Ten Key Values of the US Green Party
The
Ten Key Values of the U.S. Green Party were drafted by that party in
1984. They form the philosophical basis for the platforms of the present
Green Party of the United States and
Green Party of Canada, and most provincial and state parties.
The ten include and expand upon the Four Pillars of the Green Party originated in Europe and practiced by the worldwide green parties. The Global Greens Charter, signed by many of these parties in Australia in 2001, was based on the Ten Values and Four Pillars, reduced to Six Principles for brevity.
The ten values are still used by most of the state and provincial parties in North America.
Over 20 years of use, there are many different explanations of what the ten original terms mean, and many policies that represent examples of the principles in action, but the terms themselves are relatively constant:
- Social justice, e.g. harm reduction rather than zero tolerance
- Community-based economics, e.g. LETS, local purchasing, co-housing
- Non-violence, e.g. via de-escalation, peace processes
- Decentralisation, e.g. via Bioregional democracy, sustainable agriculture
- Future Focus/Sustainability, e.g. measuring well-being effect over seven generations, leading to what is called seven-generation sustainability
- Feminism, e.g. Health security especially for mothers and children, and thus a focus on environmental health
- Personal and global responsibility, e.g. moral purchasing, voluntary simplicity
- Respect for diversity, e.g. via fair trade, bioregional democracy
- Grassroots democracy, e.g. via electoral reform to improve deliberative democracy
- Ecological Wisdom, e.g. ending human-caused extinction, promoting ecological health
Requests are being made for permission to distribute existing explanations of what these values mean. Examples should be drawn from U.S. and Canadian Green Parties, as these are the ones who refer to the values in these terms.
External explanations: