Home > Ten Key Values of the US Green Party

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:

1. Community-based economics, e.g. LETS, local purchasing, co-housing
2. Decentralisation, e.g. via Bioregional democracy, sustainable agriculture
3. Ecological WisdomEcology is the branch of science that studies the distribution and abundance of living organisms, and the interactions between organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both its physical habitat, which can be described as th, e.g. ending human-caused extinctionIn biology and ecology, extinction is the disappearance of a species or group of species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of that species. In species which reproduce sexually, extinction of a species, promoting ecological healthEcological health or ecological integrity or ecological damage is used to refer to symptoms of an ecosystem's pending loss of carrying capacity, ability to perform nature's services, or pending ecocide due to cumulative causes such as pollution. The term
4. FeminismFeminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. While generally providing a critique of social relations, many proponents of feminism also focus on analyzing gender inequality and the promoti, e.g. Health security especially for mothers and children, and thus a focus on environmental healthEnvironmental health is defined by the World Health Organisation as: :Those aspects of human health and disease that are determined by factors in the environment. It also refers to the theory and practice of assessing and controlling factors in the enviro
5. Grassroots democracyGrassroots democracy is the political processes which are driven by groups of ordinary citizens, as opposed to larger organisations or wealthy individuals with concentrated vested interests in particular policies. Grassroots democracy is a guiding princip, e.g. via electoral reformElectoral reform projects seek to change the way that public desires are reflected in elections. Reform projects can include measures (typically changes to election laws) designed to reform political parties; to redefine citizen eligibility to vote; to ch to improve deliberative democracyDeliberative democracy also sometimes called discursive democracy is a term used by political theorists, e. Jon Elster or Jurgen Habermas, to refer to any system of political decisions based on some tradeoff of consensus decision making and representative
6. Non-violence, e.g. via de-escalation , peace processes
7. Personal and global responsibility, e.g. moral purchasing, voluntary simplicity
8. Respect for diversity, e.g. via fair trade, bioregional democracy
9. Social justice, e.g. harm reduction rather than zero tolerance
10. Future Focus/ Sustainability, e.g. measuring well-being effect over seven generations, leading to what is called seven-generation sustainability

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:

• http://gpo.ca/election/platform/2003/values_toc.htm - an illustrated version
• http://www.global.greens.org.au/charter.htm
• http://www.greenparties.org/documents/tenkey.html
• http://cagreens.org/platform/10k.htm
• http://www.radicalmiddle.com/ten_key_values.htm