GLOBAL LOGIC**BUILD SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES**PROTECT THE EARTH

Dear Friends, This is a reminder of the next meeting of Sustainable Petaluma,Thursday, June 24th at 100 Union Street (the old St Vincents convent), Petaluma. 7:15 PM. Topics will include those sketched out in our last meeting and emailed to you as an idea-mosaic a couple of weeks ago, plus the creation of our new website. We have a young man named Jeremy Gates, currently in his last year at Rochester Inst of Technology, who has offered to help in designing the site to our own lively and colorful specs. Come and connect with your best energy and ideas!

SUSTAINABLE PETALUMA is a new network dedicated to connecting the ideas and work of individuals now in the process of aligning themselves with the emerging eco-culture. Aspects include water conservation/purification, organic agriculture, elimination of toxics, stream and river protection/restoration, pedestrian and bike path creation, renewable energy production, co-housing and intentional community formation, implementation of ecological building techniques and urban design, eco-footprinting our real impacts on nature, promoting access to natural open spaces, protecting and promoting biological and social diversity, developing a critique of the macro socio-economic system that surrounds us from a new paradigm perspective, and generating and communicating an overall sense of the sacredness of our present life on planet earth. The nervous system of this collective body will be an email newsletter/website arrangement that allows anyone in the network to communicate with and tune into the work of the whole.

There are many who feel that Now is the time, and Here, in our own Northbay region, is the place to proceed with full intensity toward the building of ecologically balanced communities in true harmony with nature and Spirit. Y2K is a catalyst for this development--impelling us to connect and communicate many of the individual efforts toward community sustainability and resiliency.

The present global crisis is calling us to new levels of cooperation and attunement with nature and each other. We are in the midst of an enormous evolutionary challenge. In short, we need to lighten our impacts on and decrease our poisonous emissions into the planetary systems. We need to lessen our reliance on the fragile and monolithic structures of manufacturing and supply--including the production and distribution of energy. We are now beginning to make new connections and alliances- mental , social, and spiritual -and coming to know each other in our real state of total interconnectedness and interdependence. This transformation is not an easy task and requires us to move through our fears and limitations into a new way of communicating and being. Sustainable Petaluma is a creation of this present transformation, and the hope is that it will help move us into a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world.

We have chosen to self-organize from the bottom up so to speak-- operating with the intent that those people who resonate with the new ideas of ecological integrity would know who they were and would link in to help create the system. Every one in the Petaluma area (and beyond) can now contribute announcements, stories, and ideas to the newsletter which circulates continually, and to the web site. Scott Hess bluespin@earthlink.net is facilitating the newsletter and maintaining the email lists. Please feel free to send him your announcements, ideas, stories, etc. The web site, not yet operative, will be a permanent idea bank or collective memory where individuals will get a sense of the new pattern and new culture emerging.

Should emergencies arise, such as those that might be encountered in Y2K related incidents, Sustainable Petaluma should be a helpful network in the creation of alternative systems based on organic, local, energy efficient, decentralized intelligence and information. We will have monthly in-the-flesh meetings and other real world action projects and get together. Our first meeting was held last May at the old St Vincents convent and it was a good one. There was definitely an invisible, coherent energy and warmth shared among the sixteen individuals that showed up that could not be missed--and a multitude of others, not physically present, made their contributions as well.

The next meeting of Sustainable Petaluma is June 24, 7:15 PM at 100 Union Street. Call Scott Hess (765-0580) or Natalie Peck(766-8045) for more deta

-- Scott Hess (bluespin@earthlink.net), June 19, 1999