New Show!

This piece is about my trip to Copenhagen for the UN climate talks. I performed it once at the Burlington Airport, and this is a command repeat performance.

Hope you can come!

This Is The Movement

Yes, these are dangerous and desperate times, but they are also incredibly exciting. We've never seen this before. Joanna Macy may be right. A Great Turning.

Boycott is Back!

I had enough folks ask if I was doing another performance at Klimaforum, that I emailed Nanna, my "handler" to see if there was any chance of a repeat.

Oddly enough, she emailed me back yesterday, and I never got her email. But she called me this morning, and we went into commando mode, and the show is a-happening!

I've been emailing people all morning, and it turns out my buddy and incredible supporter Jeff Wolfe from groSolar is in town, and he's bringing a crowd. Jeff wasn't able to make last week's show, and having him there makes it all worthwhile!

Barbarina Heyerdahl, Supporter #1 Of All Time is also in town (I'm sharing her hotel room) and will be running sound for me. Barbarina has a mind like a steel trap, and I think has the thing memorized already.

So, no telling, really, how many people are going to show, but this trip has been proceeding with great surprise and unexpected fortune, and so I have faith that regardless of the numbers, we will definitely have a good time.

COP-outs

This is a great summary of where the talks are at right now.

Though it doesn't even begin to address the problem that far more people have been accredited to get into the Bella Center than the place can hold, and it's become a logistical nightmare.

People have been waiting in the cold for hours, missing their own side events, and feeling very disregarded and silenced.

But at least it's a very democratic process. Al Gore had trouble getting in, the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council waited outside in line for 5 hours, and it only took me an hour (of course I had a badge from having registered last week - these guys just got here).

Photos from The March

There were two marches on Saturday. One of them began at 10 and went through town to a building where industry is discussing carbon trading. The other went from the center of Copenhagen all the way out to the Bella Center.

My ankle is still in rough shape, so I only attended the first march. I took the train out to the Bella Center to meet up with the second march, but it took them 3 hours to go 6 km, and by that point, I had to get back to check out of my B&B.

But here are some shots from the smaller march. Folks are in blue because they're symbolizing rising water levels.

Bangle for the Bard

I had an incredible My Dinner With Andre style encounter last night with Kimo Goree, from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, his co-worker Liz Willetts, and a zingy powerhouse of a gal named Velma MCColl, a high-flying Canadian political consultant.

We talked strategy, philosophy, personality, inherent genius, wu wei (active inaction). Though I must admit I interrupted the flow for a Girlie Moment to complement Velma on her very beautiful bracelet.

We talked about knowing who has "valence," the person in any situation who can make things happen, and being clear that when you're trying to make change, that's who you should be dealing with.

We talked about the U Theory Of Change. This is the idea that to make change, you have to have an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. There are moments when each of these components are open, and they can be engaged, and you come out the other side having been transformed. Imagine moving down one stem of a U and coming up the other side.

Velma said that she's really interested in engaging people just as they're coming up from the bottom of the U.

Velma also talked about how she feels like something is really shifting here: valences, debates, influences, paradigms, institutions.

Kimo pointed out that Copenhagen is self-selecting for the most passionate, the most engaged, the most creative and committed people working on climate change at all levels. He also said there has never been a time in our history when this many top leaders came together in one place for 36 hours to try and fix a problem. It's an enormous amount of concentrated world power, of people who have, to borrow from Malcom Gladwell, blink energy. Rapid, immediate cognition.

We talked about how the inherent role of countries is to look out for the self-interest of a specifically defined collective of people, but that this Moment requires a re-constitution of the inherent purpose of government. These world bodies must now be infused with altruism, compassion, and generosity as the only means of ensuring our survival. We need to take half-formed thoughts in half-formed realities, and vast contradictions and complexities, and at a quantum pace, transform them into immediate and seemingly impossible action.

We have to storm the status quo, crack prime numbers, and remembering that we live on a pale blue dot in an infinite sea of black. We need to go Micro, Macro, Meta, Mundo because it is not acceptable for us to wait for global catastrophe before we act.

It was a heady, invigorating, elevating conversation when went on for hours. We closed down the restaurant and got free wine from the manager, who thanked us for our work.

On the way home in the taxi, I told Velma about what my friend Shyla said to me about my current Purpose. She said I am in the lineage of the Bardic Stream, a storyteller of this Moment. What Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning.

As I got out of the taxi, Velma gave me her bracelet - the one I had admired early in our night together. She said it was a Bangle for the Bard.

This moment is the reason I came to Copenhagen.

Tuvalu Testimony

Ian Fry, the COP15 delegate from Tuvalu. "The fate of my country rests in your hands."