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: