Bioneers 2010: Million Kid March For Climate Action Announced

Alec Loorz, founder of Kids vs. Global Warming, began his career as a climate change activist when he was 12 years old. You read that right, 12! That’s when he saw Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” that “changed his life forever.” He became so moved that he has been speaking truth to power, organizing and empowering youth, and speaking to large audiences ever since. He’s now a junior in high school and a winner of a Brower Youth Award.

At Bioneers 2010 last weekend Loorz announced the iMatter March planned for Mother’s Day, May 8, 2011. He called it a “million kid march” for climate and energy action.  He is calling on youth and supporters from all around the nation to organize and turn out on Mother’s Day to raise awareness about climate destabilization, our relationship with the biosphere, and to call for strong action on energy.  Loorz understands that it is his generation that will have to live with the decisions made by today’s so-called leaders.

Alec believes that “youth have a unique sense of moral authority on this issue. It’s our planet now. And we are going to have to grow up and face the consequences of what the world does, or fails to do.”

If you haven’t had a chance to hear Alex Loorz speak, do yourself a favor and watch the TED talk video below. Loorz is a powerhouse of youthful exuberance and a born leader. It’s hard not to get pumped up by Loorz’s talk of revolution and a new way of living.

Next month iMatter will be launching a global map for organizers to register their actions and providing tools for leaders to turn their marches into reality.  You can also get the iMatter app to help connect youth from around the world to one another and coordinate actions.

Follow me at @vanlenning.

Bioneers 2010: Dispatch from an Earth Community Movement

Once again, the 3-day Bioneers mother-ship has landed and departed, and a thousand pods of social and environmental change have dispersed across the globe, refreshed and re-energized.  Or to use the less technological metaphor by Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute,

“This is kind of a seasonal migration ceremony, Bioneers.  If we were migrating birds, this would be our staging ground, where we come and talk about what we have hatched this year and what breeding was like.”

The Bioneers Conference, hosted in San Rafael, CA on what is the ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok, is a leading-edge forum presenting breakthrough solutions for people and planet.  Over its twenty-one years Bioneers has become a global community of some of the most dedicated, passionate, and creative thinkers and leaders facilitating a wiser way forward for the earth community.

Farmers, students, social justice workers, scientists, artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, indigenous leaders, environmental activists, peacemakers, and a motley assortment of engaged citizens come together to learn, network, and re-energize their efforts in creating a just and resilient world.  The topics discussed range from organic farming, green chemistry, and women in the media to cross-cultural education, traditional indigenous knowledge, and local democracy.

The experience is as intellectually stimulating as it is personally transformational. Over the next few days I will be discussing some of the most visionary and exciting projects, ideas, and people at Bioneers, including the Million Kid March, the new shift in environmental and community protection using a rights-of-nature framework that is taking root across the world, the Dreaming New Mexico local foodshed & fair trade work, the One World Youth Project that is creating a new paradigm for cross-cultural education, new models of clean energy, the transformation of urban landscapes and the work of Andy Lipkus and the TreePeople, Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots programs in 120 countries, the heroic ethnographic work of Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, the first female fellow of the National Geographic Society, and the move to amend the constitution to limit corporate person-hood and restore free speech for people alone.

Here I want to highlight what I take to be some of its core themes and messages and hopefully in the process capture some of the spirit of Bioneers.

1) Urgency of Action: All the signals from the biosphere and indicators from our body and economy are in: the time is past due for massive shifts in how we do things.

“This moment beckons us all to think big,” said Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons. “To match all we are each capable of with the needs of a planet” in peril.

Another panelist, Ami Marcus from Mt. Shasta, whose community is fighting corporate raiding of their water and manipulation of their weather, said, “It is not enough to feel it here,” she said, pointing to her heart, “we must codify it in our structures on the ground.”

And that takes the hard work of speaking out, organizing, speaking face to face with our neighbors about the issues, of challenging the status quo, saying yes to things not yet born but are in our imaginations, not accepting no, and of not waiting on leaders to come.  It means scaling up the work we are doing already. It means moving beyond bumper sticker activism and clicktivism.

Bioneers co-founder Kenny Ausubel invoked Winston Churchill: “It’s no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

The Four Years. Go campaign was presented, a global effort to awaken the best of our collective awareness and action.  It is based on the premise that what we do or don’t do in the very short term will effect generations to come and that we have the solutions at hand, but we need all hands on deck.  The mission is to empower “individuals and organizations to set and reach goals that will cause a positive global tipping point by 2014, setting humanity on a new path toward a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and spiritually fulfilling future.”  As the video suggests, it is not a new organization, it represents goals for every organization.

Connect with Four Years. Go on Facebook and on Twitter.

We are urged to plug-in, co-create, and act with fierce determination. We are the leaders. As one speaker urged, “Whatever you do, wherever you are, find a way to be ever more involved.”

10/10/10 Global Work Party Oakland Style: Food Justice Bike Tour!

Just a reminder about the Food Justice/Urban Ag Bike Tour for 10/10/10.  Its HELLA grassroots and free, fun, and for-surely-inspiring!  I hope many of you can make it.  Please spread the word, facebook, personal invites to friends you want there, etc.  Start out with a bike ride in the morning, then head over to the Laney College party organized by Bay Localize, Ella Baker, Oakland Climate Action Coalition, and Communi-tree.

For those who aren’t too tired out after the work-parties, bike rides, and concerts, some of us will also be hosting another “Radical Film Night” at the Newton House (285 Newton Ave., starting around 6:30) where we will be showing the film “Gashole” or a series of film shorts highlighting innovative alternative sustainable economic enterprises.

Here are the details:

Join Planting Justice, Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, People’s Grocery, Phat Beets, and other community organizations on a Food Justice Bike Tour on October 10 as part of 350.org’s Global Work Party to highlight innovative local urban agriculture and food justice initiatives while burning fat, not oil.

We will start at Planting Justice’s rooftop garden in Temescal (5252 Claremont Ave., next to DMV) and from there we will visit inspiring sites in West and North Oakland, including a worker-owned food coop, community gardens, a greywater project (possibly), a greenhouse, and other sites that demonstrate local sustainable food projects.

5 Reasons Why Californians Must Crush Prop 23

The showdown for a clean energy and clean air future is here and we should be jolted. In November we all have to come out in force and vote no on the Dirty Energy Proposition 23. And we must not just beat Prop 23, we must pulverize it like the dust beneath our feet.

Here are the 5 top reasons why Californians must crush Prop. 23.

Read my full Op-ed on HuffingtonPost.

Proposition 23 Opponents: Climate Change Impacts National Security

Some heavy-weights across the political spectrum are weighing in against Prop. 23 as a threat to national security.  Imagine if we treated issues of food policy, health care, job creation, housing, flood recovery, etc. as the national security issues that they are? Do you think then they would finally get the urgency they deserve?

Check out this post from Streetsblog San Francisco:

Streetsblog San Francisco » Proposition 23 Opponents: Climate Change Impacts National Security.

“When I say Chevron, you say, ‘Clean up!’, When I say BP, you say, ‘Pay up!’”

On August 30, a couple hundred people snaked through downtown San Francisco to confront Big Oil and demand accountability for the damage they have done to impacted communities worldwide. It marked the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It was also the largest non-violent direct action since the BP oil disaster.

After a die-in on a mock oil spill in front of Chevron’s offices with Rev. Davis from the Richmond community (site of Chevron’s refinery) reminding us that “liars, crooks, and killers also come in three-piece suits,” we visited the EPA to demand the comprehensive enforcement of the Clean Air Act, which gives the agency authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.  The crowd then marched to BP’s offices at Mission St. and New Montgomery, where citizens presented an open letter to the CEOs of all the major oil companies.  Activists from a coalition organized by Mobilization for Climate Justice West blockaded the doors while others claimed the intersection with a giant parachute.  Engaged citizens rallied on each of the four corners to lend their support.

I was among 15 people ultimately arrested and taken to a holding cell for little over an hour, cited, and released.  I explained why I was willing to engage in a non-violent direct action in a previous post on Ecolocalizer. For many it was the first time being arrested in a non-violent direct action. As Lauren Thorpe, an activist with Greenpeace, explained,

“Monday’s action is particularly significant for me because I have come to the point in my life where I am willing to risk arrest for my beliefs. I believe the time has come for action beyond words to really show my commitment to stopping the status quo of our unsustainable, unhealthy and unfair fossil fuel-based economy. I won’t be alone on Monday either — I’ll be standing side by side with fellow activists, some whom have been risking arrest for decades and some of who are new to it just like me. As I start to mentally prepare for Monday, I remember the rich history of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience that has significantly changed both politics and public opinion on some of the most pressing issues of our times.”

In addition to learning some great new chants and making new friends, Monday’s action was a strong signal that the climate justice and clean energy movement is alive and well.  After a year of Senate non-action on a climate and energy bill, record temperatures, and environmental disasters ranging from Michigan, West Virginia, and the Gulf in the United States to Pakistan and Russia, it is clear that the environmental movement is transforming itself and awareness and action is growing stronger by the day.

We can gain additional wind in our sails this week from the strongly intoned voices of a handful of kick-ass environmental leaders.  Bill McKibben of 350, Philip Radford of Greenpeace, and Rebecca Tarbotton of Rainforest Action Network sounded the clarion call for stepping up our actions, saying, “Time is not on our side, so we’ve concluded that going forward mass direct action must play a bigger role in this movement, as it eventually did in the suffrage movement, the civil-rights movement, and the fight against corporate globalization.”

And environmental activist Tim DeChristopher issued his own stirring call for mass mobilizations. Known as Peaceful Bidder #70, DeChristopher is famous for disrupting an auction in 2008 by bidding for oil and gas leases on parcels of federal land despite having no money to pay for them.

DeChristopher writes,

“The more I advocate for stronger and bolder action from climate activists, the more I see the need for real human connections.  No amount of social media can match the empowerment of being in the streets with thousands of other people who share our passion.  That’s why mass mobilizations that engage in bold action are so important for our movement…The strategy of appeasement and compromise has thoroughly failed, and the discouragement of the climate movement is undeniable.  For years we have been told to kneel and beg, and it has left us empty-handed. Now it’s time to stand up and fight for our right to a healthy and just world.  Obedience to injustice is the ruin of the soul, and our movement desperately needs some rejuvenating disobedience.”

After several postponements, DeChristopher’s trial (dubbed the “Climate trial”) has been set for December 13. A mass convergence is planned in Salt Lake City to support DeChristopher and to elevate awareness and action on climate and energy policies.

Indeed, more mobilizations are on the horizon. In a couple weeks, Appalachia Rising is organizing an national response against mountain top removal coal mining.  October 10 (10/10/10) is an International Day of Action, organized by 350.org and thousands of communities around the world to demonstrate local solutions to climate change. And the Climate Summit in Cancun (COP16) kicks-off on November 29, with mass mobilizations planned.  Indigenous delegates will also bring the message of the People’s Declaration from the Bolivia’s climate summit.

Back to the intersection of Mission and New Montgomery: one of the most moving moments for me was sitting in the intersection, being present with so many other concerned and engaged citizens.  From one side I heard the police give their final warning to disperse and from the other side I heard the powerful testimony of people from impacted communities and poems about mother earth.

One side had a bullhorn, money, and the force of law; the other side had the truth and the moral voice of people defending a livable future through empowering nonviolent action.

One spoke more clearly and with more authority than the other.  And it will only continue to get louder.

More photos of the day’s events can be found Rainforest Action Network’s Flickr page.