Reflections on a vacation tinged by global governance

I rented a car this last week. I drove up to the annual meeting of the United Nations Association, then northwards to visit a friend in Princeton, then down to Liberty Mall in Philadelphia & the large Friends Meeting Library there; as well as taking in Annapolis & the Woodrow Wilson museum in Staunton.

So I had a lot of time to drive. I listened primarily to two books:
• Six Frigates, a history of the US Navy from 1787 to 1814 or so
(which was about how the US stopped the pirates of the Barbary Coast from bullying trade in the Mediterranean)
• Paris 1919, by Margaret McMillan, about the Versaille Treaty.
The Wilson museum, with it's handout of Wilson's Fourteen Points, turned out to be a good break from listening to the book.

What strikes me about the Paris 1919 conference is it's large scope-- the most powerful nations in the world-- the US, Britain, France and Italy (Italy?? Even then clearly the weakest of the four) holding court deciding the most important decisions-- • the boundaries of European countries, the Ottoman Empire, and even parts of East Asia & Africa
• German reparations & peace [surrender] treaty
• the League of Nations

The book is long-- 26 hours on 20 DVDs. The author tells us about Ruthenians, Moravians, and all the details of the boundaries of Europe. It seems boring and exhaustive in a way (and as of DVD 12, we haven't gotten to the Mideast and Palestine yet), but what strikes me is that THESE were the details of what was the predecessor to the League and UN. And they are amazingly complex and inter-connected.

And what occurred to me in the midst of driving is that the 1992 Earth Summit essentially was the post-Cold War peace conference. It's not that I never had that thought-- to the contrary, I had it in August 1989 and it was my motivation for being involved.

But I had never stopped to think about the Earth Summit as a successor, not just to the 1972 Stockholm conference, but also to
• the 1815 peace conference after Napolean was defeated
• the 1884 Berlin Conference in which Africa was divvied up
• the 1900 Conference in which China was divvied up
• the 1919 Conference
• the World War II summits of FDR, Churchill and Stalin
• the 1945 founding of the UN

But it IS-- and should be viewed in that light-- as an expression not just of what science demands, but in the light of realpolitik. Not because I enjoy that, but because those are real parameters.

Today I downloaded a number of papers on the concept of governance vs. government, and hope to read them tomorrow.

Guide to Nonviolence

Tentative translation of 1st three pages of draft of Guide to Nonviolence circulated in Egypt in Jan/Feb 2011.

Stages of Healing, from Judith Herman's Trauma & Recovery: the aftermath of violence, from domestic violence to political terror

Click on image to enlarge, for easier reading.
from http://books.google.com/books?id=3cn2R0KenN0C





















Is there an impulse towards health and healing in the human body politic, the same way the body heals after an injury?

Today is Blog Action Day

The theme is water; and I'm too crammed this week to write something deeply intelligent or detailed.

That said, this day itself-- a loosely coordinated effort to get a group of people all over the planet to blog
• on the same topic, of urgent concern
• on the same day

is an example of our growing convergence and ability to cooperate.
http://blogactionday.change.org

This year's topic? Water

Number of participants? 4,815 in 136 countries.
(with a combined readership of 37,594,285 Readers--
about half a percent [ 0.5%] of the world's population,
which is equal to about 9% of the world's college educated population)

Here's a first person account by the founder of how it happened:
http://northxeast.com/building-momentum-how-blog-action-day-got-going

"Today – October 15th, [2007] is the very first annual Blog Action Day. As the international dateline passes over the world, over fifteen thousand bloggers will be waking up to prepare and post about the environment on their blogs. Three months ago “Blog Action Day” did not even exist."

Transition Documents- A Short Review

Here's a short, partial braindump of a few influential Eco-Transition documents--
all of which lay out either
a vision of how to create a sustainable society, or
detail what it would entail
(describing the endpoint of the journey is not the same as a roadmap.
All but California Tomorrow are free & online in full.

Four Changes
by Gary Snyder, San Francisco, CA, August 17, 1969
Published in Mother Earth News in January 1970
& republished countless times in the underground press in the days of loose copyright.
Short Manifesto that which ends in a call for transformation, with guesses as to what might be strategy points. It is remembered by Worldchanging author Alex Steffen in his essay Four Freedoms, Four Changes and the Earth Charter.

Soft Energy Paths: The Road Not Taken
by Amory and Hunter Lovins
First published as "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" in Foreign Affairs, in October 1976.
Lays out two scenarios-- the Hard Path, in which we stress uranium-based nuclear power and fossil fuels until both are depleted; vs. the Soft Path, which ends up with none of those energy sources and stresses renewables, efficiency and smart design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_Lovins

California Tomorrow Plan
Driven by California visionary Alfred Heller, this 120 page booklet was conceived in 1969 and published in 1971. It starts with the present (Plan Zero- California in 1970) and lays out two futures: One, business as usual; and Two, a holistic eco-plan. It is hard not to think that this format heavily influenced Amory Lovins as he wrote his two scenarios in the early 70's.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3823569 Unfortunately behind an academic firewall, this seven page backgrounder shares the history of the Plan.
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt92903742

Blueprint for Survival
1972, UK
Printed as a special issue of Ecologist magazine, this went on to be a best-selling book (375,000 copies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Survival
http://www.theecologist.info/page34.html Full text

Transforming Our Industrial Society:Steps towards overcoming Unemployment, Poverty & Environmental Destruction
West German Green Party
September 1986
Passed at national convention, but never found much resonance among party or public. Was a rare public statement of eco-transformation in the eighties.
http://www.archive.org/details/UmbauDerIndustriegesellschaft untranslated German

Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment & Development
1987
Also known as the Brundtland Commission report, and sometimes as the UN Commission on Environment and Development, this report was commissioned by the UN in 1983, as fears of nuclear omnicide were at an all-time high. In light of those fears, it was little noticed when released [although Thomas Berry took note of it in his 1988 The Dream of the Earth] in March 1987, but became more noticed after the Dec. 1987 INF Nuclear Treaty and James Hansen's June 1988 Congressional Climate testimony. It helped inspire and lead into the June 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, aka "Earth Summit") in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The report is heavy on generalities and light on specifics, but nonetheless turned out to be the right report at the right time. Its definition of sustainable development--
"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
-- has now become a much cited viral meme.
http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-a2.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Common_Future

Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead
by Paul Raskin, et al
2002
Written by the a group associated with the Global Scenario Group, a think-tank that is a project of the Tellus Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute, this document sketches out three basic scenarios: Conventional, Barbarism & Great [eg. Green] Transition
http://www.gtinitiative.org/resources/gtessay.html Free 111 page PDF


Totnes (Ireland) Energy Descent Action Plan
2005
Written by students in Rob Hopkins' year-long permaculture design class as a class exercise, this vision of how one town might transform itself has helped to spark a worldwide movement (crucially assisted by Hopkins charismatic, upbeat community organizing & presentation skills via blog, Youtube and the Transition Handbook).
http://transitionculture.org/essential-info/pdf-downloads/kinsale-energy-descent-action-plan-2005

I welcome suggestions for other documents to include.
[Addition] The Art of Rapid Transition
2010
A series of five extraordinary events hosted by nef (new economics foundation) at the UK Hay Literary Festival in 2009. Dealing with peak oil, climate and economic collapse & looking back at Britain in World War II.

http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/The_Art_of_Rapid_Transition.pdf

Greening the Earth From Below

It is fascinating, and uplifting to see the emergence of a global loosely coordinated "compassionate intelligence from below"
that echoes Teilhard de Chardin's notion of a Noosphere- a global brain- through ostensibly one-shot events.

Here's a chart of the emergence of some (mostly) low-budget voluntary, decentralized world-changing events. Because many of the events do a loose global census, or have stopped counting on their website, these figure reflect early spring 2010.

1. Green Drinks
   Since 1989 in London (701 cities)
   http://www.greendrinks.org
2. ICLEI-affiliated cities
   Since 1990 (1107 cities)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICLEI
3. Critical Mass bikerides,
   Since 1992 in San Francisco (300 cities)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Mass
   
4. Pecha Kucha
   Since Tokyo in 2003 (316 cities)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_kucha
5. Awakening The Dreamer
   presented to perhaps 60,000 people by 2,200 facilitators since 2005 or so, San Francisco. [Added via suggestion]
   http://awakeningthedreamer.org
   
6. Transition Towns (AKA "Transition Movement")
   Since Jan 2006 in Totnes, UK (~300 cities, 60 in the US),
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns
7. Earth Hour
   Since March 2007 in Sydney, Australia (4000 cities)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_hour
8. TEDx
   Since Jan 2009 (353 cities)
   http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/344
9. Twestival
   ( 200 in Feb 2009; then 175 in Feb 2010) from London
   http://twestival.com/about-twestival-global-2010
10. 350 Day
    All on 10/24/2009, planned since spring 2008 from Burlington, VT. (5200 cities)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/350.org
11. Ignite
    Six continents, 60 Cities, 600 Talks so far , since 2006 in Seattle, WA
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite_%28event%29

Global Brain Reading List

References on the Global Brain
/ Superorganism

a collection of basic references, grouped by author, that
explore the idea of the emerging planetary organism and its global
brain, in the chronological order of first publication

Recommended by Ross Dawson in a comment in an essay on this topic.