I am lost for a few moments Saturday night in a epi-charged, g-chat epiphany. Immersed in choppy conversation with my dear chrysalis-cousin in the Scottish Borders, clothing designer Narda Dalgleish, I dream up a global action, a phantasmagorical cathartic syncopated flashmob fantasy, dubb it "Pollination" and convince Narda to start sketching designs for the prototype. NOW! She promises sketches by week end.
For a time, I feel light again, buoyant .. free from traumatic suffocation of full submersion in Deep Water Horizon horror ... for a few moments I sail free, free as a bird ....
Follow me over the fold as I flitter between fiction and fact, between what could be and what is...
They say that butterflies, just after they hatch, hang upside down for a time, to catch their breath and stretch out their wings. And I think, I hope, this represents the moment we are in right now, as citizens of a world which appears to be decomposing, imploding and totally out-of-synch, like some invisible, unfathomable quantum space time quidbit. Look at it and it morphs yet again into something unrecognizable...
So maybe you haven't been following post COP15 climate action, but know that the work continues in the lead up to COP16 this December in Cancun. And, like everything else in this straining-at-the-seams-insanity of modern day life, identities and motives are ambiguous, seethed in existential dilemna like some ever-present Schrodinger's cat
Nothing is certain.
It seems there is so much going on and its hard to know where to place ones energies, time, and debts. There is a climate of change, and climate change, and a climate change industry. Or is it all noise, glimmer and glamour? Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing? Or is the climate justice movement really having an effect in the USA and elsewhere? Can Gaia Permaculture Carbon Farming sequester the C02 and save us ? Or will be get more military-industrial sustainability (sustainment) via Bio-Char International and McGaia? Nicolas Roberts
5:00PM A gchat with Narda Dalgleish on our work on WiserCop16
5:12 PM Narda: So are we ready to make the page public?
5:13 PM me: hmmmm .. u know, I think you and i shld go!!!!! what a hoooot ....!!! we could get our press credentials and do it OUR WAY!!!! Put mistakes of Bolivia410 behind us. LOL can you imagine?
5:14 PM me: You and I in Cancun. We could dress as imaginal cells, u cld design our costumes ..we cld get a whole swarm together, you design and then we get tcktcktck or Greenpeace to distribute/sell and we do our own 'wave' ... mb we connect with 350for 10:10:10 ... or Avaaz
Five movements emerge from Social Forum in Mexico:
- The meetings without a name, afterwards others have labeled these meetings Frente amplio, broad front, a classical Latin American left wing concept. 6 such meetings has taken place. Participants are networks cooperating internationally with Latin American movements on anti neoliberal and other issues, NGOs as Greenpeace and other rather main stream environmental organizations as well as ecological grass roots groups.
- Climate justice campaign towards Cancun, a Latin American campaign also still without a name supported by Mexican organizations as RMALC, the network against free trade that grow out of the struggle against NAFTA. This group participates in the broad meetings and describes its purpose as participating in the open meetings to come to an agreement with the bigger environmental NGOs, often having international funding, on a common platform towards Cancun. (these environmental NGOs are sometimes mentioned as important as they are organizing the climate campaign "Pintale la Raya al Cambio Climatico" - in general main stream environmental organizations and Climate Action Network (CAN) groups in Latin America are more radical than in the US or Europe but of course still far from the position of ecological grass roots groups and a clear Climate Justice Now standpoint, see Píntale la raya al cambio climático campaign as an example.
- Organicaciones de base; almost grass roots organization, and partly or all Mexican Via Campesina. This was presented as a strand that was not completly integrated in the other initiatives.
- Klimaforum 10 - an initiative by ecological grass roots organizations with social justice concerns on a radical platform similar to the Cochabamba and Klimaforum09 declarations excluding the Climate Action Network and tcktcktck campaigning promoted by Greenpeace and others. Some of the ecological groups behind the Klimaforum10 initiative have more radical demands on emmissions, growth and social change than the environmental NGOs or even Climate Justice Now but want to have a broad platform for the Klimaforum10 based on the rights of Mother earth, Human rights and migrant rights and the system change not climate change decalaration from Copenhagen.
- Local ecological grassroot organizations in the Cancun region. Fundacion sin fronteras working on ecological issues and solidarity economy and likeminded small groups in the region presented the situation. Danish Peoples Climate Action (mostly big NGOs of the tcktcktck kind having a coordination during COP15 in Copenhagen) have visited Cancun and a meeting for all interested took place. The local "left wing" government have made and NGO with one person in key position previously in the government. As the local grass roots organizations are sceptical towards the left wing government and its record they have maintained their own cooperation but lack resources.
(conversation continues)
5:15 PM an army of imaginal cells
Narda: chuckled to death
5:16 PM so what will u do with a daft one like me?
5:17 PM i could shoot some films and photos and update the page but what else?
me:
5:18 PM I am going to put it out to tcktcktck . first we need the design, the materials must be light weight, hemp? almost cocooney.... ooooooohhhh mesh?
5:19 PM Narda: what on earth r u talking about woman? more than half of my stock is silks?
me: green green cocoons .... everyone is dressed in green cocooney things you can see thru to the butterlfy wings no no ... ONE BUTTERFLY wing is sticking out of the cocoon ... OMFG~
5:20 PM no we have to have these mass produced in Mexico using some locally grown organic material... sewed there ...U do the design only! and get royalties from sales
5:21 PM remember at COP15, they had the flood? everyone in blue slickers
me: we have the imaginal cell army!
5:23 PM Narda: you are the craziest friend i have ... what fun you are
5:25 PM Narda: A B C D?? what is 4yg
5:27 PM me: Four Years. Go. started by Pachamama who run the Awakening The Dreamer seminars who pitch the idea of we being in an evolutionary period similar to what happens in a cocoon prior to the birth of a butterfly .. the imaginal cells become voracious... 4YG, an amazing story of an awakening... some funding from NIKE. How about we get NIKE to back the production of our costumes for the .. not the flood we want to call it the the ....THE POLLINATION!
The unofficial working group, Mesa 18, banned by the Morales' government from WPCCC, was located one block from City Hall and included representatives from National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), CENDA, CESU, CEDLA, COLECTIVO CASA, FOBOMADE, BOLPRESS, ENLACE and Landless Movement. Hundreds of Bolivian and Latin American environmentalists crowed into the small hall to discuss the environmental destruction inside Bolivia caused by development projects, mining, and oil and gas exploration promoted by the Morales government. Topics discussed included water contamination from copper mining (Corocoro town), Construction of a dam for a power plant on the Madeira River (Beni region), The mining activity of gold ore in open pit mine (Sumitomo’s San Cristobal mine) and Lake Titicaca contamination by sewage. The government said the working group represented local not global issues; however, the group's purpose was to call attention to the
(conversation continues)
5:28 PM ME: little armies of imaginal cells converging on the main conference hall syncopated by Usashidi crowd sourcing and flash mob action: POLLINATE ... means each person finds one person not yet awake and gathers them into their cocoon ... a gentle NET
5:29 PM Narda: my god u are a waste of a genious
me: this is INCREDIBLE. we have just created the movement for the entire event. summer in Mexico. the netting
5:30 PM Narda: who is going to fund this?
5:31 PM me: Just start designing, woman!
Narda: you are not serious are you?
5:32 PM me: YES, i am serious. I am damn serious. Take a look at some of the pics form COP15. We don't need anything big . they just wore ponchos. just like netting ..... right now i am researching native crops Mexico
5:33 PM Narda: have you seen my clothes on flicker?
5:36 PM Narda: here
There is a class struggle going on outside the context of climate justice but it is only by linking the demands to the climate issues the specific new possibilities for alliances can be built to further strengthen the direct producers in their struggle against owners of means of production.
This means that in the case of peasants it is the struggle against agroindustry and its dependence on oil economy and the support of agriculture built on the photosynthesis in the hands of family farmers and small peasants or local communities that is a key to success when using the alliances on climate change issues rather than food sovereignty although the latter partly can be used as a model for building a sustainable agriculture. Likewise it is the struggle against the way that the industrial production is organized by the owners of the means of production making workers powerless and taking their creativity away by directing production towards fossil fuel based models and individual consumerist goods rather than goods of use for collective consumption. A political and economical struggle for other sustainable content of the production than that ordered by the owners of capital and their allies. Link
(The People's Agreement)called for restorative justice through an Adaptation Fund — financed by 6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of developed nations — that would assist countries in dealing with the impact of climate change. This includes reduced food security, the loss of water due to retreating glaciers, more frequent and intense "natural" disasters, an increase in mosquito-borne diseases, and more forest fires. The agreement also demanded the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.
"By aggregating the voluntary commitments in the [failed] Copenhagen Accord, we are talking about a temperature increase of at least four degrees," said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International. That "increase in temperature clearly means a death sentence to Africa, to the small island states, to the Arctic states and to all the vulnerable nations."
Following After the World People’s Conference, it is unlikely such an agreement can be forced on these nations again. President Morales, along with an international delegation representing civil society, formally delivered the People’s Agreement on May 7 to U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki Moon — the first step toward influencing talks during the next U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, this December in Cancun, Mexico. The Climate Justice Groundswell From Copenhagen to Cochabamba to CancunLink
(conversation continues)
5:39 PM me: i love these flowing this is the idea but we use something gathered or gatherable so one can scoop others up ..... once they pollinate.
(conversation continues)
5:44 PM Narda: the scooping business can be done with a long voil scarf so it wont make the clothing heavy and cumbersome
(conversation continues)
5:50 PM ME then we have groups coming together and convening under these huge umbrella cocoons made of mosquito net and we have a birthing of a huge butterfly or butterflies beneath ... this transformational process occurs in streetcorners throughout cancun - hell, around the world at the same time .. or time after time unfolding ...cancun ... cocoon how fascinating!
We are forced to notice that the theater of democracy is a broken one, as soon as one approaches the core of power, which is why we reclaim the power to the people. We reclaim the power over our own lives. Above all, we reclaim the power to counter pose the rationale of life and of the commons to the rationale of profit. It may have been declared illegal, but still we consider it fully legitimate.
Since no real space is left in the broken theater, we reclaimed our collective power (actually we expected it) to speak about the climate and energy issues. Which for us, involve critical nodes of global justice, survival of man and energy independence. We marched with our bodies.
We prefer to enter the space where the power is locked dancing and singing. We would have liked to do this at the Bella Center; to disrupt the session in accord with hundreds of delegates. But we were, as always, violently hampered by the police. They arrested our bodies in an attempt to arrest our ideas. We risked our bodies, trying to protect them by staying close to each other. We value our bodies; we need them to make love, to stay together and to enjoy life. They hold our brains, with beautiful bright ideas and views; they hold our hearts filled with passion and joy. Nevertheless, we risked them. In fact, what would be the worth of thinking and feeling if our bodies did not move? Doing nothing and letting it happen is the worst form of complicity with the business that wanted to hack the U.N. meeting. At the COP15 we moved, and we will keep moving.
Exactly like love, civil disobedience can’t just be told, we must make it with our bodies. Otherwise, we would not really think about what we love, and we would not really love what we think about. It’s as simple as that. It’s a matter of love, justice and dignity. A letter from Climate Prisoners
***
The emergent paradigm = many-to-many-to-many: a self-organizing global swarm translating, orchestrating, targeting, contextualizing. Kinda like the Lady Gaga inspired flash mob recently at San Francisco's elite St. Francis Hotel.
Can't you just see us, stealth-like as we move into position, barely visible in our throbbing cocoons, birthing, casting our nets, moving into postion. Tiananmen, Trafalger and Times Square. L'Arc de Triomphe, Chatham Island, Giza's Pyramids, the roof of the Andres, Easter Island, the source of the Nile .... unfurling the nets, casting upward towards the heavens, mushshrooming into millions of millions hand-stitched gossamer-winged sustainable silk worm butterfly kites. Resilient. Resplendant. Alive.
Flash Mob: San Francisco, May 12: Boycott Westin St. Francis Hotel
Should we do it? Should we ...can we ... all ... just ... wake ... UP?
UPDATE: UN's NEW CLIMATE DIRECTOR SAYS RICH MUST HELP DEAL WITH CLIMATE CRISIS
LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) - The world can salvage a new deal to combat global warming but rich countries must first fulfil their pledges on climate aid, the U.N.'s new climate chief, Costa Rica's Christiana Figueres, told Reuters.
The United Nations appointed Figueres on Monday to be its climate chief and head international talks on how to contain the world's greenhouse gas emissions. [ID:nSGE64G0D2]
Agreement on a global deal was not a priority for 2010, she said, reflecting a widespread down-scaling of ambition after a bad-tempered summit in Copenhagen in December.
The priority now was to build trust, she said, to help agree in the future a successor to the Kyoto Protocol whose first round ends in 2012. LINK
Photocredits
Epiphany by allcarrots
tomorrow.. by moczkoś.
Mesa 18´s banner by Bolivia Democratica
Peace by Sheikh Dawood
cocoon.jpg by lao_ren100
Silk Cocoon lamp by Heather K.
Powerscocoons by anyjazz65
COP15_Day7_11 by InvestigateWest
Y-2 by gaspi *yg.
Blueberry netting by tina_manthorpe
Burning Man 2009 Kites Ballet by light_bloom.
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Today we're heading to Key West, Florida as I thought you all might like to see what the beach there looks like before being struck by oil gushing from the oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico. Here is FishOutofWater's analysis.
As we try to access blame and fault for the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf, it's easy to rest blame on British Petroleum But BP can not exist without our employing it to power our cars, deliver our products and be part of products we use to sustain of way of life such as fertilizer, insecticides and plastics. It's time that we stop our denial and recognize our culpability in this disaster and acknowledge that the blame lies with our addiction to oil. The only way for us to stop our addiction to oil is for us to actually stop or reduce substantially our use of products containing oil.
I have been writing Macca's Meatless Monday weekly for almost two years and talking about the carbon intensive livestock industry. In fact, the meat industry is one of the greatest users of fossil fuels and also one of the greatest emitters of CO2 and methane. The most effective personal action we can take to reduce our addiction to oil is to reduce our consumption of meat and meat products.