourage an exchange from one jurisdiction to another and inspire helpful responses from the advisory team.

Email hyperlinks are in each person’s web site area so that members of the group can just click on a person’s email address and the message form opens up.  (Password entry for participants)

Meeting schedules and all common business that doesn’t have to be conducted in person should be done between members on the site.

Other work in various places:

Descriptions of work being done in other parts of the United States and the world along with resources and people or places to contact.  For example, excerpts from case studies done by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Finance and the Rocky Mountain Institute’s recent book, Natural Capitalism.  Existing resources from the CD-ROM, This Place Called Home will be adapted for the web site: video and stills from the San Diego multiple-species habitat preservation program; Andropogon Associates’ ecological restoration; Randall Arendt’s open-space planning, and excerpts from John Tillman Lyle’s book, Design for Human Ecosystems.  Also: Trenton’s inner-city community rehabilitation story and Detroit’s Nine Mile Run and Emscher Park restoration in Germany.  New interviews will be videotaped with experts such as Dr. Grace Brush, Geologist, Johns Hopkins University; Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia.

Web Site Resources:  a collection of web sites listed by type with specific links to places in those sites that are helpful.

Dialogue Resources: Audio interview selections with dialogue leaders, Danny Martin and others.

A selection of articles and book excerpts on “dialogue,” including philosophical perspectives that may be helpful such as those of theologian, Thomas Berry.  

For example, here is an example of background material that might make sense to include in the web site.  This is a quote from a video interview done by Anne Pearson, with Thomas Berry.  It could be used as audio, or video, or just as text:

Thomas Berry:  

All human institutions, professions, programs and activities must now be judged primarily by the extent to which they ignore or foster a mutually enhancing human-earth relationship. 

The difficulty we are having in our times is that we don't know how humans fit into the cosmological order.  Our whole religious position teaches us how the human and the divine relate, how the human relates to each other, but it doesn't teach us how the human relates to the natural world.    

Let me give you conditions under which we can go into a viable earth system: 

The planet earth is primary and humans are derivative.  And the first law of everything is the well being of the community.  

The universe must be understood as a community of subjects not a collection of objects.    

For instance, economics.  The first law of economics has to be to preserve the integrity of the planet.  To have a rising gross national product with a declining gross earth product is absurd.  You cannot benefit the human at the expense of the planet.  

Medicine.  You simply cannot have well people on a sick planet.  

Law must change.  We need interspecies law, not just human law.  The whole basis of jurisprudence needs to change.  We guarantee ourselves life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at the expense of the natural world.  

Everything rests on the acceptance of the primacy of the larger community and that the smaller community must fit itself into the larger community in all aspects of life.  

In ethics, we have a sense of the evil of suicide, homicide, genocide.  Ethics doesn't even know biocide.    

We need new religious sensitivities in all the religions.  We don't exactly need new religions, but rather new religious sensitivities in all the religions.             

We need a sense of progress-  that has to be redefined.  Not progress of the human at the expense of the natural world, but progress where the trees prosper, where the water prospers, where all living forms progress in some manner.  To have human progress as the expense of the natural world doesn't make any sense at all.  

Conclusion:  The goal is to use the effectiveness of Dialogue, along with the communicative capacity of the web to create a collaborative design for a sustainable regional human ecosystem.

End.