Douglas blogs about the June 19th Earth Charter event and happenings

Post by Douglas F. Williamson

On the 19th, Earth Charter International organized a large event in downtown Rio at the Teatro Nelson Rodrigues. The event had many speakers, musical guests, and an appearance by Severn Cullis-Suzuki who was a girl when she delivered her amazing speech 20 years ago. Other luminaries included Brazilian sustainability leaders Leonardo Boff and former Environment Minister Marina Silva.

I arrived on site in the late morning to help set up and organize the event and spent the greater part of the first two panels managing this and that and not having the chance to listen to much of the dialogue. In the early afternoon I learned that the only time I would have to interview Severn Cullis-Suzuki would be in a car taking her to her next event across the city. Well, I took the opportunity and had a few minutes to speak with her while in motion. Here's the interview.

I wanted to get back to the Earth Charter conference so I hopped out of the car and I just happened to be near the Peoples' Summit, the non-governmental, no business community conference. The atmosphere was really happy, jubilant, communal, and warm, a stark contrast to the bureaucratic, stilted, and artificial atmosphere at the Rio Centro. I got to walk around for a while and my impressions were that it was a not very well organized, messy, fun, loud, sprawling affair with a colorful multitude of young people, native americans in few coverings but with a lot of feathers and paint, and a few loud and angry Brazilians on stages giving speeches about the their issues.

I got back to the Earth Charter event an hour and a half later in time to catch the last panel of inspirational speakers and to talk with many of the interesting guests and Earth Charter friends at the reception afterwards.

There will be several more posts from our blogging team on this event in the coming hours so stay posted!