Reflections on Cochabamba, Geoengineering, and Framing the Climate Crisis on the Road to Cancun…

The news this week from the climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany suggests that the world is on track for a catastrophic 4-degree increase in temperatures by 2100. (Four degrees Celsius in temperature rise renders our planet essentially unrecognizable and unlivable.) This is a frightening forecast for what’s in store on the road to COP 16, the next round of international climate negotiations slated for December 2010 in Cancun, Mexico.

But there is another road to Cancun, made by social movements who attended the historic Cochabamba Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April. The Cochabamba conference was convened by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen talks and the regressive agenda laid out by the United States and their allies in the so-called ‘Copenhagen Accord.’ (For my take on Copenhagen see the April/May issue of Left Turn Magazine). Cochabamba was an attempt to stake out another pole in the international climate discourse, led by Southern governments and social movements, that pins the responsibility for climate change directly on the over-consumptive northern countries and transnational corporations, and asserts the rights of Mother Earth.

From Copenhagen to Cochabamba

At the invitation of the Bolivia UN Mission in New York, I had the great honor of attending historic Cochabamba meeting, and accompanied the delegation of Grassroots Global Justice and the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN).

SmartMeme’s main piece of work at Cochabamba was to support IEN’s organizing around forest-offset schemes known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). Carbon offset schemes like REDD are opposed by peasant movements and Indigenous Peoples around the world on the grounds that these programs are designed to create a multi-billion dollar market for transnational corporations, while displacing forest-dependent communities and making no meaningful impact on slowing climate change. (For a great introduction to forest offset impacts in Brazil, see the new 20-minute film from Frontline, “The Carbon Hunters.”)

The REDD struggle is a critical front of the global Indigenous Peoples human rights struggle – this is ultimately a multi-billion dollar scheme to move Indigenous Peoples out of their traditional homelands and lease those forests to polluting industry to enable them to continue to pollute. At the heart, this is the struggle against the commodification of nature, and a struggle to assert that trees, air, and people’s homes and life ways cannot be traded in a marketplace to offset pollution.

Unlike Copenhagen, the Cochabamba conference elevated these kinds of concerns about the human rights impacts of both climate change and climate policy, and proposed strong negotiating positions (50% emission reduction under the Kyoto Protocol in the upcoming Cancun COP-16 talks, and targeting 1 – 1.5 degrees C of warming).

The good news is that the Cochabamba conference rejected REDDs and “market mechanisms that violate the rights of Indigenous Peoples, States, and Nature.” The conference adopted a Peoples’ Accord on the Rights of Mother Earth with strident, strong positions on the necessary actions to safeguard the future and build a just transition off of fossil fuels.

The bad news is Bonn, and that the United States has essentially committed to do nothing to fundamentally address the climate crisis in terms of transitioning off of fossil fuels. As we enter this next round of climate negotiations at COP 16 with the sunset on this edition of the Kyoto Protocol looming in 2012, now is the time for the climate justice movement to be rethinking our framing. We are losing critical ground while extreme proposals like geoengineering (i.e. planetary engineering) are gaining support using the narrative of government inaction and a quick fix.

Description Embeds Prescription

The Cochabamba conference was titled, “The World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth,” and this framing – The Rights of Mother Earth – was the most enticing and provocative aspect of this historic meeting for smartMeme. Indigenous Peoples and social movements gathered together under this banner, combining a rights-based frame with the affirmation of our sacred relationship with the planet, and the pan-Indigenous creed of respect for Mother Earth (or “Pachamama” in much of the Andes).

As we all know, global warming is happening at an alarming rate, and changes are inevitable. Weather patterns are changing, and countless ecosystems and communities are impacted directly – from the Arctic to Africa to the Amazon. Dramatic, comprehensive, collective action must be taken…the fight now is about What kind of action? Who decides? Who profits? And who pays?

From a framing perspective, how define the problem is inseparable from how we imagine the solution. As my colleague and design studio-mate Kenneth Bailey says, in a design process “description embeds prescription.” The way we cognitively pattern the problem determines what solutions are possible – and in the climate justice fight, this is at the heart of the battle for the story.

The Carbon Fundamentalist Narrative

To borrow a meme from my colleague (and smartMeme board member) Gopal Dayenenni at Movement Generation, the pervasive mindset in climate politics is steeped in “carbon fundamentalist” narrative. This story insists that the problem we are facing is merely a surplus of atmospheric carbon, and the way to deal with it is to effectively manage the amount of carbon being omitted, ideally by reduction, but if that proves politically infeasible, then through offsets. This problem-solution-action frame has given rise to the international carbon market – and the carbon-offset-industrial-complex. It also leads to obsession with charts, bright lines, and light bulbs, and the murky logic of techno-fix proposals that will magically save us without ever having to lift a finger to phase out fossil fuels.

An underlying assumption of this narrative is that carbon emissions are disconnected from place. This story says “We are in a global crisis, so pollution from a coal plant in Kentucky is the same as anywhere else, and carbon-eating trees in Brazil can make up for it.”

While the message that we have a surplus of carbon is not untrue, it is hardly meaningful for people, which limits its effectiveness on a narrative level. The carbon fundamentalist narrative is also inherently problematic as it focuses on emissions in the abstract, disconnected from the eco-systems, neighborhoods and nations where fossil fuels are mined and burned (most often poor communities and communities of color), and where offset projects displace people and disrupt communities (most often in the rural global South).

It also is carbon-blind – seeing all carbon as the same, weather it comes from Exxon-Mobil or a Brazilian farmer’s diesel tractor – which leads to policy solutions that are ahistorical and unjust, and do not address the roots of the problem: the fossil fuel industry. If we focus exclusively on carbon, we lose the focus on real places and real people, and on the real culprits.

This narrative is very dangerous, and is getting more so. As the international climate negotiations falter, and with four-degrees in the sightlines of Bonn, false-solutions and geoengineering mega-projects are gaining more and more traction.

The Urgency Frame & Geoengineering

The carbon-fundamentalist narrative has increasingly co-opted the “urgency frame.” As the crisis escalates and the window for meaningful action is closing, environmentalists and others are ringing the alarm bells ever louder. Campaigns like “TckTckTck” emphasize that time is running out, and frame around the lack of time and the severity of the crisis.

And there is no doubt, the situation is urgent. It is very urgent, especially in Alaska Native territories, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Tuvalu, or anywhere on the Gulf Coast. But what is of concern to me is that the urgency frame does nothing to explain the roots of the problem and is thus easily co-opted by any big, dramatic so-called “solution,” regardless if it is just, or even if it is a good idea.

The carbon fundamentalist narrative coupled with the urgency frame actually enables and promotes proposals like geoengineering, proposals that are gaining a lot of traction from philanthropists, venture-capitalists, and governments in the lead up to Cancun.

Now, what do we mean by “geoengineering”? Our friends at the ETC Group explain in their 2009 report “Retooling the Planet”:

Geoengineering is the intentional, large-scale intervention in the Earth’s oceans, soils and/or atmosphere, especially with the aim of combating climate change. Geoengineering can refer to a wide range of schemes, including: blasting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s rays; dumping iron particles in the oceans to nurture CO2 -absorbing plankton; firing silver iodide into clouds to produce rain; genetically-engineering crops so their foliage can better reflect sunlight.

University of Calgary physicist and geoengineering advocate, David Keith, describes geoengineering as “an expedient solution that uses additional technology to counteract unwanted effects without eliminating their root cause.” In other words, geoengineering uses new technologies to try to rectify the problems created by the use of old technologies, a classic techno-fix.

The Geoengineers in Bolivia and Beyond

In addition to 17,000 people from social movements across the world, a bold trio of geoengineering proponents from a company called CloudWorld.co.uk also attended the Cochabamba conference, hoping to gain support for their plan to release sulfates into the atmosphere above the Arctic. We had a heated conversation about how to best address the climate crisis.

Their logic was straightforward, and chillingly compelling:

The climate crisis is reaching a point-of-no return.

We must save the Arctic, or before warming sets off an irreversible feedback loop that will push the planet over the edge.

The only way to save the Arctic, and the world, is to shield the ice from the sun.

The way to do that is to mimic a volcano, clouding the atmosphere to shade the ice.

At this point, geoengineering has to be part of the program in order to avert humanitarian catastrophe.

Their story fits right into the urgency frame, is mired in the carbon fundamentalist narrative, and is nestled in the underlying assumptions of the dominant culture:

• Earth is a machine,
• The hubris that humans can fix the machine, and
• No one else will act and so a smart (white) man must go rogue and save the world (a la a Hollywood movie.)

But this is a disaster movie.

And the scary thing is – it’s not too far from reality. The ETC group reports that In March 2010, 175 geoengineers met at Asilomar California to establish “voluntary guidelines” for real world geoengineering experiments. The meeting was convened by a body associated with a private geoenginering company called Climos Inc who aims to carry out ocean fertilization trials. Other companies and groups in attendance made it clear that they also hoped to see real-world field trials in the near future.

And the field trials are happening. On May 8^th, the Times of London revealed that a company called Silver Lining – backed by the world’s richest man Bill Gates – would be conducting field trials for their “cloud bleaching” project in the Pacific Ocean.

The Times story begins:

“The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.”

That framing is revealing of the narrative equation that is starting to define the climate landscape: government inaction + urgency = geoengineering.

Hands Off Mother Earth!

Fortunately there weren’t too many takers for geoegineering in Cochabamba. I attended a fantastic side event by the ETC Group, which launched their new campaign called Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME). This new campaign calls on the UN for a worldwide ban on geoengineering, and reframes away from carbon, and towards the larger living system of Mother Earth, on which we all depend.

The Hands Off Mother Earth campaign features an interactive website where individuals can ‘lend a hand’ to the campaign, leaving messages and uploading images of themselves. The site features a public portrait gallery of individuals with open palms calling a halt to geoengineering.

“With rich governments and industrial interests jockeying for open-air geoengineering tests it is time to draw a line that should not be crossed.” affirmed Silvia Ribeiro of ETC Group, Mexico. “Mother Earth is our common home whose integrity should never be violated by geoengineering experimentation - it should never be a laboratory for these risky and unjust schemes.”

HOME is already achieving success! Due to the great work by ETC and their allies, a proposal for a geoengineering moratorium will go to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at its next meeting in Nagoya, Japan this October.

I hope you will join me and smartMeme in this campaign by adding your hand to the photo-gallery, and lending your support to grassroots movements for climate justice that are addressing the root causes of climate change and building solutions from the ground up.

From Broken Machine to Mother Earth

If we are to succeed in debunking and halting dangerous false-solutions like REDDs and stop geoengineering, we must also fundamentally shift the framing of the climate crisis – away from the idea that the planet is an overheating machine, and towards the assertion that we are all interdependent on the living systems of Mother Earth.

The Cochabamba conference has helped the world to hear this message, but while the relationship with “Mother Earth” has always been central for Indigenous Peoples, can the “Mother Earth” meme reach the hearts and minds of the rest of the U.S. public? Perhaps with 50+ days of the tragic BP oil spill, consciousness is shifting – but we’ve got a long road beyond Cancun to make the necessary fundamental changes in the fossil fuel economy and the US culture of cheap oil dependence.

As COP 16 approaches, we must continue to resist carbon-fundamentalism and offer a new narrative of Climate Justice that can inspire transformative social change and protect the rights of Mother Earth, while blowing open the assumption – especially here in the US — that there will be a quick techno-fix that can save our planet.

The challenge for Climate Justice leaders now is to tell a better story of ecological justice and the real solutions that can transition us off fossil fuels for good. From Cochabamba to Cancun and beyond, we must change the story from techno-fix to fundamental change, and build the peoples’ movement for Mother Earth.

A quick reflection on our 2009 convening on climate change, creative actions, social justice and the “Copenhagen Moment”…

I am so thrilled about the “Pause,” a restorative and rigorous retreat we convened last week. I am deeply grateful for all who attended, supported, and donated to make this event possible. It was truly a special occasion, gathering some amazing climate activists who are approaching the crisis from a justice perspective, and working to build movements at the intersections of ecology and social justice. We were also joined by our amazing video team (justinfrancese.com) and kitchen magicians (delicata catering). The beautiful Bluewater Farm in Andover, NH (traditional Pennacook Territory) was generously donated for this event. Check out pics…

The sessions involved narrative power analysis and discussions of the dominant frames on the climate crisis; climate justice principles; the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen later this year; and creative ideas for how to spread memes for climate justice.

We also had a celebration on Tuesday evening, and were blessed with local special guests from the Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions (dedicated to environmental justice, Abinaki indigenous rights and cultural practices), and local CSA organic farmer Katherine Darling, of Two Mountain Farm.

Fireside chats and formal sessions included discussions of the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburg, stories from past UNFCCC talks in Bali and Poznan, reflections on race and racism in the environmental field, and visioning for how to build an inclusive movement that addresses the root causes of the climate crisis.

As I write this blog, I am recalling this experience and simultanously struck by the stakes. Listening to this mornings news from the G8 Summit in Italy, I hear the voice of Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace USA:

“It’s almost diagnosing your child with cancer but not taking the kid to the doctor. It just doesn’t seem like good leadership, and I think people expect better of President Obama and other world leaders.”

Then, the sobering words of Ken Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution (?):

“I think it’s going to be very, very hard to avoid a catastrophe, so I think anyone who looks very seriously at this issue has to say that the future looks very, very sobering.”

Indeed.

The Road to Copenhagen is hot, long, and treacherous. But we make the road by walking…

Below is an excerpt of a report-back on the retreat by some of the participants…

Here is a report-back from a strategy retreat convened by smartMeme that I attended last week (called “The Pause”) to discuss climate justice issues & messaging. There were about 15 or so folks in attendance, all invited by smartMeme or other attendees. The folks who came were connected with various orgs with a major focus on either climate justice or environmental justice: Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative (EJCC), Indigenous Environmental Network, Action Mill, Avaaz.org Climate Action, Katrina to Copenhagen, Global Justice Ecology Project, Rainforest Action Network, The Ruckus Society, Movement Generation, DS4SI and Northeast Action.

The retreat intended to focus on how to do more effective framing and messaging around climate justice, following the smartMeme model of challenging underlying cultural assumptions (you can download their new manual for free at smartmeme.org). On the first day we heard some presentations about smartMeme’s messaging strategy and ‘narrative power analysis’ (see the manual for a more in-depth explanation of this), as well as some strategies that have been used by Action Mill and Design Studio for Social Intervention, a community organizing group in Boston. There were some brainstorming sessions to “get the creative juices flowing,” and some short presentations about Environmental Justice/Climate Justice principles, the COP-15 process, the Mobilization for Climate Justice and other organizing underway.

The second day the group wanted to get deeper into concerns of numerous people present on the watering down of the term “climate justice” and its conflation with climate action, which is not necessarily based in justice (carbon offsetting, for example)…

All in all, while the retreat was not exactly what I expected, it was the unexpected conversations that I found most valuable and thought-provoking. And the facilitators did an excellent job of being flexible and serving the many changing needs of the group. Oh, and I forgot to mention the food was AMAZING. Mainly, it was great just to connect with so many awesome folks, and be able to have some of the hard (but
so necessary) conversations around how to build a movement across boundaries of race, class, and culture. Only by hearing each other and working through this stuff will we ever stand a chance of building the sort of broad-based movement that actually has the power to bring about systemic changes…

I was so pleased to attend the 2009 national gathering of the Progressive Communicators Network (PCN), held in Chicago at the end of May. The conversations were rich, the connections were deep, and the insights were exquisite. What an amazing network!

Along with the great discussions (and party!), one of the highlights for me was the workshop on the story-based strategy model. We hadn’t done anything quite like this before. Patrick and I, with support from Anasa Troutman of the Movement Strategy Center, designed this session for this special group of skilled practitioners. It was such a wonderful challenge, and I felt myself growing into the moment. I was so humbled and honored to be in the space and share some of our “edge thinking.” And now you we can share it with you too!

Thanks to Nell Greenberg from Rainforest Action Network (who I recruited on-the-fly to shoot this low-fi video on our Flip Cam), the world can watch the workshop on smartmeme.blip.tv! Its about 45 minutes, and we go into some detail about the strategy model presented in RE:Imagining Change with examples to show each stage in the process….enjoy!

*You can download the slideshow from this presentation (its higher res than this video) at slideshare.net/smartmeme

* You can download the Story-based Strategy Campagin Model “Chart” handout HERE.

Pics from the workshop….

What PCN is all about:

PCN exists to strengthen and amplify the power, voices, and vision of grassroots movements that are working for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. Network members use communication strategy, framing and messaging, and media tools to: 1) enhance the influence of social change movements on public policy and opinion; and 2) realize a world without poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression. The Network is a project of Spirit in Action, a movement-building support organization located in western Massachusetts.

A thousand THANK YOUs to the Progressive Communicators Network for bringing this amazing group together!

MAKE A DONATION TO PCN TODAY!

Organizers and movement builders have always helped ordinary people realize their own power-–both individually and collectively––and supported them in taking action to make their communities better. Although the lead-from-behind nature of organizing is at odds with the way our celebrity-obsessed culture has constructed heroism, social justice work is full of unsung, everyday heroes. Telling the stories of this type of heroism can not only inspire others to action but can also help redefine what it means to be a hero.

It was in this spirit that I had the pleasure of attending a fascinating and unique conference this past weekend at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavorial Sciences in Palo Alto, California. The conference was convening by the newly formed Heroic Imagination Project and was bringing together experts in different fields to examine the issue of heroism and promoting moral courage.

It was a small but very eclectic gathering of social scientists (including one who had travelled all the way from Italy to attend), entrepreneurs, educators, media industry professionals (representing a gamut from start-ups to an editor from TIME magazine) and of course yours truly from the social justice sector. The common denominator among the participants was a willingness to see heroism as a meme in the culture which could be demystified and democratized to promote the concept of everyday heroes and broader action to promote the greater good. (“Sociocentric behavior” as I learned the psychologists like to call it).

The project is the brain child of Dr. Philip Zimbardo a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. Dr. Zimbardo is a world famous lecturer, best selling author of countless books and among the world’s most famous living social psychologists. His ground breaking work––including the controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment––helped laid the foundations of the field. He was also an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trials who challenged the U.S. government myth of “a few bad apples” and put the whole system on trial in his best selling book about the psychology of evil called The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil.

At the core of Dr. Zimbardo’s work is an examination of how, when and why people stand up to illegitimate authority. The Heroic Imagination Project is taking the research on the psychology of evil and flipping it around to ask how can we teach our children and shift our culture to be more heroic about resisting immoral behavior. You can see his talk on the subject at the TED conference.

Dr. Zimbardo reached out to SmartMeme and asked us to come share our work around building broader social movements and discuss how taking action for social change is heroic. Although its a different starting point for discussing social justice work than we normally use it was an intriguing lens. One key concept that emerged from my presentation was that we need to shift the definition of heroism from the current focus on individual action to one of collective action. How can our communities be heroic? How can we shift our culture to embrace a heroism that has moved beyond its often militaristic origins to incorporate broader types of collective action? (I learned that in Germany the traditional word for “hero” was so connected to the Nazis that post-WW II the term is no longer used.) What would it take to make the idea of a “peace hero” as well known and applauded as a “war hero”?

These are big questions and ones that organizers and social justice advocates are addressing all the time. It’s exciting to know that smart people in other fields are tackling the issue as well because in a era of runaway crisis––from climate destabilization to the pathologies of the financial system–––we’re going to need all the heroes we can get. Stay tuned to see if the Heroic Imagination Project and collaborators can expand the definition of heroism and push the new meme into popular culture.

Professor Zimbardo speaking at an anti-war rally in 2003.

The NY Times is reporting an interesting shift in the Democrat’s messaging around the economic crisis. Apparently “stimulus” is out and “recovery” is the new meme of choice. Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is quoted as saying “Stimulus is Washington talk and ‘economic recovery’ is how the American people think of it.” Nancy Pelosi apparently even clarified at a press conference that “We’re not using the word ‘stimulus’.”

It’s always worth paying attention to coordinated efforts to shift the framing of a critical issue but particularly in this case what does it mean? Will the Democrats start getting to the real roots of the problem or is it just new language for the same polices of denial and distraction?

The financial crisis provides us a unique opportunity to fundamentally change the way we conceptualize our economy and what makes an “economic recovery”. We are long overdue to recognize that the economy is merely a sub-system of an even more important and threatened system — the planet’s ecological operating system. Just as our economic system is sagging under the weight of toxic debt, our global environment is suffering from the debt industrialized nations have run up on the planet’s life sustaining natural systems. This uncalculated natural debt stems from the destruction of ecosystems, over-consumption by the wealthy, over extraction of limited resources and the dumping of massive amounts of pollution into the air, water and bodies of all living things. By continuing to ignore the true ecological foundation of our economy we are jeopardizing not only our economic well being but our entire global civilization.

Collectively, we must be very clear that whatever the Democrats mean by “economic recovery” it can not be the same-old, unfettered and indiscriminate “economic growth” that has created so many of our problems. It’s time to let our values and our common sense guide our economic policy. What do we want to grow? More billionaires or more organic vegetables? More strip malls selling disposable plastic crap or more just, resilient communities? More coal fired power plants or more local, renewable energy solutions? It’s time to change our thinking and change the story about what defines a healthy economy. Our movements need to demand that this economic recovery is part of a broader transformation of our economic system away from unlimited economic growth based on extraction, destruction and exploitation and towards a steady state economy based on ecological restoration, justice and equality.

There are lots of great resources out there for folks looking for the roots of this crisis and for real solutions. One of the best compilations has been put together by YES! magazine. You can also check out the new report from the Institute for Policy Studies Skewed Priorities: How the Bailouts Dwarf Other Crises which documents how that the U.S. and European governments are spending over 40 times on bailing out the financial system than they are on fighting global warming or poverty. Another resource is Break the Bailout an emerging “transpartisan coalition” that is challenging the massive taxpayer hand out to Wall Street and proposing alternatives.

Movements are the world are rising to the challenge of not only reframing the policy debates around the bail out of the financial industry but also questioning the underlying assumptions that are driving our current pathological economic system. At the recent G-20 meetings, hundreds of civil society organizations from around the planet produced a statement outlining an agenda to create an economic system that works for both people and planet. But this is just the beginning — there’s lots more work to do to make sure that the power of money works in the service of life. What are you doing to change the story around unlimited growth and create a more just, ecologically sane economy? Leave us a comment or drop us a line and let us know.