Guest post by David Meyer and Annabelle Vinois, www.permacyclists.com
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| Permacyclists and the lead blogger |
We've been in Rio for two weeks now and
are only just starting to catch our breath.
I think this morning may have been the first day in the past week that
I've woken up unaccompanied by the sound of a helicopter hovering low over the
city…
My wife and I have come officially as
part of the delegation from the organization ATD Fourth World, an NGO working
with people living in extreme poverty.
At the same time though, arriving in Rio was the culmination of 13
months traveling by bus from New York making short documentaries about
grassroots environmental initiatives along the way, so our time in Rio involved
a few different roles and a lot of running around between various obligations,
always with the camera ready trying to document what was going on.
Before arriving, we thought the highlight
of the week would be our own moment in the sun - the side event we had
scheduled at the People's Summit to show our videos and talk about our trip.
The first sign though that this wouldn't be the case came a week before the
summit, when our event was finally scheduled but we were told that the People's
Summit could provide us with no technical support beyond a power outlet. No projector, no sound… we were nervous, and
scrambled some to find material, though with no success - we couldn't afford to
rent any, we have no friends in town, none of our few contacts could help…
In the end it didn't matter though - the
tent where we were to show our films had no walls, so a projector wouldn't have
done us much good, and the neighboring tent was blasting its own sound so loud
that even with speakers our talk would have been inaudible.
And so even though a nice group of people
came out and we had a good presentation watching videos on our laptop, in the
end our impression of the People's Summit was that for all its talk of a new
society and an alternative space, it wasn't so different from the society we
already live in. Bigger groups with more
resources were able to give loud and visual presentations in prime locations,
while smaller groups like ourselves were left to flounder on their own in
obscure tents on the edges.
More overwhelming though was that almost
every square inch of the summit seemed to be taken up by people selling
things. From indigenous people selling
handicrafts to street vendors selling "I Love Rio" t-shirts. Clearly word had gotten out that there were
willing buyers in the Aterro Flamengo, and for all the anti-capitalist dogma,
it seemed an awfully capitalist place…
In the end the highlight of the week
came, surprisingly, at Rio Centro, when a short protest by young climate
activists turned into an angry sit-in and a walk out of 130 people, all handing
in their official UN badges on the way out in protest to what they saw as the
failure of the summit to take any meaningful action. It was a spontaneous moment, a burst of real
energy into what was otherwise a week of carefully orchestrated political
theater - on both sides of town - and it gave me some hope for the energy that
is still out there in the climate movement.
Besides that one moment though, it was a
week of endless speeches, of questions which turn into speeches, of chanting
and banner-waving - a week of words.
On one of our last nights in Rio, I was
talking with Mercedes, a woman from Bolivia who is also part of the delegation
from ATD Fourth World, and I asked her what she thought of the conference. "Too much theory," she told
me. "Not enough
practice." Imagine, she went on, if
all the people who had come here had instead stayed home and planted
trees? Just 10 trees each. 50,000 people…
It has been an intense two weeks, with
some great contacts and some memorable experiences, but in the end I can't help
but wonder if Mercedes isn't right - if we might not have done more for the
planet if we had all just stayed home and planted trees…
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