PETER MERRY AND THE EARTH CHARTER

I want to share with you the wonderful words of Peter Merry (Director for Human Emergence) about the Earth Charter.  Peter was one of the speakers at the  VI INTEGRAL CONFERENCE  in Barcelona just the year that I left the Presidency of the Spanish Integral Association and I met him in Dinkelsherben (Germany) while in a course with Don Beck learning the Spyral Dynamics Integral  principles.

Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion and love’ is for me the encompassing principle of the Earth Charter. It brings us to the essence of the work to be done: to nurture life wherever and however it expresses itself.  Anywhere where we see life bursting through, emerging and wanting to experiment, we should be encouraging it. Whether we find it in creative human communities looking for new ways of seeing and doing or in the biodiversity of nature, it is our job to enable life to keep exploring and becoming aware of itself.

How do these principles inform my life? They inform me at all levels in my life; forming the impulse to live with my family in a sustainable neighbourhood, a habitat which supports the spark of life between people and supports locally produced food. It informs how I can best contribute given who I am and what I have to offer. It is a continually evolving quest. In my work I have founded an organization, the Centre for Human Emergence, which is a living experiment in an organizational form able to support the Community of life.
One example is our work within a consortium together with pharmaceutical companies, NGO’s, government bodies and research institutes to develop solutions that meet the goal of MDG5 ‘to improve maternal and new born health’. The complexity of the challenge demands a matching diversity of perspectives in order to solve it. Working together, actors who do not naturally come together can create solutions not imaginable by the parts.