The Green Party movement is rooted in sustainable environmental democracy, which derives historically from the early confederacy of five Native-American nations in New York state called the Iroquois Confederacy. The confederacy was matriarchal, cooperative, tribal, and regionally based. As Donella and Dennis Meadows note in their book Beyond the Limits (1993), the concepts of environmental stewardship and intergenerational sustainability originated in the confederacy. American revolutionaries Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin incorporated these Iroquoian concepts into their politics. In the last forty years, the democratic model has evolved into the bioregionalist or "green" model of integrative commons governance. This political approach is equally based on electoral consensus, environmental economics, and public welfare.

Green Party policy focuses on watershed patterns of resource use and control. Large-scale watersheds, or "bioregions," cross many jurisdictions, for example the Mississippi and Amazon Basins, the Arctic Circle, and war-torn regions. Ultimately, Green Party members...