Members of considerate society movements walk back and forth out of the U.N. league on global warming open at the Land of your birth Stadium in Warsaw, Poland on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski
The Tied Nations is looking for a young woman to, as BBC put it, be the 'Malala' of the harden change movement, dollop as a answer that will strengthen this September's harden change conference.
The cartel has put out a call for a woman under 30 to speak at the opening session of the 2014 Harden Ridge, which is being open on September 23 in New York City. The woman has to be from a nascent rule and could do with wolf a recording that includes advocacy on harden change or work on implementing harden mitigation or adaptation solutions. So far, the call for applicants has pale 544 women, who emailed concise videos of themselves persuading world leaders to act on harden change to the Secretary-General's division.
Organizers objective to find personality who can spasm the hearts and minds of people approximately the world as far away as Malala Yousafzai, a Pakastani schoolgirl who was triumph in the organize by the Taliban and has being become an advocate for women's custody to education, did for instance she addressed the UN in July 2013. But as the BBC record, the choice to maintain only women in the candidate pool possibly will mode some crusade. Susan Alzner, who works at the UN Non-Governmental Link Help and is the main person in through of the search, told the BBC that the suburb stems from the fact that women are smoothly the ones who withstand the maximum from harden change impacts.
"If you appraisal the grotesque challenges that still be on your feet for so many women across the world to go to see their custody to join in kingdom and how basic it is to show young women that they wolf this right, as a result we call for give the one unacceptable nick to speak to stuck-up than 100 heads of province to a young woman," Alzner whispered.
Disclose the world, women are smoothly the maximum broke members of society -- making up 70 percent of the world's poor -- which contributes to their weakness to harden change impacts. And when in many cultures women are the ones developed for detection sea, making cooking and securing life, they're the ones maximum ponderous for instance widely deficiency dries up sea necessities or unstable weather kills crops.
In accessory, as the UN states, "by comparison with men in poor countries, women personality ancient disadvantages, which maintain exact understanding to management and financial funds that multiplex the challenges of harden change." For spell, according to a 2011 UN FAO relate, only 10 to 20 percent of women existence in nascent countries wolf land custody, gang though they make up the association of small farmers worldwide.
Inhabit barriers to having their voices heard is what Alzner and the UN are aiming to cheep away at finished their suggestion of the keynote speaker.
"Perfectly combating harden change is leaving to occupy women's full empowerment everywhere," Alzner whispered. "It is central that we give women the breathing space to speak on this ashamed area office that is an existential chance to sensitivity."
The UN is overly hopeful to spasm the concentration of youth by selecting a speaker under 30. In not on time UN harden league, youth wolf been vocal on the need for world leaders to give shelter to harden change. In vogue the 2012 harden league in Doha, Qatar, the Arab Young people Harden Activity well-behaved and led the country's first-ever harden disapproval, which drew hundreds of protesters. And over and done with the 2009 harden league in Copenhagen, Christina Ora, a youth delegate from the Solomon Islands who was connecting the applicants for this year's keynote speaker, addressed negotiators, telling them to "stop negotiating away our return."
Appearance harden planning wolf otherwise garnered headlines in the U.S., first for the news that Beginning Obama will do the topmost in New York in September, and second for the news that the position is running on an international harden change promise, to be signed over and done with the Harden Restructure Natter in Paris in 2015. The do business, according to the New York Get older, would be "politically permanent" and would turn to "name and pity" countries into committing to emissions reductions.
The name 544 Inexperienced Women Poverty To Discussion The UN More or less The Quicken Of Harden Restructure appeared first on ThinkProgress.
By Paul Hawken, Orion Magazine
Posted on May 1, 2007, Printed on May 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51088/
I have given nearly one thousand talks about the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards. The people offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit and nongovernmental world, also known as civil society. They looked after rivers and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to safeguard nature and ensure justice.
After being on the road for a week or two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names, look at the logos, envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags, keepsakes of the journey. I couldn't throw them away.
Over the years the cards mounted into the thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags in my closet, I kept coming back to one question: did anyone know how many groups there were? At first, this was a matter of curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that something larger was afoot, a significant social movement that was eluding the radar of mainstream culture.
I began to count. I looked at government records for different countries and, using various methods to approximate the number of environmental and social justice groups from tax census data, I initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred thousand. I then researched past social movements to see if there were any equal in scale and scope, but I couldn't find anything.
The more I probed, the more I unearthed, and the numbers continued to climb. In trying to pick up a stone, I found the exposed tip of a geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes, and small databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas, but no set of data came close to describing the movement's breadth. Extrapolating from the records being accessed, I realized that the initial estimate of a hundred thousand organizations was off by at least a factor of ten. I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. Maybe two.
By conventional definition, this is not a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. You "join" movements, study tracts, and identify yourself with a group. You read the biography of the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tape or in person. Movements have followers, but this movement doesn't work that way. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no authority to check with.
I sought a name for it, but there isn't one.
Historically, social movements have arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps I was seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the conventional sense, is it a collective response to threat? Is it splintered for reasons that are innate to its purpose? Or is it simply disorganized? More questions followed. How does it function? How fast is it growing? How is it connected? Why is it largely ignored?
After spending years researching this phenomenon, including creating with my colleagues a global database of these organizations, I have come to these conclusions: this is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye.
What does meet the eye is compelling: tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
"Clayton Thomas-Muller speaks to a community gathering of the Cree nation about waste sites on their native land in Northern Alberta, toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space. Shi Lihong, founder of Wild China Films, makes documentaries with her husband on migrants displaced by construction of large dams. Rosalina Tuyuc Vel'asquez, a member of the Maya-Kaqchikel people, fights for full accountability for tens of thousands of people killed by death squads in Guatemala. Rodrigo Baggio retrieves discarded computers from New York, London, and Toronto and installs them in the favelas" of Brazil, where he and his staff teach computer skills to poor children. Biologist Janine Benyus speaks to twelve hundred executives at a business forum in Queensland about biologically inspired industrial development. Paul Sykes, a volunteer for the National Audubon Society, completes his fifty-second Christmas Bird Count in Little Creek, Virginia, joining fifty thousand other people who tally 70 million birds on one day. Sumita Dasgupta leads students, engineers, journalists, farmers, and Adivasis (tribal people) on a ten-day trek through Gujarat exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harvesting and catchment systems that bring life back to drought-prone areas of India. Silas Kpanan'Ayoung Siakor, who exposed links between the genocidal policies of former president Charles Taylor and illegal logging in Liberia, now creates certified, sustainable timber policies.
These eight, who may never meet and know one another, are part of a coalescence comprising hundreds of thousands of organizations with no center, codified beliefs, or charismatic leader. The movement grows and spreads in every city and country. Virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion is part of it, from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. It is comprised of families in India, students in Australia, farmers in France, the landless in Brazil, the "bananeras" of Honduras, the "poors" of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and poets.
The movement can't be divided because it is atomized -- small pieces loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and dissipates quickly. Many inside and out dismiss it as powerless, but it has been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through witnessing, informing, and massing.
The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures' resistance to globalization -- all of which are intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history.
There are research institutes, community development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations, corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations. They defend against corrupt politics and climate change, corporate predation and the death of the oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic poverty, industrial forestry and farming, depletion of soil and water.
Describing the breadth of the movement is like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn't mention the network of six thousand different women's groups in Africa planting trees. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, it is never mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture.
This is the first time in history that a large social movement is not bound together by an "ism." What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. This unnamed movement's big contribution is the absence of one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are processes, concerns, and compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side of humanity.
And it is impossible to pin down. Generalities are largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots; it has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic male vertebrate is not in charge. The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever, because that would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of fundamental understandings about the Earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people partaking of the planet's life-giving systems.
The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world.
There is fierceness here. There is no other explanation for the raw courage and heart seen over and again in the people who march, speak, create, resist, and build. It is the fierceness of what it means to know we are human and want to survive.
This movement is relentless and unafraid. It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. There can be no Berlin Wall moment, no treaty-signing, no morning to awaken when the superpowers agree to stand down. The movement will continue to take myriad forms. It will not rest. There will be no Marx, Alexander, or Kennedy. No book can explain it, no person can represent it, no words can encompass it, because the movement is the breathing, sentient testament of the living world.
And I believe it will prevail. I don't mean defeat, conquer, or cause harm to someone else. And I don't tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean the thinking that informs the movement's goal -- to create a just society conducive to life on Earth -- will reign. It will soon suffuse and permeate most institutions. But before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destruction.
Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.
" Paul Hawken is an entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this issue is adapted from Blessed Unrest, to be published by Viking Press and used by permission."
(c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All Rights Reserved.
View This Story Online At: http://www.alternet.org/story/51088/
About Paul Hawken
PAUL HAWKEN is the founder and executive director of Natural Capital Institute. He is author and co-author of six books including "The Next Economy, Growing a Business, The Ecology of Commerce" and, "Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution "with Amory Lovins. His latest book" Blessed Unrest" will be published in May 2007 by Viking. info@paulhawken.com
http://www.naturalcapital.org/index.htm
