KlimaForum09

Klimaforum09 is your climate summit, the global civil society counterpart of the official UN conference in the Bella Center.

While the UN conference will be a platform for political decision making, Klimaforum09 gathers citizens from all corners of the world to create a socially just and sustainable future.

The idea behind Klimaforum09 is to create an open space, where people, movements and organizations can develop constructive solutions to the climate crisis.

Klimaforum09 is based on the belief that meeting the climate challenge requires more than just new technologies fixes and ‘business as usual’ practices. New ways of thinking, new cultural values, and new ways of organizing society are called for.

Thousands of participants from all continents are expected to take part in Klimaforum09. Special efforts are being made to invite people from regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania who will suffer most from climate change.

The klimaforum09 programme offers a wide variety of workshops, debates, exhibitions, and cultural events focusing on climate change from a global perspective.

Klimaforum09 opens 7 December and ends 18 December. The summit takes place in large, modern facilities at DGI-byen close to the Central Station.

Klimaforum09 is organized by a broad coalition of Danish and international environmental movements and civil society organizations.

Klimaforum09 is free and open to all

Source: Klimaforum09

At Climate Camp UK, in London, we kept getting asked “where we going to Copenhagen (for COP15 and to get involved in the network of Climate Justice Action ?”. The answer eventually was “we would like to, if we could afford it and had something serious to do!”. We developed a couple of ideas, one was a Climate Social Forum, in the World Social Forum principles and process.

After a little enquiry was informed there is government funded civil-society forum: Klimaforum09, which sounds rather like the European Social Forum, Malmo 2008 in its left-establishment (vertical-left) support. On the surface its structured like a World Social Forum, but under-the-hood, its a government funded conference for NGO’s, an extension of Nordic soft-power public-diplomacy.

However the Kilmaforum2009’s 9 themes and the attending organisations are right-on and would love to work-out how to go and work on Gaia Permaculture and the Permaculture Worker Cooperative Movement projects. The Klimaforum2009 creator is a Danish permaculturalist: Tony Anderson. So, its an amazing opportunity, will try to reconnect with Malmo solidarity accommodation types and contact  the Nordic permaculture contingent, and the Klimaforum online forum.

Glocalisation of climate

My major unresolved question with solutions, revolves on this reflexive obsession with localisation. It’s a kind of allergic reaction to the Washington Consensus modality of globalisation. Pure localisation just wont work. Globalisation is real; climate, weather, migration of organisms including people, trade etc. We live on a planet with a global climate.

Are we going to localise climate? It's a nonsense.

The mindless business mantra of “Think Globally, Act Locally” is largely to blame. Corporations and the rich don’t limit themselves to this, they Think Globally and Act Globally. They Think Locally and Act Locally. Everyone knows the edge between the global and local is the most corrupt level of government, its the place where organised crime operates, dodgy planning occurs, corporations do things, see The Power Elite. Indeed there is a term; Glocalisation

Organisation needs to come from below but continue to the global level. We saw very large worker cooperative industrial democracy at Mondragon: from team to very large groups of 100 000s. It is possible to organise modern, industrial society with democratic decision-making and ownership. We need more highly organised social and economic arrangements. The anarcho-syndicalists also did it in Spain before betrayal by the liberal democracies, Socialists and Communists.

Democracy is a fractal. It can work on all scales and all systems.

One very promising discovery, which could be a lead-in to Gaia Permaculture is the plan developed by Tony Anderson and the Scandanavian Permaculture network for the Øresund Bioregion and the global plan for 10 000 trees.

Animals migrate yearly, organisms move. So do people. We need technology, transport, communications etc. While COP15 progresses inside, Kilmaforum09 runs outside. COP15 is top-down, and Kilmaforum09 is bottom-up. But where do they meet ? The place where globalisation meets localisation is where corporations, the rich and the powerful control the present and the future. One of the reasons localisation is so popular is that its is so harmless and diffuses energies away from real political economic change into gardening. As Mollison said, ad nauseum, permaculture is more than a gardening system. Again, keep coming back to Gaia Permaculture wiki project. Me thinks the Rose Room will be good for developing the wiki.

Source: GaiaPermaculture.com