The best part of Starhawk’s chronicle of recent global protests called “Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising” is the vision she lays out for the global justice movement:
* We want enterprises to be rooted in communities and to be responsible to communities and to future generations. We want producers to be accountable for the true social and ecological costs of what they produce.
* We say that there is a commons that needs to be protected, that there are resources that are too vital to life, too precious or sacred, to be exploited for the profit of the few, including those things that sustain life: water, traditional lands and productive farmland, the collective heritage of ecological and genetic diversity, the earth’s climate, the habitats of rare species and of endangered human cultures, sacred places, and our collective cultural and intellectual knowledge.
* We say that those who labor are entided, as a bare minimum, to safety, to just compensation that allows for life, hope, and dignity as well as to the power to determine the conditions of their work.
* We say that as humans we have a collective responsibility for the well-being of others, that life is fraught with uncertainty, bad luck, injury, disease, and loss, and that we need to help each other bear those losses, to provide generously and graciously the means for all to have food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, and the possibility to realize their dreams and aspirations. Only then will we have true security.
* We say that democracy means people having a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions.
