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THE INSTITUTE OF GLOBAL EDUCATION IS A USA 501 © (3) NONPROFIT WITH SPECIAL CONSULTATIVE ECOSOC STATUS AT THE UNITED NATIONS AND OPERATES IN INDIA, CANADA AND THE USA. THIS EFFORT IS TO PROVIDE INPUT AND PROGRAM CONSIDERATIONS TO RIO PLUS 20 ON SUSTAINABLE AND ENVIORNMENTAL DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED ISSUES

The Institute for Global Education has developed a strong connection to Northeast India which has over 200 tribes and a culture significantly different from the rest of India. Our worldwide experience with indigenous cultures and twenty years experience in India has led us to propose, with local institutional support, an innovative program to transform how local indigenous communities relate to their physical environment and the emerging worldwide culture.

The Northeast is a remote part of India, dependent on slash and burn agricultural base, which has had major immigration, with resulting intercommunal competition and violence. The Area has abundant water and significant unused land. Local leadership needs to be educated to sustainable economic practices and the views of their youth aware of the wider world. A successful program could help enable indigenous leaders and youth who could reach out to India?s huge indigenous population, which is largely at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. A comprehensive economic and social development plan has been officially adopted for the NE by the local and national government but needs to be implemented

PROPOSED STRATEGY

1.Target limited resources to educate and reorient tribal leaders/elders in a two year demonstration program

2.Focus efforts in 30-40 villages in 2 states with 4 million people ?Meghalaya and Manipur

3.Create a key role for youth in educating elders in new economic and social realities especially their views using permaculture, village photography, puppetry and access to a worldwide pen pal network

4. Create competition among villages for new outside educational and economic development resources including scholarships

5. Educate tribal elders in permaculture and new economic development opportunities

6. Offer conflict resolution training and possible vipassana meditation for elders and youth

7. Identify and promote future female and male leaders with scholarships

8. Improve quality of schools using gardening and other new curriculum

9. Work to implement the officially adopted NE Plan and seek additional demo grants from the Indian Government and elsewhere.

10. Encourage agricultural donations from outside India via the internet

11.Increase economic opportunities for women

12.Strengthen leadership role of key local universities and institutions especially Martin Luther Christian University

13.Utilize the educational experiences of the Institute for Global Education in Mucherla, Andhra Pradesh

14.Train teachers in permaculture

15.Use children?s puppetry and photography to improve family harmony and potentially discourage spousal abuse/ alcoholism and revision local villages.

16. Bring in a large number of Peace Corps type workers from many countries to help implement permaculture, gardening, puppetry and other strategies.

17.Document the process in a video/film that can be shown to other tribals in the NE and elsewhere

18.Create speakers bureau to utilize village leaders and students to share their experiences in other villages

19. Develop conflict resolution models for villages

20.Develop traveling exhibits and shows to many villages

21.Network with tribals into Bangladesh and Myanmar if possible

22.Promote project successes in United Nations

23.Identify additional potential resources from the UN, US and elsewhere 24.Establish a network of traditional herbalists and identify possible economic opportunities for them

25.Utilize successful education resource groups from elsewhere in India including the Indian Educational and Peace /Consortium, an Andhra Pradesh permaculture group and the Institute for Global Education

26. Have the Institute for Global Education be the lead organization responsible for the program

CONCLUSIONS

1.The proposed program is very sweeping and encompasses many elements.

2. Each part of the program has been tested and found useful in comparable venues.

3. The budget, while small, is realistic for the proposed program.

4. The overall program goal is to create new, more open attitudes in tribal leadership

5. The program strategy starts with education and then reaches into the minds and imaginations of the village/tribal leaders. The children will play a key role in educating elders.

6. The villages and state governments have expressed strong interest in the program. Their participation will increase the probabilities for local acceptance of new ideas

7. A limited amount of money will generate a tremendous amount of in kind and volunteer contributions.

8. The Proposal, while ambitious, could lead to add on efforts such as teaching English, computer satellite access and other valuable programs as funding becomes available.

9. A sense of competition among villages increases the potential local openness to new ideas.

10. Our proposed staff leadership has very strong connections with and credibility with local tribes.

11. We need to review the program after year one to see lessons learned and required modifications in approach.

12. The program approach, if successful, could be widely replicated elsewhere in India and neighboring countries.

THIS IGE PROPOSAL HAS BEEN SUBMITTED TO THE UN DEMOCRACY FUND AND OTHERS. IT FITS WELL WITH THE GOALS FOR RIO PLUS 20 PROPOSALS AND IS A HANDS ON LOCAL DESIGNED EFFORT. IT WOULD STRENGTHEN THE GOALS AND DIRECTIONS FOR RIO PLUS 20. A CONSORTIUM OF ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED AS THE POJECT IS LOCAL LEADERSHIP BASED.

THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATING, COUNSELING, AND HEALING WITH NATURE (ECHN) IS THE MONUMENTAL  SENSORY TOOL THAT EMPOWERS CIVIL SOCIETY TO REMEDY THE POINT SOURCE OF OUR CRITICAL  PERSONAL, SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS AS A CONTRIBUTION TO RIO PLUS 20 

We live excessively indoor lives. Our significant separation from the natural world interferes with our  body, mind and spirit being part of the way nature works to sustain our planet's self correcting health,  balance and purity, around and in us.  

Because the indoor process that teaches us how to think and feel is excessively nature disconnected, its  disconnection from nature's restorative powers creates mind pollution in our psyche. This warp causes  us to create and suffer personal, social and environmental problems. They are not found in  unadulterated nature or nature connectedpeople (s). 

In Industrial Society, our contaminated mentality and the disorders it produces, have a point source of  origin. For a peaceful world in balance and wellness, we must each identify and help correct that point  source.  Project NatureConnect gives any interested person the tools to accomplish this crucial feat.  The point source of our troubles is our denial. We deny that our natural senses and sensitivities are  excessively strained due to our disconnectedness from nature. We seldom recognize that we traumatize  our natural senses because our society's prejudice to conquer nature makes these sensibilities endure  unbalanced, destructive, nature disconnected fulfillments. 

The profound loss to our senses of nature's purifying and healing powers causes us to continually want  and when we want there is never enough.  The torment of our wanting is a form of mind pollution.  It  produces a wounded sensory imbalance, a warp in our psyche that results in destructive stress, greed,  disorders and dysfunctions, locally and globally. 

The remedy for our mind pollution is the science of Educating, Counseling and Healing with Nature  (ECHN).  It holistics methods and materials are tools that let sensory contact with nature's self  correcting powers, backyard or back country, help us improve well being at every level. 

There is hope. The ECHN organic antidote and preventative for our disorders provides us with a unique,  social technology, Natural Attraction Ecology. It is a practical application of Ecopsychology that enables  us to remedy our polluted thoughts and feelings.  ECHN works because it lets nature's ways help our  thinking compost the destructive addictions of civil society and recycle them into constructive  relationships. 

ECHN starts with a subsidized, online course whose nature connecting methods and materials can  immediately be applied to any person's life and livelihood.  In addition, one can teach them, or use them  to enhance their career or hobby. The course can lead to a Master's or Ph.D. degree in Applied  Ecopsychology.  

ECHN provides us with the special tool that we need to effectively address our problems. It helps us,  locally or globally, walk hand in hand while empowered by the real lifebeau  ty and cooperation of  nature's amazing grace.  

The calm, joy and restorative powers of a quiet walk in a natural area are well known. ECHN helps us  strengthen these powers and use them to reduce our prejudice against nature (PAN) and our other  great disorders. 

Nature's special perfection is the ability of its natural attraction essence to peacefully maintain pristine  optimums of life, diversity and cooperation in balance and beauty.  Its cyclic intelligence seldom  produces garbage or pollution, or our excessiveness, abusiveness, isolation, wars and disorders. 

We are nature, it is us. Every five to seven years the purifying flow of nature, through, within and around  us, replaces every molecule in us. Part of our DNA is plant DNA. This confirms that we are, and that we  inherently think, feel, resonate and communicate with the way nature works.  

Sadly, for excessive profit, our prejudice against nature socializes our thinking to conquer or exploit  nature in and around us.  We bias our thinking to demean or fear nature.  Th iswounds our psyche and  senses; it reduces our natural restorative abilities. Their self correctin waysg can't help us remedy the  troubles that our misguided thinking creates.  

To counteract this folly, engaging in sensory nature connecting activities, backyard or backcountry,  revitalizes nature's flow through us so its streaming better heals and renews our injured rational,  emotional and spiritual self. This releases Dopamine. We feel rewarded and happy. 

From five decades of research and experience, a scientific tool, Natural Attraction Ecology (NAE),  enables our excessively nature disconnected thinking to benefit from conscious sensory contact with  nature's recycling and transformative powers.  

The hands on process of NAE is rooted in these empirical truths: 

1. Since the beginning of time, the flow of natural attraction has been everywhere. From sub atomic  particles to the Universe, space is filled with natural attraction Energy.  Natural attraction holds things  together.  It grows, heals and is aware of itself. We call it Love or Whole Spirit (holy), Tao, Reiki, Chi,  Quantum, or Ki. 

2. Like all of nature, humanity is the flow of natural attraction manifesting itself as us.  

3. Natural attraction consciously registers in our psyche as at least 53 intelligent and rewarding natural  senses. For example, our sense of thirst communicates our need/attraction for water.  Thirst wisely  turns on when we need Earth's water cycle to flow through us, and turns off when we don't need water.  In addition, our sense of excretion intelligently tells us to feed our waste water to nature; this perfect  food nurture's nature. Similar to the above, our other 51 natural attraction senses operate in the same  balanced way.   They include our senses of place, touch, community, taste, music, sight, literacy,  happiness, reason, respiration, consciousness and belonging.  Each produces a special joy when our  thinking fulfills it in nature's mutually supportive ways.  

4. Throughout the eons, Nature and Earth have been a non litera twaye  of knowing and being. Although  their minerals and creatures communicate and, in cooperation, coordinate their attractions with each  other, they don't accomplish this through the literacy of our written or spoken words, labels, stories or  mathematics. 

 5. On average, industrial society's linguistic story has us spend more than 95 percent of our time  indoors, and 99 percent of our thinking and feeling while separated from authentic nature and its pre  literate, attraction pron ientelligence. For this reason, our scientific and creative stories about life are  often nature disconnected illusions about how natural attraction works. To our cost, we addictively train  ourselves to think with these deceptions. Many problems result.  

6. Our stories and science of nature are seldom fully true because they are stable abstracts; they are  shortcuts and vicarious ways of knowing. In contrast, real nature, including us, is not a stable laboratory.  Mother Earth is a living being. Nature is alive, an ever changing, ever growing act, the flow of natural  attraction relationships in the present moment.  

7. Nature is the fountainhead of authority on how its natural attraction essence works. If natural areas  were literate they might describe themselves as a cathedrals of natural attraction in support of life on  Earth. 

8. Most substitutes for authentic nature are imperfect; they produce adverse side effects. 

9. Natural sensory perceptions are the most tangible, true and unifying things that our thoughts and  feelings register. To our loss, society pays us to think while suppressing the empirical, nature connected,  sensation facts that our natural senses introduce to our mentality in support of our, and our Living  Planet's survival. 

10. We cannot solve our personal and global problems if our thinking disengages us from the unifying  natural attraction wisdom present in the "now" of connection moments with each other and the web  of life. To reverse our disorders, we need to think and feel with the full powers of our natural sensory  intelligences.  

Backyard or backcountry, NAE sensibly enables us to intermingle and fulfill our 53 natural senses with  the renewing ways of natural attractions. By strengthening them, we enjoy rewarding natural attraction  experiences.  This is a crucial element for improving our personal, social and environmental  relationships.   Itfits perfectly into the Rio Plus 20 directions and goals as an important contribution. 

DOCUMENTS FOR INFORMATION:  Online Course http://www.ecopsych.com/orient.html 

Overview Article  http://www.ecopsych.com/h allucinatearticle.html 

Fundamentals  http://www.ecopsych.com/mjcohen22.html .   

Outcomes  http://www.ecopsych.com/ survey.html 

Articles http://www.ecopsych.com/2004artnews.htm l Books http://www.ecopsych.com/books.html 

Film  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt13 57054/