Dear Paul,

In the first place, let me congratulate you with the website you conceived.  I have been working with several NGOs at different stages in my life, and in different countries, in Belgium, Nicaragua and Colombia.  I agree that the high level of commitment they have with urgent topics is extremely important.  NGOs are probably the best we can come up with when democracy is at stake, what public opinion really stands for - when it is not being spinned by big corporations (and as a supreme act of cynicism presented as "news").

Just in the same way as you mentioned in your book, I have also always been frustrated by the lack of coordination of NGOs.  But maybe you go a bridge too far on page 177 :

Its atomization may prevent it from ever becoming coherent enough to challenge marauding institutions as large as the US Government.

I do agree with you that NGOs - due to their limited budgets - are dedicated to rather small efforts, to little projects all over the world, although the impact of those can often mean a very big difference for local people and the environment.  However, NGOs do have a common ground, that you describe just before the quote above :

Because the movement is not an ideology, there can be no concision of goals, no succinct slogans representative of the whole.  It is a body of thought that coheres into a values system but not a belief system; it is a confluence of evolving ideas that never ceases; a creator of choice, actions, and solutions that confront suffering and degradations visited upon people and the earth.

There you say it all.  The movement is a confluence of evolving ideas that never ceases, cohering into a values system.

Maybe this website could be used as a tool to discuss and agree upon what this values system could be.  At first sight, the diversification of the different organizations seems frightening enough even to hope ever to reach such a consensus.

However, in the history of NGOs there is one very important slogan, repeated over and over again : Think global, act locally.  Strange as it might seem, this profound thought has never been put into practice.  What the global thinking is everybody agrees upon is, is left open.  Perhaps this is due to the lack of a technological platform like this website, in order to be able to bring different opinions worldwide together.  Or maybe, it is because until now, we never had really faced a global threat so frightening that we should really consider to coordinate our actions in unison.  At this moment in history, we face a global threat never experienced before by humankind.  The capitalist exploitation of natural resources is destroying our habitat beyond every imaginable limit.  Life expectancy is already dwindling in Europe, due to contamination from particulate matter, with an average of nine months.  That's nearly a year shorter life span !  And what do European politicians do ?  Nothing !  Nothing at all !  I don't know any study of this kind performed in the US or Japan, but suppose that the figures will be more or less the same, because this contamination is produced by very dense traffic flows.

However frightening this phenomenon is, it is nothing compared to what is ahead of us when global warming will let us suffer all its consequences.  We already see some signs, like the shifting of the Arizona desert to the North in the US and the crossing of the Sahara desert to the South of Europe.  When the glaciers on the Himalayas will totally be melted, more than 40 % of the world population - China, India and Pakistan combined - will be without drinking water.  Imagine two billion people as climate refugees !

Global warming should appeal to every conscious citizen on earth.  Nobody can pretend to be excluded from its consequences, wherever you are living or whatever you are doing.  What we do or omit to do now, will shape the conditions of life for our children and all next generations of humankind to come.

We don't have to expect any actions from our governments.  They only intervene when

Wall Street crashes, and then easily find ways to inject huge amounts of money, our money, to save their criminal banker friends.  A wiser choice would have been to inject the same amount of money in a whole makeover of the energy production of our countries, the way George Monbiot showed us in his book Heat.  But we know governments are not in the least interested in doing this.  Governments have never been interested in what is really good for the people.  They always end up socializing the losses, sustaining their bankrupt friends, instead of investing in what really counts, our common goals.

Governments are so corrupt because election campaigns are financed by big corporations.  We must always bear in mind the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt:

The trouble with this country is that you can't win an election without the oil bloc, and you can't govern with it.

That explains how Nixon managed the oil crisis of 1973.  He was so confused that for five minutes he was considering transforming US society to renewable energy sources.  What a wonderful world we would be living in today, should this have been executed at this moment in history !  But then he was told he could buy oil with arms.  And so the Middle East was transformed in a war zone, where the American military likes to show off, from time to time, pretending there is some kind of threat being posed upon us over there.

- "Iraq, incredible weapons !  Incredible weapons !" 

- "How do you know that ?" 

- "Well... we looked at the receipt..."  (courtesy of the late Bill Hicks)

Another proof of the lack of commitment from the US government was Kyoto.  But Europe is not doing much better. Although we need 90 % reduction in CO₂ emissions by the year 2030, the EU talks of a 20 % reduction !  That's so huge a difference that it isn't even worth the effort.  And even this too faint objective is being torpedoed by industrial lobby groups - German car producers in the first place.

Clinton had a good idea when he thought of an electric car, but he failed when he didn't had the bollocks to impose it as a law, as a politician should do, obliging the market to follow.  No, he gave the funds to develop it to General Motors.  He gave them US$100.000.000 to come up with something.  Surprisingly, they did very well.  They build a beauty.  You can see this vehicle with an astonishing 300 km electrical autonomy drive on a Californian highway in the documentary  'Who killed the electric car ?'.  Yeah, you got it.  There is no happy ending to this story.  As soon as Bush took over the desk from Clinton, GM withdrew the 4.000 leased cars from the Californian market and... destroyed them... as if to withdraw all physical evidence this car ever really existed...  Bush then gave a tax cut to anyone buying a Hummer, a car with an efficiency far below the first commercial vehicle ever built, the T Ford.  And went to war trying to restore the oil supply by Iraq.

Now, even if Obama wins, he won't be able to make the change he is talking about.  No way.  Or course I prefer Obama over McCain, since he will go less to war than what republicans tend to do, so therefore he's a far better choice.  He won't be the mass murderer McCain already is - when bombing innocent people in Vietnam - and he would certainly "improve" his genocide record should he be in command of the US military.

But Obama will never be able to transform the US society to renewables, let alone reduce carbon emissions to 90 % of current levels by 2030.  To begin with, he hasn't mentioned this as part of his government plan. (And would he all of a sudden become interested in it, he will be told by the denial industry, supported with junk science produced by the big corporations, that it is impossible.  And then they will make fun of him, in Fox, CNN, and all the other corporate-owned propaganda media.  If that doesn't work, they will impeach him on the ground that he's crazy.  And should this still not work, they will shoot him.  Let's face it, it's impossible to do in the fake democracy we live in.  The big corporations, the current owners of this planet, will not let this happen.)

Although the situation we have to deal with is very complicated, we must not give up on hope.  And this website is probably the place where a collective strategy to lower carbon emissions could be born, not proposed by any government, but developed by people, by conscious people, by people like you and me, who are aware of the ecological consequences of our actions, in order to preserve what's left of earth's natural resources for the generations to come.  All politicians like to talk of "the children", of "our future", while at the same moment they destroy this world for "the children", taking away "their future".  The only thing governments put in place by big corporations want from our children is to become obedient workers and compulsive consumers.  No more.  Certainly they don't want us to use our brains to think.  That's not done.  However, some of us can't resist the temptation to wonder why this world has gone so berserk.  And happily, we're not alone.  A study by Christine MacNulty showed that 30 % of the British population is inner-value-orientated.  Those people relate to the need for personal growth and self-fulfillment.  Inner-directed people are concerned about developing themselves, yet identify sympathetically with others.  This is us : people using their emotions and their brains to feel what it's be to be human.

On the other hand we have people holding on to sustenance values and just live to get by, whose only concern relates to the basic necessity of survival and security (19 %), and outer-value-orientated people, relating to the desire for prosperity and status (51 %), the people looking for a meaning to life through consumption.

With 30 % we are with enough people to make a change, a change that will inspire the sustenance-related people, since we just go a little further, we go for sustainability.  That message could be relatively easy to sell.  At this moment, and for some more years to come, the outer-value-orientated people are totally lost, since the last Wall Street crash disappeared all what they once believed in.  It was a wake-up call from the American Dream.  So maybe some of them could also be interested in what we "liberals" - or whatever they tend to call us - have to say.  Maybe they find that this is the time for a change in their lives.  It's rather funny to read in The Wall Street Journal that meditation is now recommended to the desperate brokers, in order to survive the actual crash...

One of the chat groups on your website discusses if this initiative is an individual or a collective idea.  It is clear that ideas originate in an individual.  It is impossible to connect our brains together, like a computer network does.  However, humans are far more intelligent than computers, and use language to communicate.  That's the way an individual idea can become a collectively accepted idea.  And if we believe in democracy, we put individual ideas to a debate, in order to ripe them and expand them with other inputs, in order to come up with a consensus.

However, somebody should come up with a first draft.  I have thought a lot on current developments, since I was a child, riding on my bicycle to school along a river that was so contaminated that it was extremely dangerous to accidently fall into.  At home, my parents told us children stories how they swum and played in this river when they were young.  This I felt was a big injustice imposed upon us, the next generation.  The same is happening now on a bigger scale, with global warming.  We are not being kind to the next generation !

Now, a lot of people will think I am crazy.  Maybe they're right.  But then again, Henry Miller warned us that :

... there is no salvation becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

All big transformations start with some crazy people having even crazier ideas.  The example you gave of a dozen people meeting in a small print shop in London to abolish slave trade is quite to the point (p. 24).

They were reviled and dismissed by businessmen and politicians.  It was argued that their crackpot ideas would bring down the English economy, eliminate growth and jobs, cost too much money, and lower the standard of living.

Those are exactly the same things that corporate business and governments all over the planet are saying to us.  This means we are historically in very good company !  That's already good for a start.

The Big Challenge of our time is to reduce CO₂-emissions to 90 % of current levels by 2030.  We can't expect mega solutions from corrupt governments, elected with Big Oil money.  They can't be trusted.  We will have to do it ourselves.  We will have to believe in ourselves, as direct actors of transformation, by transforming our way of life.  At this point, we don't need any sympathizers.  We need real people, acting on the real world.  It is clear that the CEOs of Exxon and General Motors are not capable of destroying the world all by themselves.  They need us, all of us, to burn their gas in the cars they sold us in the first place.  They need us to consume the electricity they produce in nuclear reactors and burning coal.  If we want to reduce CO₂-emissions, we can do a lot.  We'll have to stop buying gas and electricity.  One individual makes as less change as one CEO makes.  But if we would be able to act in a coherent way, we would certainly be able to make a difference.  Since those actions should be agreed upon by a large Movement, they should be limited in scope, to be easily understood, but should also be ambitious enough, to really produce the changes we need.

I would like to put forward seven points for the Movement of Conscious Citizens to adhere to :

1.      Change to a vegetarian menu; do it gradually, till you understand that you can easily live without meat.  It's good for your health and it's good for the environment.

2.      Cook with organic vegetables and fruits, bought from a local farmer, preferably through community-supported agriculture.

3.      Compost all your organic waste at home, and deliver the rest to a recycling scheme.

4.      Use public transportation (subway, train or bus) as much as possible; who needs a car should consider to buy only a new one when electric vehicles become available again (by the year 2010, Chevrolet, Volvo, Toyota and Mitsubishi promised to launch them; in this case, preference should be given to the vehicle which will give maximum mileage after a full electric charge).

5.      Limit your use of airplanes, since they produce huge amounts of CO₂-emissions.

6.      Install solar panels and solar boilers on your roof, if you're a house owner.

7.      Build or transform your house following the principles of the solar house, so you don't need central heating.

I would propose to open a debate on those points in your website, in a dedicated chat group, highly publicized (for instance by sending a mailing to all NGOs and people who are listed in your website).  Afterwards, the group consensus could then be included in a special banner, on top of your website, asking people to join the Movement.  It would be important that people could adhere, could underwrite those principles.  That would give an immediate feedback on how we're doing.  I would propose that any citizen acting on at least three of the seven points, could be entitled to sign up, if he or she compromises to fulfill all points in the near future, with his or her consciousness as only witness.  Let's remember again what Henry Thoreau said on this topic:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?  Why has every man a conscience then?  The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Let's go slowly, since we're in great haste.  We have not to be disappointed if at the beginning, increase of people joining up is going slow, since I am quite convinced that such a Movement will not behave as a linear system, and all of a sudden will catch a huge momentum.

Now, the success of this strategy will depend on (1) raising the consciousness level of the people and (2) assisting them in changing their way of life.

In the first place, we'll have to explain to the people what is going on. In a fake democracy where all media are used for propaganda by the big corporations, that looks hopeless.  On the other hand, although the US claim to be an advanced society, illiteracy prevails.  More than half of the population reads less than one book a year.  That's why people are so ignorant - even the ones who are truly interested in nature and ecology.  You understood this problem also :

We have little understanding of where our water and food come from, the impacts of our cars and homes, the activities undertaken by others around the globe to support our lifestyles, and the effects we have on the environment and its people. (p. 100)

If we'd like to convince people, if we'd like to "spread the message" how they're being manipulated by corporations, we'll better recur to audiovisual media.  It's a fact that people prefer to watch movies instead of reading books.  Let's be aware of that, since it's no drama.  There are some excellent films and documentaries that show how we're destroying this beautiful planet, and how we're being cheated by the big corporations and the government in doing so.  A means to increase the consciousness of more and more people could be programming a basic film cycle which contain the following pictures :

- Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983),

-  An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006),

- Who killed the electric car ? (Chris Paine, 2006),

- The future of food (Deborah Koons García, 2004).

In my case, Koyaanisqatsi was the definite eye opener, so many years ago.  I am still very fond of this picture, with great music of Philip Glass.  Since then, I never looked again the same way to what our "civilization" pretends to be.  The three other documentaries show what happens when we burn fossil fuels, when we trust on corporations to come up with environmental sound solutions for car driving and when we rely on corporations to take care of our food.

A follow-up cycle could consist of the following pictures :

- Why we fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2006),

- Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004),

- The Corporation (Mark Achbar, 2005),

- The real dirt on farmer John (John Peterson, 2007).

In the first movie, Eisenhower warns us on the dangers of the military industrial complex.  But to no avail.  The corruption strategy of Cheney and his company Halliburton is revealed.  In Fahrenheit 9/11 the same corrupt relation, but on another level, between the Bush family and the Saudi's, is exposed.  Both perspectives are important to understand why Bush and Cheney were so eager to fight a war against Iraq.  The Corporation investigates on this very strange entity, considered a "person" by law, but without emotions and feelings, without conscience, incapable of experiencing guilt, and whose sole purpose it is to make profits, no matter how.  Finally, The real dirt on farmer John shows how one man can make a difference.  We should all be supporting farmers who switch to organics.  They need us, as we need them.  And above all it is a beautiful movie to finish with.  It shows that change is possible, and that we must never give up.

Those films could be programmed once a week during two months, with some speakers giving background information and responding to inquiries from the public.

Complementary to this film cycle, courses could be given to assist people in the transition to a new way of life.  The amount of NGOs already involved in the website is so promising that this will probably be the easier part.  I would include at least the following courses :

- Vegetarian cooking

Not only cooking should be explained, but also how to balance a vegetarian diet.  The importance of cooking with fresh ingredients should be explained, with organic vegetables and fruit coming from a local farmer being the best method for freshness, taste and the least carbon emission impact.

Simple preparations should be explained, like how to make mayonnaise and jam, so that people can eat tasty food, relieving the environment of a lot of glass and plastic packing's.  For the real enthusiasts, or in a second cycle, explain how to bake bread and how to make cheese.  It's quite rewarding doing this at home.

I know some people who tried a vegetarian diet but after a while discarded it, because they were not properly informed.  They experienced low energy levels, whereas a vegetarian diet guarantees perfect overall health and very high energy levels, far above what you can experience when you include meat in your diet.  But it must be mentioned that a strict vegetarian diet - even perfectly balanced - will be quite low on vitamin B12, since this vitamin is only present in meat, fish, cheese, milk and eggs.  That means that supplements of this vitamin under the form of complex B should be taken by almost all vegetarians.  I don't like multivitamin supplements, since except for B12 all other vitamins and minerals are naturally present in a balanced diet, so why waste money on them ?  It's better to invest your extra dollars in organic vegetables and fruit.

- Solar houses

It is a fact that a solar house costs more or less the same as a conventional house, when we talk of a new construction.  The cost for central heating of a conventional house is about the same as the extra cost that the insulation requires.

That does not mean that an existing house cannot be upgraded.  Construction techniques can be explained to improve its performance and lower its needs for extra heating.  An existing house can certainly be upgraded to perform much better than what's the case nowadays.

In this course the installation of solar panels and solar boilers should also be introduced, being part of the philosophy of what a solar house represents.

- Composting

It's amazing how much nonsense is being produced when talking on composting.  Some people say erroneously that you cannot compost orange peels or grass cuttings.  Most of the commercial available composting equipment are anaerobic recipients that produce bad odors.  Composting really is extremely cheap.  You don't need to buy anything at a local shop.  Just dedicate some space for it in the garden, and turn the pile around from time to time to introduce oxygen.  In this way you end up after 30 to 60 days with a very good fertilizer.

Well, at this point this is only an individual idea.  I hope you like it, and I hope you're willing to promote this debate.

Always available for further assistance, I remain, with

Kind regards

Guy Denutte

Hello Paul and everybody who is a DOER on behalf of our beautiful Earth - and all of us people and critters!  I am Sami Sunchild, founder of Peaceful World Foundation headquartered at the Red Victorian Peace Center in San Francisco.  We will be hosting  Peaceful World Conversations at the BIG ONE  and everybody is invited!  Also for breakfast conversations at nine on Sunday mornings.  Please stop by and introduce yourselves.

PS That's my '89 Toyota with license plate GIV THNX

Dear Paul,

I received your book "Blessed Unrest" in my goodie bag when I attended Greenbuild 2007 in Chicago. I wasn't able to see your presentation at that event, but now that I've finished the book I regret missing it. Thanks for your continued hard work and the energy that you inspire in others!

Sincerely,

Brant Holeman

Dear Paul

I am a young social entrepreneur, and student. I have a question in regards to supporting Wiser Business. Kaospilots Netherlands is an innovative business school specializing in social entrepreneurship. Each year a class of 30 students completes a three month serves learning outpost in a location where substantial social innovation is taking place. I am wondering what you think about a kaospilot team helping to launch Wiser Business.

All the best,

Nathaniel Spohn

PS. I am exploring this idea as part of an application to the Kaospilots, and so do not speak for the school.