A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com by corporations. 7. Cancel all illegitimate debts claimed from the South as a major step towards enabling countries to deal with the economic and climate crises. Meanwhile President Obama challenged all Americans to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day by making their own lives more energy efficient, demanding more and sending their stories to the White House. "It's clear change won't come from Washington alone, I want you to take action." he said in his video message, citing his efforts to create green jobs and a clean energy economy. Deliberative and fully inclusive processes are absolutely essential. Clearly future summits need to be far better organised. Confusion and poor communications were key factors in the failures. A way has to be found that puts poorer and endangered nations in a stronger position. This will eventually be forced on Northern countries. The UN needs to learn how to devise deliberative, democratic processes that are opaque and inclusive and enable all peoples to be properly heard and included in deciding ways forward that meet all needs. Large scale whole system processes that are needed have been used widely and successfully in large corporations and communities for years, especially in North America. They are being used lower down in the UN hierarchy. The time has come to practise them at Summits. Trust needs to be built between all participating nations. Trust broke down because of the undemocratic processes, such as major powers meeting behind closed doors from which poor nations were largely excluded. The North bringing pressure to bear on poorer nations with incentives to accept the accord had the same effect. In the long run “strong-arming” poor nations is counter-productive. Denmark and USA are denying Bolivia and Ecuador climate aid following the Summit. The US decision will cost Bolivia US$3 million and Ecuador $2.5 million. Such behaviour breeds deep, long lasting resentments that result in threats to the security of all of us. National leaders need to demonstrate complete integrity. If we are to survive as a species, national leaders need to move beyond bargaining and put the long-term well-being of the entire planet above short –term national interests. Foreign and economic policy must be transformed. The survival of human civilisation is at stake. We have a choice. Everyone deserves the basics of human life. We have the technology and the means to achieve this. It is a moral issue. Instead of stepping in, imposing Western solutions and making money out of development, local capacity needs building everywhere. “The Arab/Muslim world is getting angrier. Yet we put our money into making it worse. We need to take on the whole underlying foreign policy.” Clare Short. We are spending enormous resources on wars – wasting money and people that could be applied to much greater effect. “The more equitable the world is the greater our guarantee of security. The possibilities of progress and development are enormous but we don’t take inside our heads what this means. Development should be our central focus.” Clare Short. We cannot afford to disengage from politics. Historic change comes from mass popular movements. The poor are urbanising. This will give strength to popular movements. The internet is providing people with the ability to rapidly inform themselves and each other. They can access and share information that corporations prefer to hide and governments’ efforts to censor what they do not want their people to know. It is enabling people to communicate, rapidly organise and work together in protesting, campaigning and demanding reform. We have far greater power than ever before to force governments to act. 202
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com We cannot afford to just focus on our own lives and local actions. We have to engage and fight for what we want if we want to survive. There is growing impatience with old fashioned, adversarial politics that is superficial and focuses on short term, ill-considered knee-jerk reactions, encouraged by irresponsible media dependent on shock headlines. We are media driven when we need honest, informed, dialogue. That requires truthfulness and integrity. There is a yearning for consensus, inclusive deliberative processes and values based policies. Clare Short says her experience of politics is that “it is almost never about leaders –it is about bottom up. We are in deep trouble. Politics is paralysed – people are disillusioned. Demoralisation is paralysing us – it can and must be done. There is a lot going for us – urbanisation could create the mass pressure for change. Politics is going to come alive again. We have the common sense within us – the elite are out of touch. We each have to find our place in this.” Conclusion In prosperous developed countries, like ours, climate change and the global economic crisis may turn out to be a blessing, a “godsend”, if we see it so. It is curtailing our addictive consumption. We are, perforce, using and wasting less, less fossil fuel and other precious resources. The crisis may encourage us to take simpler pleasures that cost less, stay at home, make our homes and gardens nicer, and make do and mend. Recession may encourage us to live, buy, holiday and work local; and make better choices about when to shop local, when global and when in-between. It may also help us see the advantages of appropriate technology and when to use none, as Gandhi and Schumacher tried to teach us. . For more affluent people, the fall-out may be a blessing, clearing a space for them to start different enterprises and a different life that is more rewarding, more worthwhile. A clearing is often needed before something new can begin. The consequences for the rest of the world are already devastating. It is much harder for the poor, wherever they are. There are legions of highly skilled, good people who have been working hard, keeping their heads down to earn a living, unaware until now of the harm they were doing. They could instead provide the resources for creating a new order. Our much abused farmers and the so-called “poor” in “underdeveloped countries” can feed the world, if we support them instead of grinding them down for the sake of so-called cheap food that isn’t cheap at all. Perhaps, at last we will wake up to the fact that our enormous material prosperity has been at the expense of the vast majority. The poor have been left out, scarcely thought of. We eased our consciences through charities, whilst continuing our way of life, unwilling to take actions that would really make a difference. We turned a blind eye to what was going on overseas to provide our prosperity, unwilling to face inconvenient truths, including how our petrol and all those cheap products were provided at the expense of other human beings. Perhaps “the universe” is trying to teach us something. We need to be open to its message: to survive, all human beings have to work together, care about each other, respect and value difference, find our common humanity and common ground, stop being greedy, grabbing resources, stop murdering each other on a massive scale, describing mass murder as war, and stop being violent in word and deed. We have to respect all nature, of which we are a part, as sacred. Otherwise we are likely to destroy ourselves. I believe the universe provides us all with what we need, including what we need to learn to fulfill our higher selves. Action We urgently need to campaign for decisive outcomes at the next UN Summit. Talks in Bonn, April 2010, intended to firm up actions to implement the Copenhagen Accord, which many smaller and poorer nations refused to sign, completely failed. Hopes are not high for the forthcoming UN Summit, COP16, in Cancun, Mexico starting 29 November. The debt crisis is overshadowing everything. There is an impasse between the G20 and the poorer nations who have most to lose. We must put even more 203
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