Global greens blog: day 3

This is going to be a real challenge. It is 1.50 am, I have to be at conference in 6 and a half hours, and I have just been talking on the steps of the hostel for 100 minutes with travellers: 2 Israeli soldiers, 1 Austrian business person, and 1 Turkish photographer who had a photographic series covering cocaine. He had spent 2 days with FARC. We also discussed oil, addiction, paranoia, peace, war, love, hatred, rules, God, Allah, and Adonai. We touched on the question of whether it is possible to love our enemies, and more.

That after a fantastic Brazilian meal – the best value meal out I have had for many years, with a representative of the China Green Party, the leader and a v intelligent member of the Japanese Green Party. We covered Lao Tsu, Moh, the government of China, and Basho, the great Japanese poet. For the first time I heard this haiku:

Old pond.
frog jumps
plop.

in the original Japanese. It was very moving.

Before that I had been speaking to someone from Belarus, and someone else from Sweden, All I can remember from the plenary is that global warming is happening (not just a theory) in French Polynesia and Canada. This strained my chosen optimism to the limit.

I got my resolution on the Index of Human Rights (search this blog for it if you are new here) in on time, along with suggested amendments to the 21 Points.

Before that it was 2 hours on the world food crisis. I emerged from it with a brain that felt unable to process any more information.

Lunch was with members of the American Green Party, including the editor of Green Horizon magazine.

The morning began with a session devoted to Ingrid Betancourt, our sister taken hostage 4 years ago by FARC. It was very moving, and I still have to deal with my resentment that the media reports always mention that she was a candidate for the Presidency of Columbia, yet always manage to suppress the fact that she was the Green presidential candidate. I realise that it is a bit stupid to entertain these resentments in the shadow of Ingrid's existential suffering, but that is what we humans are like.

That was a bit of a whiz through you understand, because I need to sleep. I left the details out. Enough to say that it was a day rich in human experience.

Thanks for taking a look.

Sao Paolo Day 2: Light and shade

A truly extraordinary spirit of common friendship and enthusiasm manifests itself in the breaks in the Global Greens conference. Not only do old friends greeted each other with hugs and kisses, as is to be expected, but complete strangers fall into conversation with each other as if they were old friends. Reserve and inhibition did not exist in the Second Congress of the Global Greens because we all know the key, deep reason that the other is here, we know each others’ deepest desire (for political change that will bring about the end of the insane war against Gaia being carried out by politicians and industrialists) and each others’ worst anxieties (that we might not succeed in averting the coming crash of the planetary ecosystem). With these psychological commonalities as a given, it only remains to find out how the person standing next to you is faring in the struggle.

This is not to say that all was sweetness and light. I heard (from the Mongolian chairman) that the Taiwanese delegation had a bit of a set-to with the China Green Party representative; and in another part, there was a tense meeting between two parties who shared the same territory, one suspecting the other of being a government schill.

We got lost on the way to a meeting of the European delegates. Not my fault.

The meeting itself was interesting; it was on the future of the Global Greens. It was big: 50 plus delegates from Europe. The Australians have put down a motion calling for the setting up of a paid secretariat in place of the overstretched group of unpaid volunteers.

The European leadership had done its homework. The Global Greens need communication, visible identity, and concrete goals. They thought that a secretariat was premature, and that we should ask the existing coordination group to make proposals, and come back in 18 months. One leader, wants Australia to withdraw their resolution or suffer a European veto; another did not want anyone from the global greens to make political statements on his behalf (that sounds exactly like what I would expect to hear from the Green Party of England and Wales).

I said that democracy requires communication, and that communication with the GG coordination had been less than satisfactory in the time I had been trying to get a decision from them on the Index. A paid secretariat would improve these communications, and the GG could make statements on global (e.g. UN matters) within the spirit of the GG charter. Other grassroots members wanted to move forward more quickly too, but in the end, it seemed ill-judged and impetuous to do anything but to proceed with caution.
I was not overly bothered. My own feeling is to go for it, but I would have been obliged to vote against it, since this was the way the GPEW voted last time they considered it (5 years ago).

[Just heard there are 80 green parties here. That’s 5 more than when I last heard].

At tea the Mongolian Chairman began chatting to a Belarus delegate in Russian – a legacy of the Soviet Union. I was mortified to discover that I was ignorant that an independent Mongolian state exists – in between parts of Mongolia subsumed into China and Russia.

The Heinrich Boll Foundation had a seminar on greening the city (more on this later), another on the question of the difference in politics between the responsibilities of government and the convictions of opposition.

I must say that I did not learn much. “Were we defined by being opposed to growth? Maybe, maybe not. Depends what you mean by growth”. Well, this is the kind of thing I can read any day on the e-lists; I do not have to sit in an aircraft for 12 hours to hear this.

For the record, it is impossible to expand forever into a finite space, and to take forever from a finite resource. Green economics aims to minimise the throughput of materials, the intake and the output of the economy. Elementary. This is not a difficult question to be addressed with furrowed brows.

[Dong Li has just briefly addressed the plenary. I insert this for the benefit of Bei Li]

Then Reinhardt questions our anti-militarism. He quotes the Nazi problem, and then mentions the new UN doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which means that if a regime is doing genocide, the nations may have to use military force. As a party of Human Rights, we cannot possibly say we can never use arms.

Well. This raises a few questions, which I would certainly have put, but there was no time set aside for questions…hmmm

All I would Say as an unbiased commentator is that the first example given, of the Nazis, should have suggested a clue for the second case, the R2P question. By the time war becomes necessary, it I too late to consider how to avoid it. You have to set the scene to avid war years before war would otherwise have become inevitable. We would not have had Hitler were it not for the preconditions set at Versailles. Likewise, we will not be so likely to have to invade some future dictator if we can put an Index of Human Rights in place.

As I have mentioned before on this blog (try searching it for “Index”).

One of the panellists spoke of the “Iron wall of oligarchy, the takeover by a small elite, that betrayed the Labour movement. Is this inevitable? Will it happen to us? No, she said.

Hmmm, says I.

Index of Human Rights Resolution submission

I put this here, (a) because it may be of interest to some, and (b) I have no memory stick, so this is the way to make it available.

Resolution on an Index of Human Rights in the UN
Global Greens, Sao Paolo 2008

This Congress of the Global Greens

Recognising that 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Recognising that despite the Declaration and the praiseworthy actions of numerous NGOs, many governments are still abusers of human rights

Recognising that there is a need to be pro-active in human rights issues, rather than merely reactive

Recognising that the human rights actions of all governments are recorded by Amnesty International and the UN, but that these detailed records are not easily accessible to the general public

Recognising that these records can be expressed as a numerical value, and that the relative position of all governments with regard to their human rights record can then be published annually by the United Nations as a ranked Index

Recognising that such a published list will exert a continual positive influence on governments everywhere to improve their actions on human rights, and will identify the very worst offenders

This congress of the global greens is

Resolved to bring pressure on our Permanent Representatives at the United Nations, and with all available United Nations Associations and human rights NGOs to adopt the Index of Human Rights in the United Nations.


Proposed by Richard Lawson
Green Party England and Wales Delegate

A day in Sao Paolo

So. Well. Chris, the below-mentioned soil engineer (an environmentalist, but nothing to to with the Global Greens Congress) took me for a walk in Sao Paolo, because he knows his way around.

It was a city like any other city, although also completely unlike any other city, since every city is different from every other city, as indeed, every place different from every other place. I have a deep rooted aversion to cities generally, but I did like some of the architecture in SP; some of the towers look as if they have been designed by and for human beings.

The pavements are sh*te. Lovely mosaic cobbles, but falling to bits, and cobbles not replaced after pipe laying operations.

The trees are lovely, good natured and quiet, as indeed they are worldwide, but all different sorts, mainly unrecognisable, some with epiphytes, (didn't know that cheeseplants were epiphytes). Only ones I recognised were a few London Planes.

We made it to a park with art exhibitions. One was modern Japanese. I loved an environment room with flowers and little tables and chairs set out (little people size). Freya would love it. Flowers as art...hmm, revolutionary. Some of the flowers needed a bit of TLC though.

The other art stuff was interesting. One was a video of a girl in pink doing pink vomit. Not sure about that really. Definitely not up there with the Night Watch.

We had lunch and then visited the Afro-Brazil expo, which was much more the business. Huge cultural impact, historic artefacts, a blast from the past (I got v excited over woodworking tools and got told off. NO TOCAR is not some green slogan, it means don't touch).

There was a slave ship framework there, and a moving projection about slavery. Chris told me that we Brits were the first to get rid of slavery (yes I know it has not fully gone away yet), so a lifetime of campaigning by the anti-slavery movement ("The end of civilisation as we know it if you get rid of slaves") paid off. Lets see, human sacrifice stopped in the 9th century BC, slavery stopped in the 18-19th century; maybe militarism is next...

Bought a toothbrush.

Drank some Brazilian herb tea. Not sure about this.

Any Green Party members reading this - you are not paying for this day of cultural recreation. I am mainly self funding.

Must prepare for tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

And so to Sao Paolo to meet the Global Greens

I wrote the first part of this on a mind-numbingly boring plane flight to Sao Paolo Brazil for the Second Congress of the Global Greens – all the green parties in the world, which now number around 75.

I have just cut short a film National Treasure 2 having wasted about 90 minutes looking at it hoping it was going to get better. It didn’t. It was a disaster movie.

Thing was, I was going to prepare myself by reading all the conference documents while travelling, so I spent a good chunk of yesterday at home, putting them all onto a memory stick. And do you think I can find the memory stick in my hand luggage? Maybe it’s in my luggage in the hold. Or then again, maybe my luggage isn’t in the hold, maybe it is on a different plane on its way to Alice Springs. [the luggage was in the all right, but the memory stick is still safely at home in England. Great].

Still, you are bound to leave something behind, so I should be glad it is just the memory stick, and not something important like a toothbrush…hang on…did I pack a toothbrush? [er...no]

Anyway, I had the main conference document printed on paper, so I have read that, twice, and it fails to inspire at present. The theme is 21 points for the 21st century, Green Politics’ road map to get humanity out of its sorry situation of self-inflicted misery. The draft lacks zip. Still, there is plenty of time.

Normally I enjoy watching the clouds while flying, but today there is just a layer of stratus covering the whole Atlantic. Oh. We are over South America now. My first viewing of South America. It looks like everywhere else; patchwork quilt.

Speaking of guilt, I am going to plant 3 times as may trees as are needed to fix the CO2 for my part in this flight. Good ecological trees in Glen Affric, Scotland, planted by Trees of Life. 3 times as many, because the emissions do more damage up at this height.

I hope this flight is worth it. It had better be worth it.

We have to do this thing. Green political philosophy is the only political philosophy in a working state in 2008. Marx is dead, and neo-conservative hyper-individualism is signalling its existence in the form of a very loud death rattle. Fascism itself died in 1946, although it won’t lie down. The diametrically opposed philosophies of socialism and individualism were anthropocentric constructions, basing their thinking on Man (sic) in the abstract, socialists viewing humans collectively, individualists viewing humans …well, individually Both leave Nature out of the ideological equation – and does it not just show? Green thought begins with ecology, viewing human beings as interwoven with the natural system that gives us life and being. Which means that we found our ideas on a good logical base. Starting point is (nearly) everything in logic. All we have to do now is to derive things like marmalade and buttered toast from our philosophical starting point. And not fall out with each other.

Actually, I am impressed at conferences of the European Green Party at the unity that is displayed, in spite of the fact that each party inevitably displays the concerns and prejudices of its motherland.

[Later]

Tried to take a bus from the airport, but the complexities of buying a ticket defeated me, so I took a taxi. The driver seems cloudy about the destination, but decided to have a go anyway. We plunged into a slowly moving traffic jam circling the city, and drove for a very long 3/4 of an hour. Sao Paolo is a very big city, somewhere near the size of London. My Portugese is limited to "obrigado" and the driver's English was less, so we drove in silence apart from my saying "Wa-hey!" when we left the traffic jam and shot off down a short cut, and the driver saying "Complicado" as we made another trun down a tiny back street.

I looked at the impossible edifice of concrete, steel and hope that is Sao Paolo, and my heart sank. Oil is the blood of these places. How will they function with no oil? I hope I learn something useful in the statements about greening the cities in the Congress this week. that is one of the main themes.

As far as I can see, part of the answer to the question: how will cities manage? is to be found in "windowboxes". Windowboxes with trailing plants. Millions of them.

I slept for 10 hours, had a great breakfast, and had 90 minutes of discussion with an American environmentalist soil engineer. Now we are off to look at the culture.

And buy a toothbrush.

Guardian Letter: Afghan plan

Your leader (Afghanistan: a failing mission, April 28) accepts that the battle there is no nearer being won, and "there appears to be no plan and no consensus on how to stabilise the country". True, there is no consensus, but there is a plan, which is endorsed by the Afghan Red Crescent, the Italian Red Cross, the Senlis Council and the European Parliament and the European Green Party: buy the opium and put it to medical use.

NATO is on a Mission Impossible if the plan is to crush the opium growers, since they generate almost 50% of the Afghan GDP.

While our soldiers are exposed to danger and frustration in the futile task handed them by Bush and Blair, the market in illicit opium is funding the Taleban, assorted terrorists and criminals as it finds its way onto our streets. When it gets here, addicts burgle, rob and spread their illness in order to pay for their habit. Meanwhile in the global south, about 6 million people a year die of cancer without the relief of opiates. Some of them hang themselves in order to end their pain. If that happened to one person in the UK, it would be front page news, but 6 million Africans? No story.

It would be entirely realistic for the World Health Organisation to buy the crops from the Afghan farmers, as we do in India and Turkey, and put it to medical use. So why do we not do it? The key argument used by Government to block this plan is "Some of the purchased crop might leak onto the black market". This is the most risible blocking argument we have yet to hear from any Government, since all of it is leaking to the black market as things stand.

You say there are clear warning signs that the Afghan mission is at a turning point. Let the legitimisation of the Afghan opium crop be that turning point.