Reflections on Rio+20 (Part 2 of 3)

Who are we to judge failure or success and from what perspective?

By Daniel Christian Wahl (www.danielchristianwahl.com)

One of the main disappointments about the Rio+20 outcomes is that the conference failed to produce a document worth of the name “The Future We Want”. Sure it would be useful to have a document signed by all of the world’s governments in a truly committed way.  Ideally such a document would serve as a global vision and mission statement as well as a detailed implementation and finance plan at global, regional, national, bioregional and community scale, giving us a road map towards increased sustainability and resilience and a way to avoid run-away climate change.  Did you really think we were ready to write such a document and that there would be a chance to ratify it through all governments unanimously?

John Croft posed the provocative question:  “Maybe we were not able to create this document, because we don’t actually have all the answers yet, and the answers we do have are not the answers? Maybe what we need to learn is to live with the questions a little longer, live into the questions, live the questions?”  Doing that might offer us a more humble, scale sensitive, and locality specific way to engage with the sustainable development agenda, with people in their communities. This is the way that GEN, Gaia Education, Transition Towns, Permaculture, Dragon Dreaming, the Awakening the Dreamer Symposiums, and Gaia University are trying to initiate and the support change towards diverse cultures of sustainability.

The Rio Dialogues and “The Future We Want” Document

The so called ‘final outcome document’ was negotiated not by the heads of state, but by each country’s delegation of bureaucrats and chief negotiators in consultation with the so called nine ‘mayor groups’: business & industry; children & youth; farmers; indigenous people; local authorities; non-governmental organizations; scientific & technological community; women; workers & trade unions.  In principle the diversity and focus of these mayor groups invited to the negotiating table would inspire hope that many important voices would be heard, and so did the innovative process of the ‘Rio Dialogues’. In an unprecedented attempt to invite more widespread participation from the global civil society, these dialogues allowed anybody (with access to a computer and the information about the process) to vote for a series of recommendations in 10 strategic areas. The results of the top recommendation in each area were as follows:

  • Sustainable Energy for All: Take concrete steps to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies
  • Forests: Restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020
  • Water: Secure water supply by protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and water sources
  • Food & Nutrition Security: promote food systems that are sustainable and contribute to improving health
  • Oceans: Avoid ocean pollution by plastics through education and community collaboration
  • Sustainable Development for Fighting Poverty: Promote global education to eradicate poverty and to achieve sustainable development
  • Sustainable Cities & Innovation: Promote the use of waste as a renewable energy source in urban environments
  • The Economics of Sustainable Development, including Sustainable Patterns of Production and Consumption: Phase out harmful subsidies and develop green tax schemes
  • Unemployment, Decent Work, & Migrations: Put education in the core of the Sustainable Development Goals agenda
  • Sustainable Development as an Answer to the Economic and Financial Crisis: Promote tax reforms that encourage environmental protection and benefit the poor

Do have a look at the 10 points per theme each of these ‘winners’ was chosen from, if you haven’t already.  The list actually does give us a series of jobs to do that would truly make a difference. So, to work everyone!  Don’t wait for your governments to do it for you! Here is a link.

 More than 65,000 people from all over the world participated in the on-line prioritizing for the Rio Dialogues and from Saturday 16th to Tuesday 19th an average of 2000 conference delegates participated in each of the 10 dialogues.  Schedule clashes and the difficult logistics of reaching the conference venue prohibited me from attending all of them. I did manage to witness, participate, and vote in four of the dialogues: Forests, Sustainable Cities & Innovation, Oceans, and ‘Sustainable Energy for All.’

I witnessed how democratic process changed the forest proposal so it would include “zero net deforestation by 2020”, only to then fail to see this statement in the final outcome document.  I saw how there was a broad consensus on immediate action to avoid the further pollution of the oceans by plastic waste, only to read in Article 163: “We further commit to take action to, by 2025, based on collected scientific data, achieve significant reductions in marine debris to prevent harm to the coastal and marine environment.”  Why the delay?

Most of the time were specific time lines are set in the document they define when actions should start, rather than by when commitments should be accomplished.  One example of how important the wording of these documents actually is the highest ranking action that came out of the city dialogues.  Worded as it is quoted above, without distinguishing between organic and non-organic waste, such a statement could result in more dioxin-releasing incinerators of urban waste rather than decentralized urban biomass and biogas plants. In the case of Brasil, more than a million people who’s livelihood is municipal garbage recycling (to a 95% efficieny) would be out of a job their families depend upon.

On a personal note, attending the Ocean Dialogues and hearing the passionate contributions of Silvia Earle (link to her TED talk) and Jean-Michel Cousteau (link to my recording of it) kindled a new commitment to include the world’s marine environments more centrally in my own activism and sustainability education.  We have to remember that the oceans are the source of life and of the majority of our atmosphere’s oxygen.  Humanity lives on an ocean planet and the future of the oceans is our future.  I hope that the new initiative of the ‘Ocean Elders’ will help to draw more funds and committed action to protecting the marine environment and into educating us land-dwellers about our dependence on healthy oceans.

Here is another example of how powerful industry lobbies were able to pull the teeth of the outcome document on pretty much every occasion.  There was a very strong and united voice to make the end of fossil fuel subsidies one of the great successes of Rio+20 and this is how the point was made in the outcome document:

 

“225. Countries reaffirm the commitments they have made to phase out harmful and

inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption and undermine

sustainable development. We invite others to consider rationalizing inefficient fossil

fuel subsidies by removing market distortions, including restructuring taxation and

phasing out harmful subsidies, where they exist, to reflect their environmental

impacts, with such policies taking fully into account the specific needs and

conditions of developing countries, with the aim of minimizing the possible adverse

impacts on their development and in a manner that protects the poor and the affected

communities.”

 

The broad popular support from NGOs and the mayor groups to strengthen UNEP and turn it into an agency of similar status and funding as the WHO (World Health Organization), in effect create the WEO (World Environment Organization) did not result in the desired outcome and was negotiated down to the following:

 

“88. We are committed to strengthening the role of the United Nations Environment

Programme (UNEP) as the leading global environmental authority that sets the

global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the

environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations

system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment.”

Yet, is it not also a small success that this issue was at least mentioned in the official outcome document rather than completely ignored?  I encourage everyone to sit down and re-read the outcome document not in order to find the many places where it fell short, but to celebrate the many places where it offers a few steps in the right direction.

Achim Steiner called the document a “half finished cookbook with many of the right ingredients and some of the right recipts” (link to video). I would tend to agree.  There have been public statements of dissociation with the results of the outcome document, as “The Future we don’t want” petition and ‘People’s Sustainability Manifesto’ by People’s Sustainability Treaties.  All of which make very valid points, and yet the time of them versus us thinking is over. We have to keep the bridge of dialogue and engagement open. We are all in this together!

Undermining the UN process, as imperfect as it is, will only serve the interests of more unilaterally minded nations like the USA and China.  Yes, we have to improve the UN process, but I still strongly believe in the principles behind the United Nations although it is time to include the “International Court of Justice for Crimes against Nature” into these principles, as Jolanda Kakabadse, the president of the WWF suggested as one of the panelist during the ‘Forest Dialogues’.
 

 

The People’s Summit and other “Side Events”

Maybe the side-events were actually the main events that will lead to lasting and meaningful change in the world? One of the events, I only visited briefly but was very impressed by, was

the “Humanity 2012 – Forum on Social Entrepreneurship”, organized by  Ashoka, the Skoll Foundation and a number of Brazilian partner organizations. Ana Rhodes, the current director of the Findhorn Foundation, and I joined a plenary on “Social Entrepreneurship and Technologies of Colaboration” with three very interesting panellists:

Helen Miller of the US-based Sunlight Foundation spoke about her organizations aim to use websites and mobile phone apps to increase the transparency of the parliamentary process in the USA and make information about who lobbies for what and the flow of political donations accessible to anyone who may want to know.  Among the websites her organization has created are www.opencongress.org (a parliamentary monitoring organization), www.subsidyscope.org (tracking US government subsidies), www.influenceexplorer.com (profiles political donors), and www.capitolwords.com (an application that lets you search for who talks about what in the capitol.  While I wonder who has the time to keep on top of all this information flow, it is obvious that transparent access to this information will lead to behaviour change among politicians, lobbyists, and party donors.

The second panellist was Silvio Meira, who is an important figure in the Brazilian Information Technology and software world.  As a former teacher and university professor he has a particular interest in education and how the landscape of education is changing due to the internet.  He has co-organized the Olympics of Educational Games that help children learn basic skills in maths, physics, biology and sustainability through entertaining educational games. He insisted that in the rapidly changing world we live in, we will need to equip children from an early age on with basic programming skills.  The most shocking and confrontational statement he made was: “Learn to programme, or simply be programmed.” I am not sure if that is the Brave New World I want to live in, but maybe he has a point?

The most inspiring contributions to the panel came from Michael Bauwens, founder of the Pear to Pear (P2P) Foundation.  He presented a series of fascinating examples of internet enabled P2P collaborations that are beginning to change the landscape of how we innovate and produce things. Among the examples he listed was a global network of organic agriculture researchers who are doing ‘science by the people for the people’ called the “Nutrient Dense Project”;  www.youngfarmers.org network is a mutual aid network that helps farmers share information

Michael Bauwens spoke about how collaborative platforms such as these and open source sharing is moving us into a new economic system where value is created collaboratively in the global commons and made accessible to everybody. The shift is from an economics of scale (where bigger is better and production is scaled-up and centralized) to an economics of scope where local-global cooperation and 3D printing technologies allow to create products on demands efficiently at a local or regional scale. To my mind, this opens a great window of opportunities to ecovillages and transition town initiatives to use these new technologies to radically localize in a globally collaborative way.about technical problems and solutions to do with all type of farmingmachinery; another was www.wikispeed.com which tells the remarkable story of how 80 people collaborated over three months through the internet to develop an opensource racing car based on 100% recyclable materials which consumes only 1.5 liters of fuel per 100km and could be built in a micro-factory using 3D printing and laser sinthering technology; www.opensourceecology.org offers a Global Village Construction Set with open source access to more the 40 blueprints for machines that improve resilience and sustainability at the local level.

A Wisdome Council of Methodologies

Another very inspiring gathering was a meeting of different methodologies at the Arena de Barros close to the Rio Centro complex where the UN conference took place. The meeting was simply beautiful and inspiring.  The fishbowl/spiral council started with the inner circle of people representing different methodologies that are helping us to take an active part in transition. Among them was Maria Luise Freiri, one of the 13 indigenous grandmothers, John Croft for ‘Dragon Dreaming’, Dominic Barter for the Non Violent Communication network, Taisa Mattos as a representative of the Transition Brazil Network, May East for Gaia Education, Ana Rhodes for the Findhorn Foundation, and Kosha Joubert for the Global Ecovillage Network, as well as a young man from the “Bucket Revolution” organic recycling and farming network from Brazil, and others.

Much wisdom was voiced with passion and inspiration during a magical two hour meeting, which allowed space for all present to join the inner circle to give voice to their heart’s yearning. John Croft reminded us that ‘we are the one’s we have been waiting for an that the time for action and transformation is NOW. Yet he also cautioned us to hasten slowly, and that maybe we do not have the solutions quite yet and that is way they are not spreading faster. He spoke up in favour of fear and the other so-called negative emotions like anger, rage, and sorrow. Reminding us that you cannot suppress half of your emotions without suppressing all of them. Anger is the heart’s response to witnessing injustice, sorrow is the healthy response to seeing beings we love suffer. Fear is alarming us to pay attention and confront the need for change.

May East spoke about the permaculture principle of maximizing the edges and how we need to work in the space where different cultures meet: grass-root community groups and activists, business leaders, NGOs, local, regional, and national government and administration, as well as the UN system. This means being able to work as “chameleons” building bridges between the different ecosystems and nurturing the rich bufferzone, where these ecosystems meet and biodiversity is especially high. May espressed her hope for Rio+20 in the wish that we may “develop an ethic of working inter-institutionally, creating communities of learning, living learning communities of collaboration”.

Ana Rhodes reminded us to bring solutions, hope, hopelessness and despair into the same conversation. She spoke of her own practice of sitting with her sorrow and despair at the same time as she is connecting with her hope and passion for creating a better world. Only if we accept all aspects of ourselves and stop trying to learn more, prepare more, in an attempt to be perfect, can we finally go out an do something and stop excusing inaction with statements like if I only had more … or if I only knew more ….

Many deep insights and heartful stories where shared in that council. What struck me most was to see how the culture of Findhorn, Transition, and Ecovillage Education is spreading.  To see how many of the young Brazilian women and men present where so clearly former students of May East or Craig Gibson on Ecovillage Training, Ecovillage Design, or Trasition Training courses. To see how natural everyone was with practices like attunements, inviting in inspiration, clarity and wisdom, speaking from the heart, and being mindful and considerate with each other, all of that gives me hope that we are creating a culture of infectious health. When we all stood in a big circle in the end, connected hands to hands and hearts to hearts I felt like I was home at the Universal Hall in Findhorn.

 

END OF PART 2 of 3  (Yes, I did change my mind. There will be a part 3, as there a few more stories to tell.  Thank you to those who have read this far.  Your Daniel Wahl J )

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