Looking for Solutions to Climate Change – NGOs making a difference

While Ministers mingled and Bureaucrats bungled, the solution to the climate change conundrum was sitting unnoticed just outside the meeting room doors. If we citizens are to take responsibility for our consumption and its impacts on our life support systems by mid century, this can not be a top down solution, rather a bottom up exercise. A modest effort at this by an international NGO may show the way. Earthwatch Institute, has mobilized 100,000 citizens from 50 countries to serve scientists in 100 countries measuring change over time in the earth’s finite biological and cultural assets. Why not each of 200 delegates pledge airfares and/or homestays to mobilize and host a thousand citizens a year for ten years in an Earth Corps to measure the velocity and impacts of climate change? Two million committed citizens all linked by a common pursuit, all connected by email and cell phones, each with a camera to upload and transmit a changing world, each equipped with science insights about the most vulnerable assets on earth, including 500 million coastal poor people, who must hope that the world recognizes their plight. The films, findings, photographs, and documentation of change over time will surely move the Ministers and Lobbyists to dance to a new tune. Copenhagen shall be Hopenhagen for a world of volunteers, an ecumenical calling, uniting one earth in one mission. This must be done. Earthwatch is one of several NGOs with a creative mission that could lead the way to solutions!