Candidate for
Member, Green Party County Council; County of Santa Barbara

One of the things that has most appealed to me about the Green perspective since I encountered it in the Bay Area in the mid-1980s had been its broad, multi-issued approach to the critical problems we face and their solutions. As Manon Maren-Grisebach, an early speaker of the German Greens, once put it: "The emphasis on relations and interconnectedness -- in Gregory Bateson's words, 'the pattern which connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me' - is the foundation of Green thought and being, whether it is called grassroots democracy or something else. This consciousness is simply there in the Greens." This sense of the interconnectedness of people and the planet, of the multiple facets of the current crisis of civilization, and the need for a holistic, imaginative, flexible approach to fashioning an alternative to them, is a foundation of Green social theory and political practice. Making connections -- to people, across boundaries -- to build coalitions for change seems what is needed today. Try it -- you'll be surprised at what you can do! As the Zapatistas say, we want a world where many worlds fit. Another world is possible. It's necessary. And it's up to all of us.