Part I - Getting There From Here

Part I will provide readers with a general understanding of the fundamentals of sustainability, particularly social sustainability. This understanding will empower Progressives with the ageless values of our species to formulate consistent and perennially relevant policies and legislation; and the ability to validate existing policies and statutes as supporting social sustainability, or to what degree they do not.

While all political positions are value based, very few are consistent and capable of providing long term designs for the sustainable operation of local and national societies, governments, and economies. The values of social sustainability provide an organic morality of our species that is as good for organizations as it is for individuals.

Further, because of their universal nature, when democratic nations emulate the values of our species, their national, international, and global agenda will become transparent. These values also offer all democratic nations an authentic and transparent option of becoming more mutually supportive and more mutually compatible without abridging their sovereignty or their unique cultural heritages.

Because of the integral nature of the values of our species, behaviors of individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, and nations that are immoral and inhumane become easily identified. In a socially sustainable nation, it is not enough to enculturate the values of our species into our institutions, but also necessary to define and enforce moral boundaries of what is inhuman and inhumane. When democratic nations choose to become socially sustainable, they must diminish decisions and actions that are inhuman and UNsustainable by individuals, organizations and themselves, while also supporting and reinforcing those that are sustainable.

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"Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it —
in a decade, a century, or a millennium — we will all say to each other,
how could it have been otherwise? How could we have been so stupid?".
John Archibald Wheeler