Up from Copenhagen

Below is my comment to Yale Environment 360 e-magazine. It relates to the article: "Copenhagen: Things Fall Apart and an Uncertain Future Looms," written by Bill McKibben.

His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million worldwide. He and 360.org (leading up to the Copenhagen conference) campaigned to spur global compliance for reducing global warming emissions.

MY COMMENT RE: "Copenhagen: Things Fall Apart and an Uncertain Future Looms,"

It's not that I doubt the efficacy of technology fixes for climate-warming emissions, or of countries getting together to make hard-headed restrictions to those emissions. Quite possibly, with more stringent negotiations prior to the Copenhagen climate conference, a better outcome would have resulted. And while Bill Mckibben worked tirelessly to raise awareness of the parts per million of CO2 in the air that the world can live with, something essential is missing. There is more emphasis on the what than on the all-important how.

The model for global agreement is unnecessarily abstract. And I think we would benefit by changing that:

1) Try giving them (future climate-change delegates) something they can feel...or at least that they can SEE!

I would suggest that 350.org partner with Google Earth, NASA and others to bring compelling, understandable, strategic global mapping to everyone with a computer, to every student everywhere in the world. Future climate delegates should DO something, based on the information gleaned from this visual program. The program should look at various nations' and regions' CO2 emissions, climate fitness (see Gaia Vince), wildlife protection, energy resources, conservation strategies, etc.

2) Think outside the box.

Nothing should be simpler to comprehend than that the "surface" of the planet--land, atmosphere and water--forms a seamless whole. When countries get together to resolve the climate crisis, they should be focused less on what happens within their own geopolitical boundaries, and more on relationships between such units of governance and neighboring ones. In other words, political leaders should be required to think outside the box.

3) Always keep the whole in mind.

Climate change cannot be affected without an inclusive, cooperative strategy that is seamless, not only geographically, but also socially and economically. No issue of governance can be excluded, and no geopolitical boundary can be allowed to obscure the seamless flow of issues and ecologies. So can large global planning projects, such as the G8 and G20 summits be brought more in line with climate planning?

4) Focus on the edges.

In order to arrive at a paradigm of seamless-earth thinking, border ecologies should be emphasized. The land must come first. And since people depend upon the health of the land for sustenance, the health of the land is also a human-rights issue. For instance, how does a border fence between the USA and Mexico affect the border ecology between these countries? What are the human rights implications for the state of the Rio Grande as it leaves the US and enters Mexico? How does the war on drugs affect the above?

5) Start with a rough preliminary assessment.

What I think should come first is a very rough assessment of the state of places--geopolitical units--around the world. Google Earth and NASA earth mapping could help provide a baseline of which areas produce what emissions, which countries are suffering the most from warming, etc. Then let's see, in the future, what social, economic and environmental pushes and pulls between places might effect a better outcome.

6) Do charettes.

Future conference delegates should not have to sit and listen to dry speeches. Instead, they should be looking at pictures of places. They should split up into regional groups and do charettes. (A charette is a collaborative session in which a group of designers drafts a solution to a design problem.) If, for instance, a group that included Mexican and US delegates sat down and designed their hoped for outcomes vis a vis the Rio Grande, which both nations share, a dry Rio Grande reaching Mexico would not be acceptable to either party.

7) Bring in the heads of state (preferably, after first getting their buy-in to begin the planning process).

These delegates would arrive at proposals to enable more health to the river (above), and these proposals would be taken to the respective heads of state. Later climate conferences would determine how effectively governments have been implementing similar strategies proposed by their delegates.

8) Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative...

There is a plethora of dysfunctional clutter in the way of doing the right things, however. Since the US Congress is stymied, we should not pin all our hopes on what they can deliver. Let's focus instead on worldwide success stories where appropriate actions are independently being taken. There are many US states and cities that are already legislating lower CO2 emissions and cooperating toward regional sustainability, not to mention the achievements of other countries such as Denmark. Let's highlight these achievements and encourage more. Let us do this within the context of a seamless-earth strategy that is concrete rather than abstract.

9) To the future of 350.org

350.org is a fine organization for coordinating such a program worldwide. It is already doing something similar, but it must continue on a more ambitious scale, acting more as an organizational catalyst. While world governments must be pressured to act responsibly, we should be taking separate action to make irresistible their buy-in to global coordination. We should all be looking at the same picture(s). The big picture. What any country does, climate-wise, within its boundaries is everybody's business. By all visually perusing nations' climate issues, we can arrive at a measure of transparency that helps us to keep governments accountable.