progress

From our Supporter Simon Fjell

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:56:21 +0100

The legendary Garoe or 'Fountain Tree' was sacred to the Bimbaches, the early

inhabitants of El Hierro in the Canary Islands. The tree intercepted the rolling fog and

the water dripping from its leaves was collected and channeled off to provide drinking

water for the inhabitants.

The effect is most pronounced in Tenerife where the pine forests on Mount Teide

contribute at least three times more water by fog capture than is provided by rainfall.

"On Tuesday, July 22nd (1494), he departed for Jamaica.... The sky, air, and climate

were just the same as in other places; every afternoon there was a rain squall that

lasted for about an hour. The admiral writes that he attributes this to the great

forests of that land; he knew from experience that formerly this also occurred in the

Canary, Madeira, and Azore Islands, but since the removal of forests that once

covered those islands they do not have so much mist and rain as before."

The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his Son Ferdinand

Translated by Benjamin Keen (1978).

The Great Ash: A poem from my 12 Year old son Riley

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:31:18 +0100

Firmly

the giant ash stands

It’s as sturdy as the earth

Tall the giant ash stretches

Climbs to the sky and higher

Leaves The giant ash’s hands

Flowing like sea waves and surf

Up from the ground it reaches

It was seeded by fire

Older than time

Wiser than books

thousands

of rings

in its trunk

its story

wide

spreading

wings of

branches

the glory

The great

Ash

felled by man

to make timber

f o r p e o p l e

Happy new Decade!

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:13:58 +0100

Warnings were clearly present in 1970 about what we as a species were doing to impact the environment. The bulk of us who were alive and in communication at the time ignored the warnings. (indeed there nearly twice as many of us now as there were back then)

Denial, debate and depression have been with us about our environmental impact have been the leading influences on our thinking for 40 years and now we are in the second decade of the new millennium and the warnings are getting louder and the impacts are becoming obvious.

Optimism is our only recourse now. It is time for our species to use the great gifts we have to become on mass the stewards of our global society and our world to spread the awareness of our impact and to roll up our collective sleeves and get to work.

We have all the technologies we need for a sustainable future and if we can in one decade reach out into space and plant footprints on the surface of the moon surely we can organize ourselves to restore the gardens of our one and only Eden?

So I call on everyone now to see themselves working in this decade and beyond for the benefit our our Earth. We have dug too deep and too greedily into her and now we must make amends and choose ways to prosper by her restoration. To do well as we do good and heal our planet, our birthplace, our one and only home.

Amazing disinformation about Copenhagen everywhere in the media!

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 17:52:49 +0100

Being an official Party representing St Kitts and Nevis in the COP15 meetings I sat bewildered as after nearly two weeks of patient diplomacy all the agreements we were working on were side lined by a document that a small group of 30 nations, led by the US president, inserted into the agenda and then suggested we had one hour to review and approve. What was even weirder is that I was also online getting notes from people around the world who had read that a successful accord had been reached and that the US president had brokered it (this was apparently based on the Press conference that was held by the US president during the proceedings and yet before any document had been submitted to the COP)

What was submitted finally as the document referred to as the Draft Copenhagen accord is indeed deeply flawed in particular in the area of the funding it purports to provide as it is carefully worded to provide up to to 30 Billion USD in quick start funding by 2012 and then nothing at all for 8 years until 2020 when the headline 100 Billion comes into effect (by which time it will be too late to do much of any good)

That said the thing to note is that not only did this last minute effort distract the whole conference from any chance of making real decisions the draft accord its self never made it as a decision as there was no consensus to adopt it. (all COP decisions require consensus e unanimous agreement of all parties before they become official decisions)

In point of fact the draft accord was put up first as a decision and knocked back almost instantly (especially given the way it was incompetently introduced by the Danish COP President who, while tired, should know better to ask for a show of hands in the UN)

Then at 3 am in the morning we gave up a crucial 3 of our last hours before closing to have it put up again as an INF document (information) and again it was knocked back (this time with Sudan making some very embarrassing and inappropriate references to the holocaust to add to the annoyance in the room).

Still they kept trying to force it in and wasted more time so then we see the document as a MISC (miscellaneous) entry into the proceedings and again it was knocked out. Finally at 9am after working a day and a night a COP Decision was given Consensus and we could get on with the rest of the work...

The decision was to "Take Note" of the proposed Draft Copenhagen Accord.

Decision -/CP.15

The Conference of the Parties, Takes note of the Copenhagen Accord of 18 December 2009.

Decision -/CP.15

The Conference of the Parties, Takes note of the Copenhagen Accord of 18 December 2009.

Gals and guys this is about the least recognition the UN can give any document. Forget the contents of the accord they might as well not exist as far as the COP process is concerned in other words a more total failure you could not ask for excepting a mass walk out.

Now not only did this waste the time of a truly unprecedented number of world leaders it sought to undermine the ways in which the UN and the COP work full stop. The UN COP process will go on in COP16 is next year and while I am no apologist for the UN, I see the little progress made in the last 14 years and shake my head, still the principles of transparency (yes all decisions are public http://unfccc.int/2860.php there is even a good search engine on the site) bottom up, consensus building are, as I have witnessed them, nothing short of amazing. Face it if you were trying to get 192 countries to agree on something as important as this how long would it take you to get the job done and how would you do it better?

That a room can be filled with world leaders (many of whom do not personally get along) and come to any decisions at all is somehow miraculous to me. Yet what happened on the last day of COP15 has actually set the process back a year in my opinion and so the hope is at the midyear conference in Bonn things can be made to change back to the right direction as the decision of this COP were curtailed by the aforementioned very untimely intervention.

I humbly beg you to take direct action - Get in to meet the technical negotiators for your countries or better yet become a party as I have done. Bring the urgency inside as it is possible to get in to COP16 and not just in as an NGO get in as a party make the change! Find out the names of all the technical negotiators from your countries delegation and get into communication with them they are real people and many have been at this for 15 years or more. You can get into the process and you can make a difference you could even bridge the gap between countries by lobbying the delegates just please do not distract them or get in their way as its hard enough already, instead support them, encourage them and even join them.

Above all please realize that the UN and the world governments are not going to fix the problem so please assist us to plant trees now! As if we can permaculture reforest 20 of the 39 Million Square Kilometers of degraded land we have on Earth by 2020 the extra cloud cover the trees generate will halt global warming in 2023 long enough for the politics, the technology and the economy to catch up.

COP 15

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:48:42 +0100

Where are the captains of industry? Where is the leadership? Who is at the helm? Where are the religious leaders? Why are the NGO's being excluded.

If you do not know the answers to these questions then count yourself among many of use here who are standing for substantial legally binding targets to save the Earth and our species and yet cannot see what good this meeting is really going to do.

The only reassurance I have been given by my fellow small island state delegates is that this is the way it always is and that this cop is so far no different from any other.

#COP15 #Copenhagen

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:18:33 +0100

It is a very revealing to see behind the curtain of the United Nations. I can see that the years that have been put in have been ones of hard one negotiations and that there is a lot to get through in the next days and I am standing for an agreement to come and looking for ways to contribute every day and a lot of my time is just trying to figure it all out so as to not cause any issues myself.

There three levels of negotiations the first of which have been going on since June for this meeting and of course drawing on the meetings right back to Kyoto. These first negotiations are carried out by the parties most of whom have been attending COP for a long time.

The second level takes whatever cannot be agreed by the first round and puts it into the hands of the ministers who will bet attending soon. Anything they cannot resolve is then bumped up to the heads of state who will then do the final negotiations when they arrive next week. This COP though does not provide for much time for heads of state to negotiate so there is a big focus on getting agreement on as much as possible as early as possible.

Huzza for Stephen Fry and John Lloyd

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:49:32 +0100

As I sit here in the First hotel in Copenhagen pouring over nearly incomprehensible conference information and formulating our last minute preparations to promote the cause of reforestation in Copenhagen I got a delightful boost from Stephen Fry who not only very very kindly narrated our new video for free, he just tweeted about us to his million plus followers on Twitter.

If you do not already follow @Stephenfry on twitter I highly recommend you start!

Thank you Stephen it is appreciated by the whole team!

I wish also to say a Special Thanks to John lloyd who made everything possible with the narration including the studio time!

Tomorrow we start tracking down key delegates to speak with!

One movement, many networks

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:10:54 +0100

Hi all please check out our new network page we now have established networks on several different social networking sites such as Facebook, XING an wiser Earth ahead of the COP15 in Copenhagen.

Please invite everyone you can to join us so that we can build the most possible momentum ahead of the conference.

I will be tweeting live from the conference as often as I can so please also follow me on twitter @liaonet

Also check out the latest information on our own network

Lots going on!

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:59:15 +0100

Amazingly inspiring time at the European Summit for Global Transformation!

I had a really good time presenting on the sunday morning and then met many many inspiring people.

Also we have appointed a CEO whom we met at the summit. Please bid welcome to Marie-noëlle Keijzer who is simply amazing and will shortly be providing her bio for the blog.

Finally had an exciting meeting with Tree O'Clock a BBC initiative to plant a huge number of trees on the 5th of December go and pledge some tree planting!

Many meetings in London today

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:45:09 +0100

We are on the brink of announcing several new partners and several new initiatives which is exciting and there is a lot of preparation for Copenhagen.

We have recut our video down to 2 Minutes 55 seconds and we are looking to release it with in several new versions with different voiceovers.

We now have three new reforestation projects being prepared one in St Kitts, one in Zambia and one in Thailand.

Stay tuned.