RealClimate for Real Change to a WiserEarth

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I received an email from Timonie Hood of WiserEarth thanking me for sharing Paul Hawken's video with my One of the Morally Urgent Questions of Our Moment post. She also asked that I share information on WiserEarth itself which I am glad to do.

Paul Hawaken founded WiserEarth to connect individuals and organizations working on social justice and environmental issues.

Here is some more information on the organization.

• About WiserEarth - WiserEarth

  WiserEarth helps the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances.

  Diigo tags: green, environmental, global

  • "There is nothing like WiserEarth.
    Its' community directory, made by us and for us, has over 100,000 organizations working for just and lasting change."

    
    

    Jon Ramer, USA
  
  

Another update I wanted to make to that post was to also mention RealClimate.org, a site mentioned by Bill McKibben in his MITWorld talk. Between the two of them you have hard scientific data and a wise vision that can have a global reach for a better world that could last for at least the next millennium.

RealClimate

About RealClimate

Filed under:

• Extras
  

RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science. All posts are signed by the author(s), except 'group' posts which are collective efforts from the whole team. This is a moderated forum.

RealClimate

We've often been asked to provide a one stop link for resources that people can use to get up to speed on the issue of climate change, and so here is a first cut. Unlike our other postings, we'll amend this as we discover or are pointed to new resources. Different people have different needs and so we will group resources according to the level people start at.

They have a section For complete beginners:

• Start here
  • Filed under:
    
    • IPCC
      
    • FAQ
      
    • Climate Science
      

    Diigo tags: realclimate, green, environmental, global
    

Social Innovation Fund: Social Activists bring the innovation Government brings the funds

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I am trying to find time to get back to this blog and updated my Facebook page to create away of keeping track of some of the resources, especially those at Change.Org. I found two interesting posts over the weekend from Social Entrepreneurship on Facebook. Nathaniel Whittemore on an interview with America Forward on the Social Innovation Fund.

I know that is usually the interviewee one pays the most attention to, but I really liked what the interviewer said about a set of principles being distinct from orthodoxy.

clipped from socialentrepreneurship.change.org

Change.org: Makes sense, and is definitely an evolving expression of progressive sentiment. It seems to me that part of the increasing political pragmatism is a sense that a set of principles can be distinct from an orthodoxy about how to achieve them. No compromising on closing the achievement gap in schools, for example, and an absolute fervor that it is government's job to lead that fight, but an openness to how to get there.

This takes out the ideology as the main point of contention and gets us focused on the problems.

Below is from another Change.org post at Social Entrepreneurship. This time Nathaniel writes about Andrew Wolk and his recent attendance at the Future Trends Forum in Madrid, Spain. This is the type of thinking that is going to be necessary to get thousands, maybe millions of different groups working for the Millennium Development Goals to come together to make a change from the bottom up. While I support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and pushing the developed world to keep their promise I remain skeptical of their resolve. If postive change can be seen by regular people in the developed world so that they start to believe that real change is possible, then we have a far better chance of leveraging political policy.

clipped from socialentrepreneurship.change.org

I left Madrid with two takeaways I thought were worth sharing. The first was a general agreement that we have been too focused on scale by replication, and have not thought enough about scaling ideas. While this is not new for this blog, I heard a new angle on what should be an increased emphasis on collaboration. As one attendee put it, we do not need another water filtration system to solve the world’s clean water access problem; rather, we need to bring everyone working on the issue of clean water together to collaborate and work on a distribution system of the best solutions.

One of the Morally Urgent Questions of Our Moment

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I ran across two resources on the Web relating to Millennium Development Goal No 7. Environmental Sustainability. One was this video Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest and WiserEarth.

Copyright Bioneers, http://www.bioneers.org 2007 which was featured in the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seanotes article on Paul Hawken author of Blessed Unrest.

The other was this MITWorld Video on Bill McKibben and the 350 project. The 350 project sets 24 October 2009 as the INTERNATIONAL DAY OF CLIMATE ACTION.

• The Most Important Number in the World | MIT World

  “Just a sleep-deprived activist and organizer.” That’s how environmentalist Bill McKibben describes his current incarnation, with writing career in abeyance while he proselytizes about the danger of climate change. The plight he first wrote about as hypothesis in 1989 has evolved into “deeply rooted consensus.” By 1995, world climatologists agreed: “Human beings are heating up the planet.”

  Diigo tags: mdg7, MIT, sustainability, environmental, 350

  • McKibben saw the way ahead as harnessing the Internet’s multiplicative power. In 2007, with the help of six students and email’s exponential impact, 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations took place countrywide. “The thing just went viral,” McKibben exclaims, “…the biggest day of grass-roots environmental activism since the first Earth Day in 1970.” Social networking and cell phones proved most effective tools for mobilization.
  
  
  • From Martin Luther King, Jr., McKibben absorbed principles of righteous activism. The good fight must be “creative…determined…joyful.” In closing, McKibben cautions “nature does not grade on a curve.” Global warming “is the morally urgent question of our moment.”

They may not be explicitly under the auspices of the United Nations, but the scope of what they grapple with is global and it will effect us for the next millennium and beyond depending upon what we do today. I am combining both because they seem to work well together providing visions for possible pathways and stirring reasons for those pathways. Also like the online organizing campaign and that it will be happening soon after the Stand Against Poverty event October 16, 17 and 18.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.