Last week the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth drew to a raucous conclusion in the Cochabamba football stadium as more than 35,000 people from 140+ countries cheered the adoption of their own strategic plan to address climate change around the world. Bolivia's Cochabamba gathering was neither Social Forum nor an inter-governmental meeting but a marvelous mix of the two - bringing together official government delegations from 42 countries with social movements and civil society organizations from 100 more.

Today was "Reclaim Power" day, a collaborative adventure with activists from Climate Justice Now and Climate Justice Action that had been many months (years?) in the making.   There were demonstrators from the outside -- the thousands of activists who have no accreditation to get into the Bella Centre where the talks are being held, and those who had been working the process inside -- lobbying, analyzing, holding press conferences and such. The point was to hold a people's assembly on climate change when talks failed to deliver.   And they are failing to deliver big time.

I am still in the Bella Centre, still tracking technology negotiations.  That means I have a magical "secondary pass" unlike thousands of other NGOs who cannot get into the building today. Technology is supposed to be the "easy issue", on which there will possibly be an agreement, evoked by both the Danish Presidency and the UNFCCC head, Yvo de Boer, as the most rapidly progressing item.

So much has happened in the past three days it is has been impossible to blog.  We have been trying to lobby for precaution and assessment on technology, trying to talk to the press about our issues, attending side events, organizing our own workshops, meeting old and new friends and allies and basically working from early morning until late at night, like virtually everyone else here.

It is the mad dash for Copenhagen.

I am leaving Montreal for the international summit tomorrow although the conference actually got underway today.  In between urgent emails over the weekend I found the time to take my ten year old daughter and two of her friends to see A Christmas Carol, a Geordie Theatre production of the Dickens classic.   The play was great but it was hard to keep my mind off what was going on in Copenhagen -- plus Scrooge kept reminding me of Stephen Harper.

Written for The Ecologist - May 2009 - p89

Since we don’t have enough land for the renewable technologies we need - let’s go stratospheric instead, with a high-altitude solution… 


Written for The Ecologist - April 2009  - Page 87

Thirty-storey farms? The stated aim of the third green revolution to remove agriculture from the land is nothing short of colonial