Proposal: The Great Conversion Conference

[villager]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreatConversion/


THE GREAT CONVERSION

From Fossil Fuel Economics to Sustainable Localized Economies
Proposal for a Conference to Develop Legislation and Budgets
With People from Climate Change * Peak Oil * Ecotopian Design * Labor * Agriculture


Prepared by Climate Action NOW!
P.O. Box 324, Redway, CA 95560
[e-mail] [phone]

January 2, 2006

If humanity is to survive the threat posed by accumulating greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere, and the end of the age of oil, it will be because of a great conversion made globally to convert economies, in a time frame similar to The Great Depression, to one that uses 20 percent of the fossil fuels currently consumed around the globe. I believe that our descendants will look back upon this time as The Great Conversion.

So much of activist energy and resources around the world is drained away in the battles to fight what's wrong with the plutocracy that is ravaging the lives of billions of people, and savagely ripping apart the very fabric of nature. Not nearly enough has been put to the task of strategically organizing to bring about the changes that must happen in the next decade because of the order of magnitude and urgency of the climate crisis and peak oil limitations.

Imagine one day we wake up to find that all of the fascists and religious maniacs have vanished, and we own everything. Suddenly we have no resistance to moving as fast as we can toward the creation of Ecotopias, or at least make enough changes in our economic infrastructure, fast enough to beat the clock on peak oil and the climate crisis. It's like we know there is a climate crisis clock, but we don't know what time it is. But nature's limits are set to a specific time and we either make enough of a change by that time or we fail completely. It's like with the Asian tsunami a year ago. It's not enough that one start to run away from the ocean when the water retreats. If you don't get far enough away by the time the wave hits, then you die.

One major answer to what would we do is that we would start to have big pow-wows with the various sectors of society: people from labor, agriculture, health care, education, transportation, accountants. These people would meet to develop plans, designs and garner resources for constructing bioregionally-integrated, sustainable, localized (as much as possible) economies and the economic infrastructures needed to create post-fossil-fuel societies.


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The conference would begin with presentations on the climate crisis and peak oil. The main purpose of the presentations is to help define how much society must change and how fast. It defines the limits of The Great Conversion.

The second set of presentations would be by people such as Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia; Peter Berg, pioneer of the bioregionalism movement; Richard Register, Green City designer and author of Ecocity Berkeley; Paul Hawken on the reformation of industrial production; Jeremy Rifkin on the reformation of work for pay. The main purpose of these presentations is to show that there are actual changes that can be made to meet the timelines of the climate crisis and peak oil.

The third section of the conference will be on agriculture, by both new way farmers and conventional farmers. Permaculture, subscription produce purchasing networks, co-ops and farmers markets are some of the solutions to be discussed. But it is equally important to understand what obstacles confront conventional farmers in the globalized market system. This is where we find out how they need to be supported during The Great Conversion of agriculture.

The fourth section would be presented by organized labor. What are the concerns of unions and their members? isn't time we embrace them in the process of designing our sustainable economies? It's important that organized labor know that conversion activists from the environmental movements are not anti-union, but are in solidarity with it. They have to know that we've got their backs.

The final session of the conference would be a day of project meetings. The purpose of these meetings is to start writing legislative proposals and budgets that will allow us to make The Great Conversion. And to develop organizing campaigns. These legislative proposals would have to meet the test that all three groups: climate/peak oil activists, labor, and agricultural workers can back them and get involved in joint lobbying efforts to pressure local, state, and federal politicians. Groups would meet to develop separate legislation, budgets and campaigns to pursue at local, state and federal levels.

Imagine a big protest of labor, farmers and environmentalists at Arnold's office, along with 100,000 phone calls, demanding the same specific conversion legislation and budgetary items! The legislation we develop could also be turned into initiatives.

DVDs would be made of every presentation and later sold to groups around the country to help them create their own conferences and legislative projects which meet their own local needs in line with the work done at this first conference.

The first major conference will be either in Portland, OR or the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. After the first conference, there will be five more conferences sponsored by Climate Action NOW! and the ILWU. The other four cities are Seattle, WA, Eugene, OR, Los Angeles, CA, and San Diego, CA. These other conferences would all take place in the twelve months following the first conference.

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This proposal to the Greens is to encourage endorsement, to recruit campaign workers, conference planners and Web publishers, to raise funds, to acquire office access and other needed resources. It is also to solicit people to write preparatory white papers (green papers?) on the topics of the conference.

We don't have to wait for the fascists to vanish to start organizing this conference, create the DVDs, and hopefully, begin organizing more conferences like this around the country.

The final purpose of this proposal is to encourage local Green groups in CA and elsewhere to not wait for this first major conference, but to organize their own local conferences as soon as possible.