Global Oneness Project

Hello all.  My name is Larry Chamblin.  I am a retired educator and, for the past three years, advocate for sustainable communities with a focus on my region of Florida, the western Panhandle. Before we moved to Florida seven years ago, my wife and I lived for 30 years in Maryland.  My interest in sustainable living grows out of my love of nature that has its roots in childhood experiences in the forests and coral reefs of Hawaii, the mountain trails of Virginia, and a small river valley in Central Maryland.

Today, I see myself being in the first steps of a long journey of transformation toward sustainable living.  Along the way, I am compelled to call on others—in the most effective ways possible—to take their own journey.  This is the central theme of my work with Sustainable West Florida in organizing discussion courses developed by the Northwest Earth Institute and public meetings on key environmental and sustainability issues.  Last spring we held a public meeting on global warming that served to raise the level of consciousness about the issue. This coastal area is especially vulnerable to rising and warming seas yet, by reason of a largely conservative populatioin, it is inclined to resist change toward a more sustainable future.  

I have been surprised by the number of people in our area who are part of what Joanna Macy and others have called The Great Turning, and what Paul Hawken has now called the Blessed Unrest.  Locally, our biggest challenge is to broaden the circle by reaching out to more people, including the faith community.  We also have plans for a grassroots effort to get our cities to become part of the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities campaign.

Recently, I have been editing entries from a journal I kept in my visits to the Middle Patuxent River in Maryland back in the 1980s and 1990s.  Here is one passage from that journal that is background for my current work with Sustainable West Florida:

“November 3, 1991.  At the state education department, I am part of an effort to move schools toward a business model that sees people and nature as resources.  A new bond between top business leaders and top education leaders forms a unified push to reform schools to meet higher standards.  Rhetoric about ‘a common vision’ derives power from the power of the leaders, and sometimes from the truth that we do indeed need higher standards of learning.  But the standards pushed by the business roundtable have everything to do with making students more productive in the new information age and nothing to do with young people’s understanding of themselves and their place in the natural world. 

“Call me a hopeless romantic in a realistic world, but I say we make a big mistake in ignoring our spiritual and psychic needs for living in harmony with the living earth.

“Our education system ignores our reverence for the natural world because that system is part of the larger economic system that depends on exploiting the natural world, using its resouces for the econimic growth that we have made essential to what we choose to call success and progress.  We fail to see that the economic system is itself part of the larger ecological system.”