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Welcome to the Winter 1999 issue of EcoStewards. We invite readers to learn about several of the projects World Stewardship Institute has promoted over the past few months. Perhaps the most important of these has been our assistance with the Celebration of the Russian River this September. Our article "Living Waters" expresses WSI's belief that stewardship is an ideal unifying science, business, and religion. Our article on the Celebration discusses various events over the September week of celebration. WSI is especially pleased that Topolos at Russian River Vineyards has offered WSI members and friends an opportunity to support both our Institute and the organic viticulture at Topolos by ordering Christmas and New Year gifts from this award-winning, family-owned winery. If you wish to assist WSI's work in the coming year, please consider joining us as a member, using the application blank below. Stewardship and the World Trade Organization Behind the recent "battle in Seattle" over the future of the World Trade Organization (WTO), some crucial principles of stewardship are at stake. This gives rise to some critical questions: Are the precepts of economics and the needs of the environment mutually exclusive? Does one have to choose between the market and morality? Is economic globalism identical with the well-being of all the inhabitants of the globe, non-human as well as human? Does the World Trade Organization have the best interests of the whole earth at heart, or is it primarily concerned with the corporate bottom-line? Can Mother Earth's biodiversity co-exist with a global market mono-culture? Can a free society be preserved by coercive economic policies originating from a source unconnected with that society? Who is responsible for free trade? What is the best way to preserve at one and the same time free markets, the sovereignty of individuals as well as nations, the freedom of morality and the biological freedom of the order of nature? Ultimately all these questions boil down to the three principles of conscious stewardship: responsibility, authority and freedom. The struggle in Seattle is a struggle to answer in the context of the world's economy the three basic questions: Who is responsible? Who has the authority? How is that authority to be exercised in the most responsible way to produce and preserve and, above all, to sustain the greatest freedom and wellbeing for all of earth's inhabitants? _ Vincent Rossi
Join World Stewardship Institute as a member today. Help us to continue our programs and achieve our environmental goals. Please fill out the information below and return with your check to: WSI, 409 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. Name: __________________________________________________ Address: ________________________________________________ City: ___________________________________________________ State/Zip: ________________________________________________ Amount enclosed: ____________ Our regular annual membership is $ 40.00 per year ($20.00 low- income and seniors). Donations of $50.00 and greater will be matched dollar for dollar by one of our donors to help build WSI's funding base.	EcoStewards Production Staff Editorial Committee: Edgar Castellini, Lynn Newton, Douglas Fisher, Vincent Rossi Production: Lynn Newton, Brian Talbott, Vincent Rossi, Ed Castellini EcoStewards Journal is a quarterly publication of World Stewardship Institute. Issue date: December 12. This is Volume III, # 3. WSI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our address is 409 Mendocino Avenue, Suite A, Santa Rosa CA 95401. (707) 573-3160, Fax: (707) 578-7702, Email: wsi@ecostewards.org. EcoStewards is free to our members. Regular membership is $40/year, low income/retired/student membership is $20 per year. EcoStewards is printed on recycled paper with soy-based ink. Reproduction of this journal and its articles is not permitted without authorization. Photo Cover Credit: Sarah Nossaman (Children's drawing displayed during Celebration in window of Guerneville Graphics, Guerneville, CA