and we are today, the eco-cultural community serves as a way of thinking big.
This requires us to move beyond our traditional and historical understandings. Historically, such a model or reference to such a society would conjure up indigenous communities and their practices: say, for example, the Maya, who developed agricultural and cultural practices unique to their environmental setting; the Dai
people of China, who have extensive knowledge of plants and who built their homes using sustainable material; the Maasai in Africa, who demonstrated how cultural norms can interact with the environment; and even Puebloan communities in New Mexico. Such a model might also conjure up eco-villages such as The Farm in Lewis County, Tennessee; Crystal Waters Eco Village in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia; the Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland; and Eco Truly Park in
Huaral, Peru, among others. Each in its own way serves as a small example, a microcosm, of what might be possible.
But attempts at realizing a small-scale utopia is not the point here. The point is major
structural and sustainable reform on the national as well as continental scale, one which
adopts many of the tools we have today to communicate and conduct commerce that will
more readily represent our notion of more naturally occurring governance frameworks and
which quite possibly could engage parliamentary systems built around coalitions of shared need rather than our current system which embraces the power held by factions
initially proposed by James Madison. Set one around the other, providing contrasts
amongst both large and small communities, the framework of eco-cultural communities
would temper and test extremes, thereby avoiding city or regional dominance not to
mention the localized natural aristocracy of isolated communities ruled by clans of
wealthy businessmen and landowners or closed societies built around ideological or
religious bias.
VIII
Elevating Dignity
As with all movements there first needs to be an organizing framework for presenting such an idea. Human Dignity Projects could well serve the role. Human Dignity Projects champions a paradigmatic shift that elevates human dignity and supports a more dignified human existence.
Uniting creatives, makers, organizations, and corporations in a global partnership that honors cultural heritage and reshapes our shared spaces, in person and through virtual meetings, Human Dignity Projects could capitalize on the talent within its membership to serve both a research and marketing function, developing ideas and promoting actions aligned with human dignity and greater enfranchisement. From such work, one can readily see how Human Dignity Projects could inform a new social and political order. Human Dignity Projects, in placing human dignity and living a dignified existence together, next to and dependent upon one another, forges a moral universe in which people, places, and traditions are respected and cultures are supported.
The first way in which they are respected and supported is through the recognition that everyone is uniquely formed to have a mind that organizes and voice that expresses their distinct character, a voice that provides insight into how individual perspectives are formed and delivered, an insight that not only serves to protect their identity but recognizes and welcomes the mind and voices of others, building community through reason and commonality. The second way in which they are respected and supported is through the acknowledgement of diversity and difference, whether expressed through people or places, as each is intimately tied to their distinct relationship, an interrelationship that though distinctness binds all in determining ways through which they move and interact within
time and space, for good or bad. And the third way in which they are respected and supported is through the traditions which form and
145