Our Vision for a Great West

Contents

Vision Framework for Great West Institute: 9.13.08

"In Atlantis and Hesperides, the ancients had their own Great West, enveloped in mystery and poetry...The west of which I speak is but another name for the wild; and what I have been preparing to say is; that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
                                                                                           -Walking, Henry David Thoreau

Our Vision for a Great West
The American West is our home. We love it for its wide open spaces, spectacular scenery, precious natural resources and the communities it supports. Today, with factors like climate change, shifting demographics and evolving energy policies impacting the quality of life in the West, we believe there are historic opportunities to expand efforts to preserve the best things about the communities we love. Our work is essentially to engage the grassroots citizenry of the West in an effort to conserve resources, protect the quality of western life we love, and create a shared long-term vision for a Great West.

Mission
The central purpose and role of Great West Institute (GWI) is to:
Develop and implement innovative programs and creative strategies for expanding Conservation in the 21st century.

Vision
Our vision is for an engaged citizenry working together to preserve the Great West we love, using a full spectrum of methods, many based on a growing understanding of our essential relationship with nature and demonstrating to the rest of the world what can be learned about creating a sustainable future from intact wild landscapes.

Our Philosophy
At GWI we believe that the Conservation Movement has been successful at many levels However, it has failed to engage a major segment of our population that cares deeply for the quality of life for future generations, but doesn't relate to or consider themselves, environmentalists. Therefore, they have with few choices for effectively acting on their concerns. As the green revolution continues to gain momentum, we see this grassroots center.  providing the most dramatic increase in the support for environmental improvement. . However, activating this important grassroots constituency involves more than new public relations campaigns or marketing programs. It will require a deeper understanding of what motivates us as humans living in this modern world.

With this in mind, GWI is built on three basic tenets: 1) the desire to live more meaningful lives may be the one thing all people hold in common; 2) internally we share with all life the deep knowledge necessary for our survival as a species; and 3) by tapping into that deep knowledge, individuals will be motivated to become involved in a more inclusive and accessible grassroots movement to preserve the earth for future generations, which will add meaning to their lives.

Our overarching goal at GWI is to encourage a new level of thinking within society about the implications of conserving wild nature in our modern lives. We approach this in three ways:

Philosophical: We believe that “the environment” is our foundation and integral to every aspect of our lives. Protecting “the environment” is essential to our survival as a species and should not be relegated to the status of another optional “special interest.” Building this understanding translates directly to an increased level of advocacy, activism and overall civic engagement.

Psychological: Carl Jung believed that humans have two minds—the modern mind and the archaic mind. We believe that many of the issues threatening our existence are the result of over-emphasizing the modern mind and that there are simple tools for accessing and activating the archaic mind. We seek to balance the archaic mind and the modern mind to develop the necessary creative and innovative strategies for addressing modern environmental conflicts.

Experiential: We believe that the most effective method for accessing the deep knowledge required to address global warming, loss of habitat, toxic conditions in the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat, is through experiences in wild places with wildlife and a continually growing understanding of the way Nature works.

We believe that further exploration into these humanities-based elements is important to augment the scientific understanding we have developed about the human-nature relationship. The potential for these areas of exploration to yield long-term systemic solutions requires the preservation of wildness and biodiversity for many generations as the primary mindspring and source of inspiration.
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Our Approach
Science-based predetermined goals and objectives have been and will always be necessary for dealing with environmental threats to natural systems. During the past three years, we've developed and tested a new model for a more `open-ended' approach involving personal narrative as a vehicle for understanding our relationships to each other and with the planet. We have found that this approach creates different levels of interaction and thinking that would not otherwise been possible. The result is the opportunity for new processes and innovative programs which are inherently positive and more inclusive due to their focus on common deeply held values.

Funding is the key challenge to our philosophy. Traditional financial resources available to organizations within the Conservation Movement have focused chiefly on short-term projects with verifiable results. To date, most of our key conservation successes have been financed using funding with this traditional focus. The downside of this more product-oriented philosophy is the narrowing of the movement to a point where a majority of its emphasis is on litigation and legislation involving lawyers and lobbyists working on projects with the goal of having measurable returns. 
We believe this narrowing is responsible for the inability of the movement to engage new constituencies, and that expanding the movement will require a historic investment in conservation “Research and Development”. By definition, open-ended or experimental programming will yield unexpected answers and results. This will require that the funding community broaden its focus and its expectations.

We believe that the next generation of the Conservation Movement will be led by individuals who embrace and understand traditional methods and successes, but are focused more broadly on using innovation and creativity to explore new possibilities for how modern humans can flourish on Earth.
Corporate Values

GWI will operate under the assumption that preserving the environment for future generations is a value shared by all humans and that effective conservation requires breaking down the boundaries between people, generations, communities, governments, races, and species.