Just read the TruthOut article, its great. I’m passing it on to friends in Australia

Talk soon

I’m interested to talk to my freind Paul from Australia who is on exchange at Berkely about his experiences with the U.N. at the CSD. Until very recently, the Australian youth environment movement had absolutely no engagement with the UN/ CSD/ Kyoto Protocol at all. These institutions seemed so irrelevant to our activism - partly because of Australia’s stance on international treaties (increasingly ignoring them - eg not ratifying Kyoto, and our govt is violating the Convention on the Rights of the Child due to the policy of keeping children in asylum detention centres indefinately). Partly it’s because all these institutions are on the opposite side of the world - with UN HQ in New York and UNEP HQ in Nairobi, and no UN conference held in Australia in my living memory, it’s not accessible to get Aussies over to these summits. In fact until i went to Montreal in 2005 with the youth delegation thanks to the Environnement Jeuness and the Canadian govt, I had not thought about Kyoto at all really - i was just focused on domestic campaigning on campuses and around coal. Being in Montreal was amazing, but more because I got to meet inspiring climate campaigners. The convergence centre taught me more than the official conefrence centre. I have huge critiques of Kyoto because of the market mechanisms, and I believe it may entrench the tinkering around the edges approach rather than the fundamental change we need that Josh talked about. Im scared about the amount of precious activist energy poured into reformist structures like the UN.

But this year COP 13 is in Bali - really close to Australia - and partly because of my experiences in Montreal, the AYCC has decided to organise a youth delegation. So, we’ll see how that goes… and if anyone from the IGHIH community is going to Bali in December, we invite you to come to Australia before or afterwards and enjoy the beautiful hot Aussie summer. If you’re here in January you can come to the ASEN Summer Training Camp.

In the hallways of the UN, I heard someone say the BBC had captured the Zimbabwean Minister saying ‘what does sustainability have to do with human rights?’ It did seem a bit over the top, but points directly to the question at hand, and also raises the question of how any government in the world can legitimately chair the CSD. Here in Canada, indigenous people’s are planning a national day of action on June 29th against the refusal of the government to deal with their land claims and the historic injustices that are the foundation of this society… the same one that is largely responsible for the death of the earth.

I believe in the UN. I have struggled with it, as have we all, we who have attended and given so much to pursue the ideals that were the very noble foundations of this noble institution. But I had the privilege to sit in a room with people from around the world that believe in the sacred balance of elements on earth in conference room c on the third last day of the conference, and be told by a UN researcher that the reason youth engagement at the UN matters is because there, if you affect someone, if you get through to someone and help them see, that vision can spread far… that’s why we need to be at the UN.

I call us back to this. It is the hope that came to the world after such a dark time as world war two. we now stand on the brink of another world war, and are watching our world be warred upon. Sooner or later, it has to come to enough. We have to choose our way forward. We are one earth family and one human community, with one common destiny. These are the powerful words of the Earth Charter.

The submission of the youth caucus on the thursday ministerial of the CSD was incredible. It blew open the discussion to the deeper issues at play here - cut through the diplomatic polite-speak to the heart of the matter. One of the assets of youth is the necessity to break it back down to the basics - which the Minister of Energy and Industry for Qatar, H.E. Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, did following the reading of the youth submission. Oil, for him, and for his country, has brought wealth. His first statement said it most clearly: In 1952, life expectancy in Qatar was 44-45 years, roughly. Now it is 75-78. There are schools. Hospitals. Roads. Money. I’m sure there are iPods and laptops too. This is the reality, and it was incredibly exciting to have helped provoke it. That discussion, along with the Minister’s commitment to bring youth from Qatar, and around the world, to the next CSD, inspired in me a vision of a global youth dialogue on climate change, through a blog, a perhaps a summit before COP 13, in Bali, Indonesia this December.

I would like to dedicate this post, and my participation at CSD 15, to Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman who always believed we were evolving towards equality, and did her best to bring us there. And to the youth caucus of the CSD, and especially to Josh, whose dedication to the asking deeper questions helps to keep me truly grounded. Thank you!

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt
http://www.earthcharter.org/