I was excited about the possibility of working in groups at the conference; in fact, that was one of my motivations for going there. I loved the idea that it was a people’s conference and I wondered how that might play out, how the promise of consensus would become a reality. I was intrigued by this quote from the official cmpcc website (cmpcc is the acronym in Spanish for the complete name of the People’s World Conference): “The People’s World Conference is truly striving to involve as many people as possible. The core work of the Conference will be done in Working Groups. Each one will start their work via email, building consensus and putting forward proposals, which will be considered and enriched in the meetings in person that will take place during the actual conference in Cochabamba. The idea is to construct in Cochabamba in an inclusive and participative way a grand “Peoples' Accord to save life and Mother Earth.”
On the NAC website, in sharing with others about my upcoming journey, I had written, “Nurturing Across Cultures is committed to listening to traditional cultures worldwide, and applying knowledge and understanding that is relevant to our own lives as caring members of the world community. This is the purpose of our trip to South America in April; to stand shoulder to shoulder with other peoples of the world, sharing our humanity with them, and returning to our own culture with strategies and inspiration to move cultural trends toward nurturing, cooperation, and responsible action. We are aligned with the Permaculture principles of care of the earth, care of people, and fair share.”
Then, as I was preparing for my travels, I read this quote on 350.org, which I also posted on the Nurturing Across Cultures site in my info about the upcoming event.
“…In April, (Bolivia) will convene a major summit of progressive government leaders, social movement leaders, activists, and civil society to map out points of consensus and a plan for shifting the international debate on climate change towards an outcome that is fair and ambitious. …their collaborative approach towards organizing this summit… reaches far beyond the anti-capitalist, radical wing of the movement that you might expect. They have been working hard to reach out to a wide range of social movements and civil society, get invitations to government leaders with positions clearly different than their own, and map out an agenda that leads to open and honest conversations about a positive way forward. In a post-Copenhagen world, their commitment and drive to building a broader and more powerful movement in 2010 is one of the most hopeful and inspiring things …to get involved with right now.”
I had already wanted to get involved, in fact, I was committed to go, and these posts confirmed that I had made the right choice. They gave me hope that the conference might move beyond the predetermined agenda of the event, which showed up as topics for many of the working groups, for example: structural causes of climate change, climate justice tribunal, climate debt, and dangers of a carbon market.
I encouraged others to participate in the online working groups as I solicited funding for my actual trip south. I appreciated that cmpcc encouraged online as well as physical participation to be more inclusive, all over the globe. I looked forward to the day when the working groups dialog would begin. One had to choose one working group in which to participate at the conference but could sign up for up to five groups online. I chose to interact with three groups pre-conference of the seventeen or so possibilities. There were originally fewer groups and then a few more were added as the conference got closer. I waited weeks without hearing anything from any of my groups and I sent them emails asking when the dialog would begin. Finally I got my first emails from the two online groups in the second week of March, and didn’t get an email from the conference group until March 19. By then, I had a lot less time to read, reflect, and respond as I was so busy preparing for my journey and taking care of what I needed to at home. I had wanted to participate fully in the process from start to finish, but it was hard to find the time and focus I needed to do so in the final weeks before I left the US.
The groups I chose to be a part of were: Harmony with Nature (the group I would also participate in at the conference), Mother Earth Rights, and Shared Vision. I felt that I could contribute the most to the Harmony with Nature group since so many of the ideas and experiences I wanted to share had come from Permaculture, a design system based on harmony with nature, and other ways of mimicking and being with nature. I felt that I had intuitively lived in this way for many years and had chosen this path over other more conventional paths before me. And I was yet to learn about the concept of Living Well.
I chose Mother Earth Rights because the idea fascinated me and I wanted to see how it would evolve. It felt like an idea whose time has come, to me. I first heard of the concept at the Bioneers conference http://www.bioneers.org in Marin County, CA last October. I saw Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund speak and attended a workshop about the Democracy School movement. At Bioneers Mari spoke of her part in drafting Rights of Nature language for the constitution of Ecuador as well as ordinances for municipalities in the US that changed the wording and intent of the law to give Mother Earth rights. It was mind blowing and exciting to realize what she was talking about. The way it was explained to me that made sense was this—whenever a new group or entity gets rights, there is resistance because it is such a paradigm shift, it is almost inconceivable to imagine, to the mainstream, and sometime to the fringes as well.. Before slaves got rights, the culture at the time couldn’t imagine them being thought of as human, as beings that deserved rights. The same scenario unfolded when women got rights. So that’s why we might feel so odd when we hear talk about ecosystems, or nature, or Mother Earth, having rights. The concept doesn’t make sense in our paradigm. In our present legal system, damages to ecosystems can be looked at only in terms of how that damage would be harmful to a human being; the ecosystem has no rights on its own, only as related to human beings. So if a river or mountain, for example, is damaged by the actions of an individual or corporation, it is only legally significant if it affects a person, for example, their health, adjourning property, or livelihood. For example, as I understand it, indigenous tribes in North America have sued for loss of fishing rights when rivers have been dammed or diverted for irrigation, but they have not been able to sue to protect the fishes’ lives apart from said fish being a commodity or income or food source for human beings. I also understand that in the Global South, and where people truly live in harmony with nature, away from and apart from the legal structures of western civilization, Mother Earth Rights are accepted intrinsically and it is part of the paradigm that Mother Earth as a legal and living being.
I chose to be a part of the Shared Vision group because that was one of my main intentions and hope in attending the conference, to be able to create a shared vision with the other participants. I wanted to be part of that process. As I read posts from others in the Shared Vision group, I sometimes despaired because their vision seemed so far away from mine, and many of the posts were hostile and belligerent toward the US and others in the Global North, not only the governments but also the citizens. I actually worried that as a US citizen, I might be in danger at the conference due to the hostile feelings expressed by a number of people in their posts in this group. I recognize that even though I had, over the course of my lifetime, lived with less of a carbon footprint than probably 90% of those in the US, I could be seen as a perpetuator of the US model of living, and to some extent, that is true. After all, I had taken five planes to get to the conference. I presently own a car, a computer, washing machine, dryer, and refrigerator. It’s true that I didn’t own any of these items for most of my adult life and I practiced voluntary simplicity, choosing a different path from the majority. But although I am a second generation American whose ancestors did not participate in the colonization and imperialism that has affected so much of the so-called developing world, as much as I have tried to even out the playing field by my own choices and lifestyle, and as much as I have rejected some of the privilege norteamericanas are born into, I have, both consciously and unconsciously, reaped benefits of our system.
One of the Shared Vision posts in this group called for complete elimination of all automobile and air travel. I mentioned this to my then 22 year old son one day, and he said, “Well, that’ll never happen. What else have you got?” I loved his clear, to the point, realistic response, and I actually agreed with him. If that’s what it takes, it’ll never happen. So what else have we got?
I had some ideas that I had wanted to share at the conference. I wanted to share what I thought were feasible ideas for shifting climate change that originated in the Global North. I wanted to show people at the conference that there were those of us in the north who are committed to proposing and following through with solutions for climate change. I wanted to share ideas that could make a real difference in climate change without dealing with what were referred to as structural causes, or some of the more controversial topics (at least to me) suggested in the conference pre-program. Two of the ideas I had wanted to share were the Fossil Free by ’33 initiative through the Community Environmental Council in Santa Barbara, and the 2030 Challenge issued by Architecture 2030
The Community Environmental Council has some
concrete steps for the region to take to become Fossil Free by ’33. From
their website: “CEC’s mission is to make today’s generation the last to
rely on gasoline for fueling its cars, and coal- and
natural-gas-created electricity for heating and lighting its buildings.
The two biggest energy-using sectors in our region are buildings, which
account for about 37 percent of our energy needs, and transportation,
which accounts for about 48 percent. In our energy plan for Santa
Barbara County – A New Energy Direction – CEC focuses on solutions in
which there are available, cost-effective technologies, and where we
have the potential for local influence.”
What I like best about this, besides the numbers, ands the focus on local action, is that CEC acknowledges that “We…need to take a creative approach that keeps in mind those things that we have control over”. I personally tend to think in terms of idealistic solutions that may be difficult to implement, which probably waste time and energy in the long run, and accomplish less, because people just aren’t ready for them. So I was encouraged by a solution proposed by an environmental group in the US that makes such bold changes in our energy use yet is couched in terms so it can be embraced by an environmentally conscious mainstream. The initiative is very detailed and proposes many ways of effecting change. Here are more details about the CEC plan:
http://www.cecsb.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=122&Itemid=163
Architecture 2030, a non-profit, non-partisan and
independent organization based in New Mexico, was established in 2002
in response to the global-warming crisis by architect Edward Mazria. I
quote, “2030’s mission is to rapidly transform the US and global
Building Sector from the major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions
to a central part of the solution to the global-warming crisis. Their
goal is straightforward: to achieve a dramatic reduction in the
global-warming-causing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the Building
Sector by changing the way buildings and developments are planned,
designed and constructed”.
I saw Ed Mazria speak at UCSB in 2009. He was articulate, engaging, professional, and passionate about his work and ideas. His presentation was backed by easy-to-follow statistics and data. I felt possibility in the air as he spoke. Like Fossil Free ‘33, this appeared to me to be a radical solution that could get real results, couched in terms that the mainstream could embrace, if stretched just a little.
Architecture 2030 is a solution that is based in industrialized countries where there is sufficient money and infrastructure to carry out the targets. Implementing such strategies could be one way that industrialized countries can take responsibility for their part in creating the current climate catastrophe. Implementation guidelines can be found here:
http://www.architecture2030.org/2030_challenge/guidelines.html
Armed with hope, passion, and solutions to share from my part of the world, I was ready to journey south. I started to get lots of emails from the working groups in the last days I was in the US and the dozen days I was in Venezuela and Ecuador before I actually got into a working group session in Bolivia. I was unable to download or read most of the documents I received during that time, so I was not up to speed about the general overviews or the nature of proposals in ‘my’ groups by the time I arrived at the conference setting in Tiquipaya. But two days before I was to travel to Bolivia, in an internet café in Sanare, Venezuela, I received an email that said that the working groups would congregate at 8:30 AM on Monday, April 19, not on Tuesday April 20 as originally announced. My inner time clock speeded up and I geared up for arriving for these meetings I had waited for with such anticipation.
A
Permaculture designer, water harvesting advocate, and longtime
environmental steward, Barbara Wishingrad, attended the Peoples’ World
Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 19-22, 2010,
along with 35, 000 other people. She also traveled with a delegation
from SOA Watch to Venezuela to visit clinics, schools, cooperatives,and
other social programs under the Hugo Chavez government. Barbara has
worked as an herbalist, homebirth midwife, street artist, interpreter,
and with special needs babies, among other things; she is currently
organizing a Water Harvesting Co-op in the Santa Barbara area. Barbara
has lived and worked among indigenous artisans and midwives and has
made sharing indigenous wisdom an important part of her life work. She
is founder and President of Nurturing Across Cultures, formerly The
Rebozo Way Project:http://www.nurturingacrosscultures.org
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