Report from Jo’burg – Day 5

Let me introduce you to the team of us working together here. Before I do, however, I cannot resist referring to a piece I read yesterday, quoting the Sun newspaper (yes, the British one, I am afraid) ranting about opulence in the midst of misery, caviar and champagne in the grand hotels surrounded by poor people lacking access to potable water, the £500,000 hotel and entertainment bill for the UK delegation to be footed by the poor taxpayer.

I have no doubt that there is truth in this story – and it is no laughing matter. What made me smile was looking around our house tucked away in the eastern suburbs of the city, 14 of us plus assorted others coming and going, four to a room, with another mattress in the corridor, eating breakfast from a great tub of meusli while no less than six simultaneous meetings are shouted across the kitchen, not one of us being paid a penny and all to some degree digging into our own pockets. The picture of some be-slippered curmudgeon sitting at his evening fire reading the Sun and grumbling about the bloody scroungers he was having to support is just too rich.

...Back
So, on with the introductions. In the house, there are eight of us from the Global Ecovillage Network – Lucilla, Liora, Marti, Marian, Oumar, Ismael, Eduard and me – three GEN volunteers, T.H., Scott and Gunlaug, Roger and Sarah from the Restore the Earth! campaign and Rob from the International Institute for Sustainable Futures. In addition, there is a team of local helpers, based around a core of people who came to Findhorn in the spring for the Ecovillage Training Programme and the Restore the Earth! conference. This forms a team comprising eight nationalities. We are each primarily promoting our own causes, but also lending healthy support to each of the others.

Our work here is primarily representational, manning the GEN stalls at three venues (each of which also carry promotional materials for the other campaigns) and attending various talks and sessions where we take every opportunity to put in our two-pence worth. In addition, a team of us went up to Stakeholders’ Forum that took place the week-end before the Summit started, trying to push onto the Summit agenda a ‘partnership initiative’ entitled the EcoEarth Alliance. This is a bundle of proposed projects to be undertaken by the many organisations I listed in my first report from Jo’burg, including GEN, Restore the Earth! and the International Institute for Sustainable Futures.

So far, so good. The partnership initiative has been accepted and will be one of 80 such proposals to be presented from the Summit platform. (More on this in a later report.) Among the specific initiatives included in the proposal is support to the ‘Living and Learning’ centre in Yoff, Senegal – effectively a community-based teaching and demonstration ecovillage – and more general support for the development of the ecovillage network in Senegal.

Just one item from the morning’s paper caught my eye. The report quotes an anonymous negotiator in the group of officials tackling the issues of trade, finance and globalisation, saying that agreement on a text is close: delegates, he said, remained divided ‘only on the issues of subsidies and globalisation. These are the only two major clauses remaining to be resolved’. We are almost there then, aren’t we?

So, it is back to the opulence for me – to the tables laden with bread and soup, to the cans of premier cru Castle lager, to the delights of bladder control on the cold morning landing in the queue for the bathroom and to the sweet choirs of snorers through the long, long nights.
Converting a Stove

An innovative scheme to convert 500,000 traditional injera stoves across Eritrea will cut thousands of tons oil carbon emissions each year and help to conserve the country's precious firewood.

For centuries injera - a pancake-like food widely eaten in Eritrea - has been cooked on simple clay stoves built over an open fire. But. the stoves are smoky, dangerous and need a substantial amount of firewood to burn effectively.

Scientists at the ministry of energy believe they have found a solution. With a few simple design changes they have increased the efficiency and safety of the stoves --- known as mogoggos – by over 100%.

"We have added a chimney, so smoke no longer fills the kitchen, and an insulated firebox to conserve heat," said Afeworki Tesfazion, the ministry's research director. "We have also improved ventilation, to allow the fire to burn better, so that it uses 50% less fuel."

The new stove also burns a wider range of fuels, such as animal dung, twigs and leaves.

Health benefits are significant. Without thick smoke pouring into their kitchens, women and children are less likely to suffer from the respiratory diseases and eye problems that affected many who used the old stoves.

The new mogoggo is already proving popular. In a scheme run by the government and backed by small grants, dozens are being built in villages around the country every week. More than 5,000 homes have already converted.

Under the scheme, village women are taught how to build the stoves. They then teach other women. With free labour and free materials -- the stoves are made of clay and rocks, which are easily available -- the only. cost is the accessories. Metal chimney caps, valves and doors, as well as clay fire grates and cement chimneys, are mostly made locally.
Report from Jo’burg – Day 6

A day in the belly of the beast. Sandton conference centre. The early morning NGO caucas meeting had an air of near panic about it. The story was that in the late night session last night, EU negotiators, under pressure from the US, came within a whisker of letting go of mention in the final Summit Declaration of the precautionary principle. Agreed in Rio ten years ago and at the heart of many treaties negotiated since, the principle says, in short, that controversial new innovations will not be approved until proven safe for use. This is of key importance in the development of GMOs and a host of other technologies.

Alarm, fear, despair. A rising feeling that the Summit is in the process of being lost. That the EU is prepared to abandon its generally principled position (with important exceptions – we Europeans are no angels in global terms) in order to meet half-way a completely intransigent US. Other than the precautionary principle, the other key issues are corporate responsibility, global warning, agricultural subsidies and trade tariffs. On all of these, the Europeans have been insisting on firm targets and schedules. The fear in the air is that they are prepared to abandon this demand to keep the Americans on board.

It is agreed that we NGOs need to do less networking among ourselves and to put more pressure on the decision-makers. But who are the decision-makers? Where can we find them? What form of pressure can we put on them? Other than trashing cars and taking the battle onto the streets (one suggestion from an NGO representative), this is not clear.
Out we go into the corridors, Lucilla and I, in a state of shock and alarm. People in great numbers milling around (the Findhorn discovery game, where you weave in and out between people at speed was great preparation). Monitors at regular intervals showing speeches from the main plenary, from sub-groups, from press conferences. Meetings taking place viewed through half-open doors. An Italian television crew doing multiple takes of a broadcast for the evening news. Other cameras filming interviews. A hundred mobile phones ringing. Another hundred telephone conversations going on. Screen flashing up a dizzying array of meetings coming up during the day.
There is a deeply poignant scene in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where one of the evicted Okie farmers, whose shack is about to be demolished, decides he is going to kill those responsible. He sets off to shoot the driver of the bulldozer, but stops, thinking: ‘If I kill him, they will just send someone else’. So he goes off to shoot the owner of the bulldozer company but, once again, stops short: ‘They’d just replace him too’. So it goes, as he considers killing the land-owner, the manger of the bank that provided the loan for the purchase of the land, the local governor, his anger always stymied by the same logic: ‘they’d just replace him too’. Finally, he sits on the ground and weeps.

By mid-morning, I was close to tears. Shocked, but just unable to find any way of making a difference. I pride myself on being a ‘forest-level thinker’, able to see the wider picture. Here, I felt like a minnow in a shark pool. The mind (this mind, anyway) is simply unable to work at this level of complexity and abstraction. For ninety-nine per cent of our time on earth as a species, the outer limits of our world have extended little beyond the 30-50 people we called our clansmen. My feeling is that we are still pretty much wired to operate on that scale. This is perhaps the single most powerful argument in favour of localisation. We can understand, manage, empathise with what we can experience at first hand. At this scale, when we screw up, it is not the end of the world.
I went home to try once more to sort out the problems of computer/internet compatibility that had left, to my enormous frustration, three daily reports still sitting unsent in my outbox. Finally, eureka! – for reasons I am still unclear about, I was able to make the vital connection. I returned to the conference centre, singing happily. See what I mean?! Breakthrough in the peace process in Northern Ireland, I have a row with my girlfriend = misery. Famine in Africa, Manchester United win in style = happiness. How can a species with this type of wiring possibly hope to manage a hugely complex, globalised anything?!

Coming back to the comments I made in a previous report about the depressingly monolingual nature of the Summit, I was interested to read this in the Declaration of the International Indigenous Peoples to the Summit: ‘Language is the voice of our ancestors from the beginning of time. The preservation, securing and development of our languages is a matter of extreme urgency. Language is part of the soul of our nations, our being and the pathway to the future’.

Back at Sandton, I went into a meeting where negotiators were working line by line, word by word through the remaining disputed text in the section of the Declaration dealing with Finance, Trade and Globalisation. Mindlessly dull and not at all clear how one might intervene. But the stories as to what had happened the previous evening had changed. Seems the EU negotiating team had said to the US, ‘OK, no movement, fine, no point in us negotiating any further, let’s leave it to the ministers’ (who arrive on Monday). A bluff? I suspect not. Lucilla and I met with a member of the EU delegation this evening who said that spirits in the EU team were very high and they were determined to stick to their guns and insist on firm targets and schedules. If this means leaving without an agreement, she said, that would be preferable to one without teeth.

Still, the NGOs are deeply pissed off. They feel pretty much excluded from the process and watch with despair as many of the positions being taken – especially by the US, Australia and Canada – seem to have regressed from Rio, when this Summit should have been about taking the agenda forward. Tomorrow they (that is, we) take to the streets.

A fascinating evening of talks on the subject of eco-cities. Lots of stimulation and tremendous innovations in reducing the ecological footprints of cities. Herbie Giradet, one of the presenters, cited a particularly interesting statistic: to fly a mango from Africa to Europe consumes 600 times more energy than is actually in the mango as food.

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