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Bush Gets Dinner While Protesters Fast

Bush Gets Dinner While Protesters Fast
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 26 September 2007

More than 80 heads of state met at the UN on Monday to discuss the launch of post-Kyoto climate negotiations. Although this was the most high-level UN meeting yet held on the global climate emergency, President Bush refused to attend. He did, however, assent to an invitation from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to attend a private dinner afterward.

Ban opened the UN meeting by showing a short film about the rising seas, more intense storms, and droughts that will result from global warming. The film warned there is no time to waste in crafting solutions. But President Bush did not see the film nor contribute to the discussion. He would only agree to dinner.

Ironically, who eats and who does not eat is very much what the climate crisis is about. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict global warming is likely to cut African crop production by half in the next dozen years.

On Tuesday, film stars and celebrities from Bollywood and Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry) rallied near the UN with a "Mayday Message" on behalf of Africans and Asians. They said: "Please help save us from climate change. We are the ones who have done the least to cause it, but we are suffering from climate change now. If you don't come to our help today, tomorrow it will be all of you."

Bollywood actress Shabana Azmi said, "There are 854 million hungry people in the world today - 54 million more than when the world leaders pledged to halve hunger 11 years ago." As global warming saps food production in poor countries around the world, the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 recedes into impossibility.

While Bush was eating his dinner with Ban ki-Moon, a half-dozen American climate change activists continued a weeks-long fast to protest American inaction on climate, "so that others might eat." The fast began with participation from more than 1,200 people on September 4, the day Congress came back in session.

"The starting date was deliberate," said Ted Glick, one of the ongoing fasters and an activist with the Climate Emergency Council. "Congress needs to act," he said, despite veto threats from the White House. Feeling physically weak from his fast, Glick made the effort to go to Capitol Hill last Friday to talk to key legislators about climate change and energy bills before Congress. "The main thing I learned," he said, "is that the chances of climate legislation even getting to the floor of one of the houses of Congress this fall don't look good right now. Barring either a major climate disaster in the US or what this fast is calling for, a grassroots political uprising, which galvanizes our elected officials into an urgency mode, the odds look good that the best we can hope for is floor debate sometime in the winter of 2008."

Glick and others are doing their best to organize the grassroots revolution. On Thursday, Glick will join a non-violent civil blockade of the second climate meeting this week, President Bush's "Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change," also known as the "Major Emitters Meeting." This is the meeting Bush announced at the G-8 summit in June when he blocked the G-8 from adopting binding emissions targets. This is the meeting where Bush will try to steer the world away from any mandates or caps on emissions and substitute vague "aspirations" for clear goals, and voluntary action for legal obligations.

To Africans facing famine in the next dozen years, will Bush say, "Let them eat aspirations"?

It is the moral dimension of global warming that keeps Glick committed to his fast. He says the deaths of 35,000 people in the European heat wave of 2003 are what first made him realize he had to put body and soul into this effort. "We only have one life," he said. "What will we do with it?"

Glick describes fasting as a form of prayer and says that religious people of all stripes have joined in the climate fast at various times. A Muslim man fasted in addition to his Ramadan fast, and 39 members of a church in Montana fasted. But Glick does not want to limit climate action to fasting and passive resistance. He also calls for more "ruckus."

"We need more people out in the streets," said Glick. "A Tiananmen Square-type action down in front of Congress would be timely and called for."

In August, climate activists camped out at Heathrow Airport in London to protest aviation's contribution to climate change; and, earlier this month, Australian activists locked down a coal-fired power plant and then a facility loading coal onto ships at the world's biggest coal export port. They were trying to send a message to the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) discussions on climate, another meeting where Bush's "aspirational" climate goals prevailed.

In addition to the civil resistance planned on Thursday, the Climate Emergency Council is holding a rally protesting Bush's "Major Emitters Meeting" at noon on Friday, September 28 near the State Department building where the meeting is being held.

On October 22, peace, justice and climate activists are sponsoring a "No War No Warming intervention" in Washington to pressure the government to stop the war in Iraq, shift funding to rebuild communities, and go green with new jobs in a clean energy economy.

On November 3, Step It Up 2007 is organizing coast to coast actions to demand leadership on global warming. Part of the action is to invite politicians to join the rallies and tell communities what they will do about climate change. Then, says the group's web site, "We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time. One year before the election, let's make sure the world witnesses our national call to action."

Glick endorses all these actions and more. "When you have everything from letter writing to riskier actions that push the envelope, you have a powerful movement that can't be ignored."

A powerful movement to save the planet would certainly be worth missing a few meals for.

"The 11th Hour" and Generation Z

"The 11th Hour" and Generation Z
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Friday 14 September 2007

Reportedly, Leonardo DiCaprio's documentary film, "The 11th Hour," has yet to take the box office by storm. That is a shame because it is a valuable film and everyone who can get to a theater should go and see it. However, it is not terribly surprising that it hasn't really caught on yet, because despite its cliffhanger title, it lacks the kind of dramatic tension that pulls people into theaters. Even Al Gore's slide show had more grab, because Gore himself is such a story - the leader cheated of his victory, come back as a prophet of the age.

But "The 11th Hour" is only one slice of a complete story. It is a parade of talking heads set in a swirling background of Koyaanisqatsi-like images of planetary beauty and destruction. Co-director Nadia Conners calls it "an experience." The images evoke various moods: horror, sublime reverence, fear, love and longing. The speakers voice words of wisdom and profound insight into the science and psychology behind our predicament. Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel defines the quest at the beginning: It is to understand how the two most complex systems on earth - nature and the human mind - can coexist.

If "The 11th Hour" is not a complete story, it is deliberate, because the intent is to involve and motivate the viewer as an actor in the ultimate story - a story to be written by the current generation. Throughout the film, DiCaprio as narrator returns to the idea that his generation will be the "pivotal generation" that "will heal industrial civilization."

Joseph Campbell, in his explorations of the power of story and myth, often referred to "Star Wars" as the archetypal myth for our times. If that is so, then "The 11th Hour" is that piece of the story where Luke Skywalker encounters Obi Wan Kenobi and learns from him how to fight the Empire. If Luke Skywalker represents DiCaprio and his generation, then the more than 70 scientists, historians and thinkers interviewed in "The 11th Hour," ranging from physicist Stephen Hawking to Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, are a collective embodiment of the wise Jedi swordmaster.

Collectively, the words of these thinkers and activists paint the big picture of our predicament, illuminating the physical, mental and emotional destruction we experience as the planet suffers from our industrial civilization and our overwhelming numbers. We also find illustrations of how elusive the big picture is for so many of us. Wangari Mathaai, the Kenyan tree planter, says: "I keep telling people: 'let us not destroy forested mountains. Rains will become irregular. Crops will fail, and you will die of starvation.' The problem is people don't make these linkages."

Seeing the big picture is the definition of wisdom, and the film delivers buckets of it. Whether "The 11th Hour" also delivers the motivation needed to complete the story is another question.

Skywalker already had his motivation when he came to Kenobi. "The 11th Hour" offers hope and realistic solutions for those motivated to take action, but the challenge of providing motivation is perhaps the least understood aspect of the story of our survival on this planet. The film ends with Leonardo's exhortation to his generation to take up the task of healing industrial civilization, as the camera speeds over wild landscapes seething with boiling clouds and frothing waves, and the music builds in a slamming crescendo to one final bam! that seems meant to propel you out of your seat and into action.

To me, one of the most motivational snippets from the film is where eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken talks about the more than one million environmental and humanitarian groups working in the world today, followed by this statement from designer Bruce Mau: "It is almost as if we had distributed an ambition without ever having written it down so people all over the world knew what they ought to be working on knowing they only had one pixel in a mosaic of the image of a sustainable future."

The idea of being a pixel in the larger collective vision is appealing. And as more people join to create the vision, more will be motivated to join.

One example of how this is happening is that DiCaprio's film is not unique. A few weeks ago, I received a review copy of a new film called "What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire," by VisionQuest Pictures. This film carries an endorsement from Daniel Quinn, author of the prophetic eco-novel, "Ishmael": "The two hours of the documentary are two hours that bring hope for the future of humanity by awakening and informing in the most profound yet lucid way imaginable."

This more low-budget approach covers much of the same ground as DiCaprio's film, including a few of the same interviewees, Richard Heinberg, Jerry Mander and Stuart Pimm. "What a Way to Go" probes more deeply into human history for the source of the problem, tracing it back to the beginnings of agriculture instead of just the Industrial Revolution. But to me, the most valuable aspect of this film is the personal and generational analysis.

The film is written, directed and narrated by a regular guy, a Midwestern Everyman named Tim Bennett. It opens with the voices of young people, talking about the future. A young man says: "My generation may be one of the first generations where a lot of us don't die of old age, because a lot of us might not make it there.... "

The film is beautifully written and intimate, starting off with home movies from Bennett's childhood in the early 1960s. "I was raised on stories," he says, acknowledging the security of his world in rural Michigan steeped in the old-fashioned values of God and country, hard work and family. But as he grew, he came to realize that the story of progress he was raised on was a fast train to nowhere.

"I was born facing forward and looking upward," he says, "but the slope ahead was the result of short-sightedness and imbalance." We see a chart, the graph of population growth, with Tim's birthdate marked at the inflection point in 1958, where the curve begins to shoot rapidly upward. "I was born halfway up the population explosion, in the foothills of mass extinction and on the slope of rising CO2 levels." Being close to the same age as Tim Bennett, I can relate to his sense of his place in the dynamic of our times . As the film goes on, covering the basics of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Peak Oil, Population Growth, Global Warming and Mass Extinction - it asks why we don't wake up to reality and begins to move into an analysis of the cultural trap we are in. We are captives of a false story of limitless growth, trapped in an economy that must grow or die. Cut off from nature, our culture has become a narcissistic hall of mirrors populated by infantile personalities. We are being driven mad like caged beasts in a zoo and can see no exit.

Rejecting what he calls the "happy chapter" ending, Bennett offers no solutions, no techno-fix. Instead, he offers the way of the vision quest that involves squarely facing our frightening future and choosing to meet it head on with maturity and grace. He says, "We are in a time of initiation ... we need a mass initiation ... a vision quest for the collective mind."

Tim Bennett says that making the film has been part of his personal initiation. He came to this point after years of suppressing his fears about the future. For a long time, he says, "the world looked insane to me but no one else seemed to notice so I buried my thoughts and muddled on."

Born in 1958, Tim Bennett is, like me, part of a generation that I call "Generation W," somewhere between Generation X and the Baby Boomers. Our older brothers and sisters were the true Boomers, the ones who first broke down the barriers, did the drugs and the sex and fought in the streets to end a vicious war. In 1968, we were still carrying our Flintstone lunch boxes to grade school.

But we had our own consciousness-raising moments. In 1974, the one and only time this country has experienced gasoline shortages since WWII, I was getting my first driver's license. The eventual end of oil was vividly in my awareness. I never forgot that, and, like Tim Bennett, was dismayed at the lack of concern all around me as time wore on and nothing was done to grapple with the problem.

Now, more than 30 years later, we are on the verge of a mass awareness of the end of oil and our whole way of life. Generation X has expressed its sense of alienation; Generation Y is taking its place as the youth whose energy will drive the future; and Generation Z still sees the world as its playground.

Leonardo DiCaprio, at age 32, is somewhere between Generations X and Y. He is calling on his generation to be the ones to "save this unique blue planet for future generations." Throughout his film, DiCaprio refers to the 30 years we lost, not dealing with peak oil and global warming or the extinction crisis. It was my generation that was meant to tackle those problems, and many of us wanted to. But we were denied a proper initiation. Instead, we were ridiculed for our concern, repressed as citizens and reconditioned as consumers, as were Generations X and Y that came after us.

Tim Bennett is right. We need a mass initiation. All of us need to do it together - W, X and Y, the Boomers and even the "Greatest Generation," those who are left from the WWII era.

Films like these can help. They are good to see in a theater, but may be more effective shown in small groups. Support groups are forming all over the country to help people go through the psychological process of despair and empowerment as we cope with the planetary crisis. A "Climate Change Roadshow" recently came through my town, offering information and resources for people to set up a local group.

Perhaps the most important thing that the despair and empowerment groups do is to encourage us to express our feelings, which include a profound grief at the state of the planet. When we have truly acknowledged our despair, we become initiated into the real world and maturity. As mature adults, we'll be able to touch the earth again and look, unflinchingly, into the eyes of Generation Z.