Turning 20: A New Memo

by Jerry King, ECI CO-Founder

On March 12, 2001, John and Anita Gibson moved furniture and put up folding chairs so that maybe 25 guests and a flip chart could squeeze into their dining room. It would be the first gathering to introduce the Earth Charter to Indianapolis. When John brought the Charter to my attention in January of 2001, I knew I was all in. We started exchanging ideas over breakfasts, including who might want to take part in exploratory discussions.

On March 12 we all took turns reading segments of the Charter and shared what resonated with us: The Charter is far-reaching, impactful. It speaks to our time; it’s what the world needs today. The way the Charter connects ecology, justice, democracy and peace makes sense, intuitively. The Preamble is written beautifully. It reflects our spiritual needs for connection. I don’t say that the perspective was new; for many of us present on March 12, the Aha! moment was recognizing that the Charter affirmed what we already understood about the earth, community, shared life, ourselves.
We knew that evening that several Earth Charter initiatives across the nation (Chicago, Seattle,
Philadelphia, Tampa, Jackson, Oshkosh, Portland, OR) had started planning concurrent summits to take place on Saturday, September 29, 2001. So, it was an easy decision that our first organizing effort would be to plan an Indianapolis summit alongside those other cities. I coordinated a planning team that worked through the summer. The event would be at Marian University (then called Marian College). There would be speakers, breakouts, creative expression in the courtyard, organization exhibits and tours of Marian’s wetlands. People could sign a scroll endorsing the Charter’s principles of peace, justice, democracy and ecological integrity.

We couldn’t know that the September 11 attacks would happen just days before the summits.
Four hundred people came to that first summit. It was clear, after September 11, that many came because they needed to be part of something about hope and peace. We eventually held five more summits over the early years – at the Museum of Art, the Old Centrum, at a Unitarian church where we were picketed by John Birchers.

If you were part of the Earth Charter in those early years, you’ll remember that we continuously
struggled with the Charter’s breadth and depth. How to describe it, how to apply its many principles? Some of us simply found the Charter to be too big; it had too many parts. How would you ever explain it in an elevator speech? We pondered whether to break it into manageable pieces. How about a year on the environment, then a year on justice, a year on participatory democracy, a year on peace? But those suggestions didn’t understand that the power of the Charter is that its focus areas are entirely interdependent. The Charter’s premise is this: that to achieve environmental integrity, we must also ensure social and economic justice, transparent and accessible government, while relying on non-violence and peace.

We resolved that debate by focusing for a time on skills for civic engagement based on the Charter: a two-day leadership development retreat, a three-part series on communication and many evenings conceptualizing an Earth Charter Leadership Academy (an idea that still interests me). At the 2006 Summit, we launched Sustainable Indiana 2016, the 10 year campaign to inspire and promote sustainability practices in communities across Indiana.

There’s good reason the Earth Charter has been called a Declaration of Interdependence. One sentence in the Preamble speaks for the entire Charter: [It] is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. The Earth Charter is not prescribed steps to get to a whole earth. It’s a North Star.

The Earth Charter is still a compass for me. It calls me to humility, to be present in the knowledge of shared life and responsibilities. In the early years of the Earth Charter in Indianapolis, before we had become quite the painful, entrenched nation that we are today, I believed that a unifying message of life shared would be one way to help define progressive common ground so that the center would hold. Today, when our divisions seem irreconcilable, our need for the Earth Charter’s voice is as urgent as it was 20 years ago.

Jerry King and the late John Gibson worked together in 2001 to introduce the Earth Charter to
Indiana. Over the next 15 years Jerry held various offices on the Earth Charter Indiana board,
including several years as the board’s president.

Jerry retired in 2018 from the Indiana Public Health Association where he had been executive
director for over 20 years. During his public health career, Jerry served on multiple boards,
coalitions and workgroups in Indiana and at the national level. Jerry was honored to serve on
planning groups that led to formation of the first national program for health department
accreditation. He was a fellow in the Mid-America Regional Public Health Leadership Institute.
Jerry’s prior experience was in hospital community relations and neighborhood organizing.
Jerry joined the board of Hoosiers Concerned About Gun Violence in 2019. He has been HCGV’s
board president since January, 2020.

Jerry received a BA in English from Indiana University at Bloomington and his MA in history
from Butler University. Jerry and his one-dog and three-cat family live in the Indianapolis
neighborhood of Irvington.