Ecological Creditor Nation Brazil Mobilizes: State of the World Forum moves to February 2010 (Washington, D.C.) and August 2010 (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

In February, NextNow Collab helped launch the Ecological Creditor Nation Summit initiated by the Global Footprint Network.  Brazil is one of the approximately 20% of nations studied that maintains Ecological Creditor status.  Now NextNow Collab partner State of the World Forum is moving its Washington D.C. conference from November 2009 to February, 2010, largely due to the extensive involvement of Brazil, which is launching a Brazil 2020 campaign in partnership with the Forum in August 2009–the developments of which will go far in informing the subsequent Forum in Washington, D.C.– and which we plan to attend.  All of these efforts combined act to energize the emerging global 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign.  We’re really excited by these developments and inspired by Brazil’s commitment.

Below is the announcement from Jim Garrison as it appears on the State of the World Forum website.

Dear Friends of the State of the World Forum,

We want to inform you that the upcoming State of the World Forum has been rescheduled from November 12-14, 2009 to February 28 – March 3, 2010. This has come about due to the extraordinary success of our endeavors and the fact that what was originally an intent to convene a conference has morphed into a global strategy to develop a 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign.  Allow me to explain.

A year ago, we decided to convene the 2009 State of the World Forum in November 2009 to address the escalating crisis of global warming.  We decided to do so using an integral framework, a perspective that was unique to the debate and which would allow for very synergistic cross sectoral dialogue. In early March of this year, I was invited down to Brazil to give some lectures on climate change and to speak about the integral approach we were taking on the issue.  What took place can only be described as phenomenal.  Each place I went, the response was not only an affirmation of the urgency of the crisis global warming represents but a willingness to begin working to develop a national mobilization in Brazil to support our efforts to mobilize action by 2020. Similar responses have been forthcoming in Australia, Holland, and Mexico and from a range of organizations and companies around the world.

To make a long story very short, four months later, we are launching a global 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign as well as launching a national Brazil 2020 campaign in Belo Horizonte, Brazil August 4 – 7 with over a hundred international specialists in climate change and several hundred activists from all over Brazil.  The decision has also been made to convene the 2010 State of the World Forum in Rio de Janeiro August 30 – September 3, 2010.  The emergence of a global strategy and such dynamic movement in Brazil has necessitated a reframing of the 2009 State of the World Forum in Washington.

There are four main reasons we are changing the date:

1) By moving to the 2010 February 28 – March date we will have much more space available to us at the Washington Hilton hotel to accommodate more people and to design a more interactive event with more breakout rooms.

2) The new dates for the Washington Forum will place this event equidistance between the two other Forums, giving us the opportunity to respond to the developments from Belo Horizonte in August 4 -7, 2009 and incorporate the work from Washington February 28 – March 3, 2010 into the Rio Forum August 30 – September 3, 2010.  This Phase One plan is in keeping with our overall orientation as a  global Campaign as opposed to a single event.  Our intent is to convene State of the World Forums in major cities worldwide over the next ten years, through 2020, as we building support for our 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign.

3) We have recently established an important partnership with Globo TV, the largest media company in Brazil and South America, and are in the process of developing programming ideas, including the production of at least one special in conjunction with the Washington Forum.  This gives us the opportunity to create other global television distribution deals and give the rescheduled Forum world-wide exposure.  The new February dates will give us the time necessary to make these arrangements.

4) The new dates will place the conference in Washington at a time when the Congress is in session, thus providing us with an opportunity to involve members of Congress in the Forum and include some lobbying activity concerning the overall Forum 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign.  As you may know, the United States is essentially acting like a failed state in the climate change domain and so there is a serious and urgent need for further education and lobbying in the Congress.

We sincerely hope that you appreciate the logic of our need to reschedule the Forum and that this change of dates has not inconvenienced you in any way.

We would invite you to peruse our website, which as been transformed from featuring an event to describing an entire global strategy: http://www.worldforum.org/

The urgency of global warming mandates that each and every one of us become climate leaders. For the first time in our lives, indeed for the first time in history, all of us must take responsibility for our climate, whether at the individual, community, company, institution, state, or national level. We are all responsible for global warming. We must all share in the leadership required to solve it, for nothing less than the fate of human civilization is at stake. The crisis is that stark, the choice is that clear, the leadership required is that urgent.

If we rise to this challenge, if we take climate leadership, we will generate climate justice and climate prosperity because it is precisely our capacity to solve our greatest crisis that affords us our greatest opportunities for growth within the context of sustainability and alignment with natural systems.

Small Way to Help Create a Large Awareness: Collecting Serious Sand

This invitation to make a contribution to the study and communication of plastic pollution comes from Daniella Russo of Sea Studios Foundation, who forwarded it to me as part of our work with the Strategic Council on Plastic Pollution.  Sea Studios Foundation is the organization behind the Clinton Global Initiative, Strange Days on Planet Earth, 2020:

Strange Days on Planet Earth, 2020 Imagine Earth in the year 2020… the world has embarked on a winning path to slow climate change; clean energy use is exploding around the globe; all people have access to clean and fresh water; we are feeding ourselves without compromising the land and sea; life-sustaining eco-systems are being valued and protected…. and for the first time in years, parents are starting to believe their children will inherit a better, safer world. Imagine a healthy planet with healthy humans living on it…Strange Days on Planet Earth 2020 is inspired by this vision. It is born out of our passionate belief that to achieve this vision we need more than enlightened political and business leaders; we need an active, globally-minded public with the mindset to support sustained involvement and leadership.

Here’s the invitation.  All it requires is taking a little personal initiative while you’re on the beach:

Hello All Sand Collectors and others interested in Plastic Toxicity in our Seas!

Just back from Midway where I was overwhelmed by the death by plastic of hundreds of Albatross. I opened a film cannister I had filled with beach sand on Sand Island within the Atoll. To my surprise, the beautiful white sand was laced with red, blue, and lavender flecks — tiny bits of toxic plastic working their way into the micro-world. This was new to me and after having learned how plastics absorb pcbs and other toxins, I thought about a new project called Serious Sand.

Please collect a small container of sand from a convergence beach zone near you or where you vacation this summer. You will know a convergence zone along a beach — it is where two drift cells collide, usually creating our most favorite beach areas known as Points, spits, or hooks.

Just like the convergence zones in the open ocean, these beach sites collect debris, acting to concentrate macro and micro pieces of plastic. They are some of our more famous beaches and often have lighthouses or a bunch of fishermen tossing their favorite lure.

Scoop in the upper intertidal just at the edge of the high water line. Check the sand yourself, but please send samples to me at:

Ron Hirschi

Project Serious Sand/SOAR

PO Box 899

Hadlock, Washington 98339

(Include that you’re sending from NextNow)

Aloha nui loa to one and all and have a wonderful summer!

NextNow Collaboratory Joins with Strategic Council on Plastic Pollution–Please Add Your Support (UPDATED)

This post now includes 3 new links:  June 12, 2009  Mother Nature News (see comments for Capt. Moore’s insights re this innovation), June 9, 2009 U.N. Official Calls for Worldwide Ban on Plastic Bags, and the April 2009 U.N. report ‘Marine Litter: A Global Problem.’

Last week, NextNow Collab joined with the new Strategic Council on Plastic Pollution at Google in Mountain View to help raise awareness of the rising threat plastic pollution poses to the health of the world’s oceans and all life that depends on them–that is, all life.  The day started with a presentation to Google by Captain Charles Moore, the founder of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, the man who discovered the Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997 (that was 12 years ago!!  Where have we been?), and an environmental hero (who won an Environmental Hero Award from the California EPA). I attempt to summarize the conversation in this post, but the following February 2009 clip from Captain Moore’s TED presentation is a must-see.  (Please also see the video from 2001 at the end of this post, filmed during an actual expedition.)

After the presentation at Google, a group of us retreated to a conference room with Captain Moore to arrive at the (almost) final wording of the official statement issued by the Council for the United Nations-designated World Oceans Day (June 8).  Manuel Maqueda, one of NextNow Collaboratory’s social media gurus, collaborator on ISDE5, and founder of the Trash Island project, a NNC collaboration project, convened the meeting and opened it with the perfect mixture of gravitas and grace.  I was impressed with the thoughtfulness of everyone present; these were not only among the people most committed to raising plastic awareness through their own lives, but also can be considered among the theoreticians of the movement.  Captain Moore had to leave early but left us with a strong directive:  our statement must not be directed at progress, but at the transformation of our relationship to plastic:  “This is about the complete redesign of the entire system, not putting more trash cans on the beach.  Massaging the old paradigm won’t work.  We need a new language, new concepts..”–a new consciousness about plastic, which he rightly says is both a symptom and a symbol of the crisis of over-consumption, of the unsustainable nature of our culture.

This is how Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish describes Captain Moore’s position:

The plastic pollution problem is the visible manifestation of the crisis of our civilization. (There’s so much more that is invisible.) Progress is not what we’re after here. Everything has to be redesigned. We need a new paradigm that subtracts from the consumer lifestyle rather than adding to it. We’re after difference. The Great Refusal.

How did we get here? I remember reading a quote once attributed to, I believe, Harry S. Truman, who told our nation after World War II that it was patriotic to be a “consumer,” to “consume as though it were our religion.”  (If anyone knows the actual quote I’m referring to please comment.)  Why would he say this?  Because we had a huge production capacity that threatened to stand idle after production for the war ended.  Captain Moore reminded us that it was our considerable production capacity as a nation that created the manufacturing concept of planned obsolescence–and from there, the cultural concept of “waste saves time,” or “throw-away living.”  Context is everything, and whatever wisdom those concepts may have held when they were birthed make them a leading threat to all life on this planet in the context of today. Our hope is that by raising awareness of the seriousness of plastic pollution, we can tap into what people are already becoming instinctively aware of:  that we are collectively coming up against the physical limits of our consumption, the mental models this casual consumption represents, and the level of consciousness that accepts them.

Some of what we discussed:

• Only 5% of our plastic in the waste stream is recovered–that’s recovered; even less is recycled.
• Plastic isn’t really recycled, but downcycled (a term popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things), or turned into a lower grade plastic, meaning that a plastic milk bottle never ends up as another plastic milk bottle, at least not without another layer of virgin plastic.
• Plastic never biodegrades, it just breaks down into smaller pieces, mimicking food in the environment.  Photodegradation causes disintegration, not final biodegradation.  Further, bioplastics, which many of us have placed our hopes on, don’t break down in the marine environment.
• In other environments, volcanic lava melts over plastic debris and incorporates it, making plastic a new substrate.
• More people work in plastic and related industries than in any other single industry.
• It’s not just consumers that supply the glut of plastic debris; plastic pellets which serve as the raw material for consumer products (and which look like fish eggs in the ocean) escape en masse from factories and rail cars each time connections are made and broken.  Think of all the other ways plastics get into our environment.
• The density of the plastic in the North Pacific Gyre has doubled in the last ten years.  The North Pacific Gyre is only 1 of 5 in the world.
• Toxic chemicals from plastics register in dangerous quantities in the blood streams of humans and animals.
• We must leave the age of extraction, and fully enter the age of reuse.
• If people are given the tools to collaborate in order to transform their use of plastic, they will use them.

For those who say, “what about the discovery of plastic-eating microbes?,” we note that this is an important scientific discovery but, as the article in Mother Nature News says, it’s not a panacea or current workable solution, and while working fervently to make it a reality, we must not be seduced into inaction by possibility.

Future threads will discuss how NextNow Collaboratory can continue to support this movement as a community.  In the meanwhile:

PLEASE SHARE THE BELOW STATEMENT ISSUED BY THE STRATEGIC COUNCIL ON PLASTIC POLLUTION AS EXTENSIVELY AS YOU CAN.

Add your name to the bottom of the statement and be counted among those supporting it.

The press release follows this short clip of Wallace J. Nichols, who was present at the meeting, reading the statement.  (Those are his daughters opening the clip.)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

World Oceans Day Brings Warnings from Plastic Pollution Council

June 8, 2009, San Francisco, California

Following a presentation to Google employees by Captain Charles Moore, an oceanographer who pioneered the study of plastic debris, the Strategic Council on Plastic Pollution convened at the Google Campus in Mountain View, California on June 4, 2009. It was the first meeting for the council on plastic pollution, which was recently formed to raise awareness of this rising threat to the world’s oceans. Said council member and marine biologist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, “We are finding plastic in the stomachs of sea turtles, birds, and fish all over the world.  I find this extremely disturbing.” In honor of World Oceans Day, the council has issued the following statement regarding this increasingly urgent threat to wildlife and human health:

Do you know where our plastic goes?

Did you know that our oceans are filling up with plastic pollution?

Plastic fragments contaminate even the most remote locations on earth, and harmful chemicals leached by plastics are present in the bloodstream and tissues of almost every one of us.

Plastic pollution harms people, animals, and the environment.  Plastic is not biodegradable. In the marine environment, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller particles that absorb toxic chemicals, are ingested by wildlife, and enter the food chain that we depend on.

Consumption of throwaway plastics, such as bottles, containers, bags, and packaging, has spiraled out of control.

Recycling is not a sustainable solution. The reality is that most of our plastic waste is landfilled, downcycled or exported to other countries. And tragically, millions of tons of plastic are poisoning our oceans.

Businesses and governments need to take responsibility for new ways to design, recover and dispose of plastics.

Plastic pollution is the visible symbol of our global crisis of over-consumption.  Let’s pledge to shift our societies away from the disposable habits that poison our oceans and land, eliminate our consumption of throwaway plastics, and begin embracing a culture of sustainability.

Our health, our children, and the survival of future generations depend on us.

Captain Moore on Ocean Plastic Pollution:  “Synthetic Sea,” 2001:

NextNow Collaboratory and “Summer of Peace” Initiative: Attend “Cities of Peace” June 10

NextNow Collab is exploring collaboration with Summer of Peace, a 501(c)3 project of the Tides Foundation.  (I’m leading the collaboration with sponsor organization Global Coherence Initiative and part of the science team).  This is a comprehensive initiative that will start in San Francisco as the first city/first summer of peace in 2010, and Cities of Peace is the first event of several leading up to that summer.  It’s a free event with opportunity to make a voluntary contribution.  From the website:

Imagine… gathering the most inspirational peacemakers and the most effective peace-building programs from around the world to light up the San Francisco Bay Area for a celebratory summer that creates measurable reductions in crime and violence.

Imagine… whole cities making a commitment to peace that addresses the root causes of violence, harnesses the creativity of citizens, and strengthens cross-sector alliances.

Imagine… the passion of activism married with the pragmatism of science and the wisdom of spiritual practice, working in concert with proven educational and grassroots programs to create lasting change.

In the city that birthed the United Nations, helped launch the International Day of Peace, and was named for the peaceful St. Francis, we invite you to an important new event that addresses how the Bay Area can lead the way in reducing rates of violence in our nation. We’ll explore creating a movement in which citizens, non-profits, government and business can work together to create a powerful shift to a more creative and collaborative culture of peace.

Get involved in making the Bay Area a pioneer in peace-building and a shining
example of collaborative community!

Co-sponsors: The Peace Alliance, Urban Peace Movement, Change SF, Pathways to Peace, Institute of Noetic Sciences, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Global Coherence Initiative.

Host Committee: Josh Becker, Krishanti Dharmaraj, Urusa Fahim, James Hanusa, Dorka Keehn, Regina Kulik Scully, Avon Mattison, Bonny Meyer, Devaa Haley Mitchell, Lora O’Connor, Rachel Pfeffer, Adrienne Pon, Sudeep Motupalli Rao, Lateefah Simon, Maya Dillard Smith, Claudia Welss.

RSVP: The main public event is free, but you will need to RSVP in order to guarantee your seat. We expect a full house.  RSVP at www.sopjune.eventbrite.com Everyone who attends will be invited (and hopefully inspired!) to make a financial contribution but it is not required.

Brower Center Community Event: The Economics of Happiness

In an earlier post we announced that NextNow Collab is part of the Sustainable Enterprise Cluster at the new David Brower Center in Berkeley.

Part of the Brower Center’s mission is to foster community and collaboration including through the offering of informative and inspiring events on site.  On June 3 Helena Nordberg-Hodge will be presenting a free talk, screening and reception based on her new documentary film, “The Economics of Happiness.”  I know some of our NextNowers support the Dalai Lama Foundation’s Project Happiness (including Jim Schuyler, who is the their CTO–his latest blog post features the Study Guide for Ethics for the New Millenium).  Please come.

You can follow the schedule of upcoming programs here.

NextNow’s Zann Gill on Evolution, Sustainability, and Collaboration

Our own Zann Gill recently recorded this video preview of her book, What Daedalus Told Darwin:  Darwin’s Dilemma and Designing Intelligence.

Zann was exploring evolution as a way to help understand the creative process, and ultimately was led to flip her inquiry:  might an understanding of design help shed light on the process of evolution?  Asking this question instead eventually helped her build on the case that Darwinism may have misrepresented Darwin (by attributing to him an extreme view–that all evolutionary change was a product of “survival of the fittest,”–which he apparently never held), that socioeconomic paradigms can and sometimes do shape the interpretation of scientific findings (and not just vice versa), and that if we dare question the logic of “survival of the fittest” (and examine its relationship to the tragedy of the commons,) we may find that elevating the status of collaboration to equal competition is as natural as accepting the importance of a balance between left and right brains–and as critical to our survival.  My favorite phrase for this balance is Elisabet’s Sahtouris’ “negotiated self-interest,” which she coined more than ten years ago to describe the need for self-interest to be tempered by a recognition of and respect for the common interest.  As obvious as this idea seems today, as a society we have still not embraced it–evidence of this is everywhere–which is likely a reason why Zann wrote this book.

The following 10 minute clip captures key ideas from recent talks at Google, NASA Ames Research Center, Stanford University Media X & SRI Artificial Intelligence Center. More at http://zanngill.com and http://desyn.com; also, see the 48 minute video from her November 2009 presentation on the Google Tech Talks Channel (abstract included below).

Here’s a description of the talk she gave earlier this year at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University of Ireland:

WHAT DAEDALUS TOLD DARWIN
social nets, semantic webs & evolving systems

Researchers have analyzed how social networks operate, from small organizations to nations and networks of people connected by similar values and objectives. But insufficient attention has been paid to harnessing social networks for cross-disciplinary, collaborative problem-solving. 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of his publication of Origin of Species. The theory of evolution is seen by many as the greatest theoretical breakthrough of all time.

Zann Gill will introduce findings that call for a more complete interpretation of Darwin’s theory (Stephen Jay Gould thought “Darwinism” misrepresented Darwin) and argue that this more complete interpretation of Darwin’s theory would drive sustainable development and offer a model for seeding and evolving “innovation networks” to develop smart systems for eco-sustainability at the intersection of ICT and green tech.
Here’s the abstract from Google Tech Talk:

Google Tech Talks
November 20, 2008

ABSTRACT

Highly innovative organizations face a constant challenge to process a flood of good ideas, both generated by employees and submitted from outside. In the wake of Google’s Tenth Birthday Competition, this talk describes how innovation networks apply principles found in life’s origins and evolution to “processing innovation.” Debates about how novelty emerged in the origin of life and its evolution toward complexity demand revising assumptions that we’ve taken for granted. Steven Jay Gould said that “Darwinism” misrepresents Darwin.

A more complete interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution could inspire new problem-solving methods with a range of practical applications, from multi-agent systems able to learn and improve their performance to cross-disciplinary decision support systems designed to address environmental sustainability challenges. Objective. To discuss nine principles of innovation networks and the problem-solving method they support.

NextNow Collab Visualization Expert Bonnie DeVarco at Stanford Media X May 18, 2009

Bonnie DeVarco, co-founder of NextNowNetwork and the collaboratory’s visualization technology guru has worked with Dr. Katy Börner, Elisha F. Hardy and others to co-create an experience at Stanford that inspires cross-disciplinary discussion on how best to track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. The exhibit tour and discussion will be at Stanford’s Media X on May 18; the exhibit remains until December 31, 2009.

The Stanford Press Release and a description of Bonnie’s discussion follows.  Also see Bonnie’s blog, Scale Independent Thought, for her deep reflections on the topic.

Click to enlarge. Science Related Wikipedian Activity map featured in the Third Iteration of Places & Spaces by Bruce W. Herr II, Todd Holloway, Katy Börner, Elisha F. Hardy, Kevin Boyack (2007). Image courtesy www.abeautifulwww.com.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 8, 2009
Contact: Martha Russell, Associate Director, Media X at Stanford University: 650-723-1616.  martha.russell@stanford.edu

Art And Technology Of Science Visualizations Celebrated On May 18th At Wallenberg Hall By Media X At Stanford University

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA, May 8, 2009 — Media X at Stanford University is pleased to announce that the broadly praised international exhibition, Places & Spaces – Mapping Science, will be exhibited in Wallenberg Hall from April 20 to December 31, 2009 with a seminar, an opening reception, discussion and tour on Monday May 18th from 4 pm to 6:30 pm.

Places & Spaces highlights the rapidly growing genre of science maps based on large scale data sets. “The art, science and understanding of visualization technologies and their application have enabled new insights about complex issues to be shared with broad communities,” states Media X Executive Director Charles House.  “This new exhibit has turned Wallenberg Hall into a gallery setting that complements the world class visualization work on the Stanford campus in campus labs such as the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCI) and the Spatial History Project.” http://hci.stanford.edu/people/  http://spatialhistory.stanford.edu/

Curated by Dr. Katy Börner, director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University and her colleague, Elisha F. Hardy, Places & Spaces was created to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how best to track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale.  According to Börner “This exhibit introduces people to the power of maps to navigate physical spaces as well as abstract spaces of our collective scholarly knowledge.”

The exhibition has two components. The physical component allows close visual inspection through high-quality prints. The online counterpart at http://scimaps.org/ provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of why these maps work.

Each year 10 new maps are added, which will result in 100 maps total by 2014. Marking its fifth year traveling around the world, the 40 maps will be joined by the “Fifth Iteration” of the Places & Spaces exhibit. Media X at Stanford University is proud to sponsor and debut 10 new maps based on this year’s theme, “Science Maps for Science Policy Makers,” on May 18.

Media X will host a reception and tour of the Places & Spaces exhibition in Wallenberg Hall from 5 pm to 6:30 pm, immediately following a seminar on Visualization Convergence for Collective, Connective and Distributed Intelligence by Bonnie DeVarco, Media X Distinguished Visiting Scholar.  The seminar is part of the 2009 Media X Sun Microsystems Spring Seminar Series, http://mediax.stanford.edu/spring09_seminar_series.html.  Both the seminar and the reception are open to the Stanford academic community and the general public.

The reception will include a description by Stanford Computer Science Assistant Professor Jeffrey Heer of new visualization initiatives underway at Stanford, and his graduate students will present excerpts of their exciting new work in data visualization in a featured poster session.

Live teleconferences with Dr. Börner and several of the mapmakers themselves will introduce the new iteration, “Science Maps for Science Policy Makers.” The physical exhibit is open to the public Monday through Friday from 8:00 am until 8:00 pm. The full schedule of Media X Spring Seminars and workshops offered in the Summer Institute at Wallenberg Hall can be seen here:
http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/schedule.html

Relevant Web URLs:
•    Media X http://mediax.stanford.edu
•    Places & Spaces Exhibition http://www.scimaps.org

About Media X
Media X is a membership program of the HSTAR Institute – Human Sciences Technology Advanced Research – at Stanford University. Programs and activities of Media X bridge academic and industrial research at the intersection of people and information technologies. The Wallenberg Learning Center is the premiere international teaching facility on the Stanford campus. Housed in the Main Quad, it is equipped with multiple high-tech classrooms and lecture halls.

Directions to Wallenberg Hall: http://wallenberg.stanford.edu/top/location.html

Visualization Convergence for Collective, Connective, and Distributed  Intelligence
Bonnie DeVarco

Today’s leading edge information and  geographic visualization technologies are rapidly becoming  instruments for connective intelligence on the World Wide Web.  People can now easily travel around Earth and through space on their  computers and mobile devices with the ubiquitous tool Google Earth.  At the same time, new data visualization tools allow us  to travel through the patterns of shared knowledge and scholarship using new mapping methods that are both pragmatic and  illuminating.  Whether tracking and predicting epidemics,  making national policy decisions, or identifying emerging scientific  paradigms, these new maps and visualization methodologies are  effective tools for clear thinking and collective action.   Bonnie will survey the recent history of these tools, their networks  of users, and their current state-of-practice.  She will also  present and discuss new trends, showing how these technologies are  converging and amplifying their importance for global communication  and collaboration.

NextNow Collab Joins Sustainability Cluster in the New David Brower Center

NextNow Collaboratory adds a second office by joining the Sustainable Enterprise Cluster at the new David Brower Center, one of the Bay Area’s most advanced green buildings.  The building developers, Equity Community Builders, also developed San Francisco’s Thoreau Center for Sustainability.  Situated right across the street from the University of California, Berkeley, the DBC considers itself the region’s hub for environmental and social action.  It was conceived as a physical space that will foster collaboration among tenants and with the larger community, help catalyze a broader population in advocacy, and facilitate cross-sector communication and solutions. 

We’re thrilled to be part of this community that includes Earth Island Institute, The Center for Ecoliteracy, and The Redford Center, as well as several for-profit companies dedicated to facilitating the shift.

We went to the (sold out) Housewarming Benefit Party last night, and made a short film right before leaving when the crowd had thinned and it was possible to get a bit of a view of the interior.  My favorite parts are the courtyard, the atrium (which has great gallery space for which we’ve already submitted a proposal for a mapping science exhibit), and the Goldman Theatre.  There’s a slight lack of uniformity among the color of the theatre seats–a few different shades of red, which actually looks fantastic)–because the fabric is all recycled.

When you come to visit, put this in the category of “Don’t Miss” (and still “Coming Soon”):  Building Dashboard: Our interactive Building Dashboard will make the Brower Center’s energy consumption transparent by allowing the Center, our tenants and our visitors to monitor the building’s energy “vital signs” in real time right from this site. Check out our consumption right now, or look at consumption patterns over time. Compare our building’s usage with another monitored building. And get an in-depth look at the green design features that help reduce our impact on the planet.

Update and Save the Date: State of the World Forum in Washington D.C.

NextNow Collab is joined by Club of Budapest, CSR Wire, Earth Policy Institute, EnlightenNext, EthicalMarkets, Friends of the Earth, GaiaSoft, Integral Institute, New York Open Center, Ode Magazine, Pachamama Alliance, Presidential Climate Action Project, Resilient Cities Initiative and a growing host of others in partnering to convene the 2009 State of the World Forum.  This is the launch of a 10-year plan of committed action to transform our economy, our world, and ourselves in relation to each other and the natural world.  To register, visit the website; to explore collaboration, please contact me at cwelssatnextnowdotnet.  Watch for our announcement in the upcoming issue of NextNow Collab partner Imaging Notes:

This SWF announcement will appear in the upcoming issue of NextNow Collab partner Imaging Notes

The “Phoenix Economy,” State of the World Forum and Global Coherence Initiative

“A new economic order is rising from the ashes—and a new generation of innovators, entrepreneurs and investors is accelerating the changes essential for delivering scalable sustainable solutions to the world.”

The Phoenix Economy:  50 Pioneers in the Business of Social Innovation

Global Footprint Network has been named one of the “Phoenix 50,” a new list generated by Volans, an organization that describes itself as “part think-tank, part consultancy, park broker and part incubator.”  They are in the business of helping develop and scale social innovations to financial, social and environmental challenges.

They distinguish between four types of markets instead of the usual two we’re used to hearing about–Bull and Bear markets.  The Dragon characterizes markets like China, where social cohesion is just strong enough to keep the double-bottom line economic engine roaring, while the Phoenix is the kind of market we have to do more than hope we’re destined for–a market that “blurs across national borders and works to integrate the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental value added into its DNA—as a triple helix of change and new growth.”

From the website:  “From the ashes of the downturn, a new Phoenix Economy is self-assembling—focused on providing social and environmental solutions, where markets and governments have failed. If the pioneers of the Phoenix Economy are to succeed, they will still need substantial assistance from governments, foundations, investors and businesses, and we identify urgent opportunities for facilitation, collaboration and support.”

Volan’s Phoenix Economy report was supported by The Skoll Foundation, SustainAbility, NetImpact, and the United Nations Environment Programme.  It’s a market intelligence report of scale solutions leading into a Phoenix economy, and ends with a “Phoenix Agenda,” detailing how different sectors can help enable this paradigmatic shift.  The Phoenix 50 are organizations–for-profit, non-profit, and NGO’s–that are, in the authors’ opinions, among the best currently doing this work.  (Heartening to see the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley on the list, since I was there pioneering socially and environmentally responsible curriculum for corporations during most of the 90’s, when awareness of the need for this kind of work was quite low–except among the student body in the form of the self-organized Students for Responsible Business, which has since become NetImpact.)

The report quotes the same”everyone a changemaker” remark from Bill Drayton that I quoted in an earlier post on his presentation at the Tech Awards last year.  Drayton is convinced that we’re about to hit the “awareness tipping point” in which “the public at large will engage.”  This is one of the functions of collab partners like the 2009 State of the World Forum–to move the momentum towards a tipping point in which the public is not just aware, but is also motivated and empowered to act; that is, where a critical mass feels sufficiently networked into solutions capable of addressing the challenges we face in transforming ourselves and our societies.

One of the most interesting parts of the report is the “Pathways to Scale” model, which is described as 5 stages:

1. Eureka!, in which growing dysfunctions of the current order reveal emerging opportunities
2. Experiment:  trial-and-error responses to those opportunities
3. Enterprise:  building responsive business models that support new value creation
4. Ecosystem, in which critical mass is achieved through alliances and imitation
5. Economy:  the system transcends to a new equilibrium.

These stages remind me of what Belgian chemist and Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine said about a system in balance and functioning well.  Such a system is difficult to change, but as that system falls into disorder, change becomes more and more feasible and finally inevitable.  At that inevitable point the least bit of coherent order (or critical mass) can usher in a new higher form of order.  We are clearly at that inevitable point.  Now we need to facilitate the critical mass that will usher in a higher-functioning order out of the “ashes of the downturn.” Reports like the Phoenix Economy, and organizations such as those that comprise the Phoenix 50, are helping to get us there.  And for an example of an initiative working to create critical mass on the level of being to complement the doing, see the Global Coherence Initiative.

Read the full report, or watch for the second half of this post which will summarize remaining highlights.