THE DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE

We have gathered at Wall Street, New York City, and on the streets of financial districts around the world, both real and symbolic, in our homes and in our hearts, in every continent on the Earth. We stand at the precipice of possible futures in peaceful assembly, seeking a new way.

Understanding that a democracy is a compass calibrated by the combination of its citizens, and a peaceful change of course the dearest test of the equality of its members, it is the duty of good citizens to be awakened in the times.

In these days of awakening, we recognize the excesses of unchecked capitalism and name them “injustice”. We see the exercise of democracy undermined by entrenchment; we see the benefit of democracy bent from the many to the few; we have seen whole nations shaped by profit motive, as corporate gain infuses and influences nearly every aspect of human life, from the intimacy of domestic detail to branches of government and the reasoning of law.

The living guts of a democracy are found in its will to self-correct. We have allowed the dehumanization of society to so build up around us, to box and minimize us, to hound us with fabricated need, that the majority of working men and women would take great and rightful joy in protesting these wrongs, but feel they cannot afford to.

Now we find planet Earth endangered.

By the million, insistent banners of infinite growth—a concept which is sustainable only in our lies— we have seen democracy become other than democracy. We recognize these shortcomings of capitalism as systemic, for nothing so endangers a society as its own success.

But if our awakening stops here, at the level of the political and the economic merely, it remains more a measure of sleep. There can be no true material gain lacking the understanding of our inherent, human connection to all materials.

We hereby declare our realization that the Earth is a sentient being.

We declare that the Earth and the humanity She yielded are bound to one another at depths that science cannot yet detect.

We declare that the human species is dependent upon the Earth, as a child upon her mother.

We declare that the understanding of this relationship supersedes the role of government and economic systems; that, logically, the first purpose of a government and its economy is to effect the best symbiosis of human beings with the Earth.

We declare that no government is just which leads humanity to a preventable extinction, and to the death of the planet; that no government is just which is not itself a good citizen of the larger, governing Earth.

We declare that the Earth and humanity are near enough to one; that we can no more shed our own evolution, or stand in sovereignty apart from our own existence, than we can continue to conduct our industries without first concern given to sustainable resources, holistic impact and plain necessity.

We may declare independence from a tyrannical king or some equally tyrannical, stale idea of the past, but there can be no independence from the planet in which the original flare and surge of life yet abides, in plants and animals, and in us, and all our works.

If that chrysalis day should arrive in which we make a second, sentient planet our home, it will come as proof that our living bond with Earth Mother was, in these days, preserved. Proof that we left the modern age for a newer age to come.


--Matthew Glenwood
11/1/11