Where the real action and hope was at Rio+20: the side events and People’s Summit

Excerpted from a lengthy and fascinating report on Rio+20 by Daniel Wahl. This excerpt only focuses on the side events.

Contact the author via contact at danielchristianwahl dot com for the full version with a multitude of links. I’m of course happy with the positive evaluation of my own contribution to the event, see below.

Daniel Wahl writes:

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 Peer to Peer (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 about technical problems and solutions to do with all type of farming machinery; 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.

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.

A Wisdom 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.