Personal Experience Working with
Green Technology

by Samantha Simonnet, Director Cleantech

Read >>

Weapon of Mass Seduction

• The Social Venture Network
• The UN Commission on Sustainable Development
• Conference on American Spirit, Values and Power

Many of you know that I was recently in New York attending three great back-to-back conferences on sustainability (or related topic), including a UN session. Many also requested I give a synopsis of what I learned, so I will give the main points and try to be succinct.

The three conferences were:

1. the Social Ventures Network annual conference on Creating a Sustainable Future. They are a powerful group of people with their own successful public interest organizations

2. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development, meeting for the first time since the World Summit in Johannesburg. They met for a week and a half at the UN Building in NY; I attended the first week of this.

3. A conference on American Spirit, Values and Power, presented by the Open Center of NY.

First of all, I want to let you know how many times I heard speakers say, in one form or another--

"The bottom line is that it is much worse than it looks,and we don't even have a strategy yet to create the alternative, let alone have begun implementing it. This is in spite of the fact that we do have blueprints for viable alternatives to our current system and institutions. The top priority is all of us getting together to come up with our strategy, and collaborate in creating the change." Another way of saying this is that if we all continue to do what we are doing, we are guaranteed of ending up with the corporate/military state that we are rapidly heading towards.

Some of the featured presenters and their key points:

Robert Kennedy Jr. passionately told of the pathetic state of the rivers in the US and of his amazing Water Keepers initiative that is winning back the purity of the waters one river at a time.

Jerry Mander, president of the International Forum for Globalization, said that it is flat out a war between corporate profits and the common good, that the US is an empire in decline and is now desperate to take whatever resources it can before giving way it's dominance as the sole super power (like the Roman Empire in the final years).

Ralph Nader said people were giving up on themselves in resignation, not organizing or motivated to demand justice. "We must come together to align on cohesive agenda and policy."

He enumerated a six-point agenda for action:

1. Enable workers to own and control their own pension funds (the largest single source of funds in the world). It is invested now in many companies that have very low social responsibility records..

2. Reclaim the national public lands. It is now available to foreign companies for drilling, mining, etc.

3. Reclaim the public air waves. The media belong to the people, according to their charter's, but they are controlled by corporate advertisers.

4. Stop corporate subsidies. Corporations and the military continue their dominance of the national agenda helped by the tax money.

5. Stop corporate control of education. Corporate slanted news and ads are increasingly gaining access to students in exchange for funding of schools, where it should be coming from public funds, and free expression is being suppressed.

6. Public control of public works. Again, corporations tend to control them through the buyout of politicians with campaign contributions.

Bobby Muller said it most emphatically of all. Bobby is a disabled Vietnam vet who took a bullet in the spine, and knows personally the insanity of war. He has created his own veterans organization for peace, and has interacted at high levels ever since. He was screaming at us... "the Right has been planning their takeover for decades, and we're not even on the game board yet."

At the UN conference, everyone was clear that we already had an excellent agenda for what needs to happen globally and a good plan of implementation. The problem facing us is how to make governments accountable to what they have committed to at the Earth Summit in Rio ('92), at the Millenium Summit (2000), and again at the World Summit in Johannesburg last year. The US, of course, remains by far the single largest "rogue nation," refusing to agree to most of the major treaties concerned with sustainability: The Biodiversity Convention, the Kyoto Protocol (global warming), the Intl. Criminal Court, the Landmine Treaty, the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, the Agreement on Children's Rights. It seems hard to imagine how we could have any worse of a record!

Overall, I learned many things, confirmed many things, and made excellent contacts. It's clear that we have a long way to go, that we need to be concerned with the long-term, working patiently and persistently to create the world we know is possible, where every human and living thing is respected and given what they need to flourish. Hope to see you at the gathering this weekend.

In Peace,

Vinit