Ok, since the last post was hardly substantive, let's get down to it. I'm living in Stockholm for the year as a World Education Corps volunteer with Earth Charter International:
World Education Corps (soon to be World Leadership Corps) is a new global service organization out of Oxford's James Martin 21st Century School. This is only the second year they are sending volunteers out into the world, and I feel very lucky to be involved. WEC was established to train an international group of young people to be leaders in the global society, atuned to their {our} responsibilities in light of growing social and environmental challenges.
I think WEC and the Earth Charter are an excellent fit:
The Earth Charter is "a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century." To put it simply, it is how you do sustainability, what it looks like when we are there.
Earth Charter International (ECI - where I live now) works to strategize, organize communications, and disseminate educational materials to support the Earth Charter Initiative - the worldwide movement that has sprung up to advance the Earth Charter as an ethical guide to meet the challenges of today. I will be working mainly with the Youth Initiative, the network of youth organizations who are committed to the Earth Charter and the principles it embodies. These are very exciting times in Stockholm...
n.b. This evening I attended a lecture on "Capitalism at the Crossroads" at the Royal Technical Institute. Stuart Hall, who teaches at Cornell, emphasized how in this era of globalization it is business, not government or civil service, that can lead us to where we need to be as a sustainable society. I thought his most interesting point was that the global social entrepreneurs - whom he described as the agents of change for a new model of capitalism - should be focusing on the base of the social pyramid, the astonishing over 4 billion (out of a global population of 6.5 billion) have-nots. It is, for example, those without electricity who would be most receptive to newer, cheaper, more sustainble power sources, like solar panels and LED lightbulbs. Say solar could power a single family home for a one time cost of $50 (really, only about $50), which could be micro-financed and payed off over the course of 2 years (and then free power after that) - isn't there a market for this? My thoughts - yes! We need to get all of this innovative technology out there in the world, moving bottom-up, not top-down.
And on that note - I was so excited to hear about Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Prize. More on that later, hopefully. And more on Stockholm, and also Amsterdam, where I was for the EC Council Meetings at the beginning of the month.
Vi ses!
