Mariposa county, California, has 1437 square miles, includes eleven cities, Yosemite park, abundant cattle grazing lands, and includes, on the county border, the site for the forthcoming Merced campus of the University of California.

Key aspects of a participatory component of the Mariposa county plan as it might be made available:

1. The healing of the world: The ongoing development will be aimed, primarily, at the preservation, and maintenance of Mariposa county as a place of natural beauty, in which construction, roads, buildings, all become part of that natural beauty, and help to sustain it for our children and their children.
2. Participation by inhabitants and visitors: The ongoing development will reflect the needs and wishes of the people who live and work and visit Mariposa county. This will be accomplished, and will not be fobbed off as lip service.
3. Diagnosis: Every act of development will take place within the context of a diagnosis that identifies which places are to be protected, which places have potential to be made more beautiful, and which places are in bad condition.
4. Policies which encourage healing in every act of construction or development:The policies which will be implemented, have the general form that each act will be undertaken as an act of healing, and specific guidelines will be provided so that this is easily understandable for everyone, and operationally simple.
5. Private rights and public good:The policy of healing, in conjunction with user participation, and diagnosis,will gently -- but firmly -- redefine the boundaries of private rights and public good, so that each act which creates benefit for the private landowners, is constrained to contribute, simultaneously, to the public good. Once again, this will be implemented in the form of easy going but clear principles, and operational rules which can be followed by everyone.
6. Strong protection of private rights:The process is one which gives each person freedom, and the freedom to act and think, and work in the way that suits them best, and that see see as most beneficial to them.
7. The beauty of the whole:The overall goal of the plan and all its processes, is to allow the people of Mariposa county, together, to protect and beautify, the earth.