[P2P-F] Fwd: An opportunity like no other - the Great March for Climate Action

Mon Sep 16 06:08:42 CEST 2013

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Atlee <cii at igc.org>
Date: Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:50 AM
Subject: An opportunity like no other - the Great March for Climate Action
To: michel at p2pfoundation.net

    [image: Like this on
Facebook]<http://mad.ly/fd2e04?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&facebook_like=true>
[image:
Share this on Twitter]<http://mad.ly/fd2e04?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&twitter_share=true>
[image:
Pin to Pinterest]<http://mad.ly/fd2e04?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&pinterest_share=true>
[image:
Share this on with
+1]<http://mad.ly/fd2e04?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&plusone_share=true>
    [image:
IvyRockWall]
Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence Journal
[image: Cii-logo-smaller]<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-a72436c45574c0e3988ee079de8c68b7-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>

. The Co-Intelligence Symbol .

*What this message is about: What this message is about: In March 2014 the
8 month cross-country Great March for Climate Action will be launched. I
believe it has truly profound potential for personal and social change, and
is worthy of our support and participation. Dialogue and deliberation
practitioners, in particular, can make a significant difference.*
An opportunity like no other - the Great March for Climate
Action<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-a822fe996523b720275061df66557517-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>
[image: 220px-Yin_and_Yang.svg]

Co-evolution of personal and social transformation

Dear friends,

If all goes as planned, almost six months from now - In March 2014 - one
thousand people will depart Santa Monica, California, on a cross-country Great
March for Climate
Action<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-5d210d1f6897dc9587138c3fc5ff64cc-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>.
It will take them eight months - walking about 15 miles a day - to reach
Washington, D.C. They will speak in hundreds of communities and venues
along the way and be joined by locals for days or weeks. Once they arrive
in D.C., they will swarm-lobby their representatives. Equally importantly,
the lives of every participant will be profoundly changed and their roles
in the world will evolve in ways they (and we) can barely imagine before
this adventure begins. Above all, I believe they will co-create new, far
more effective forms of social change.

I want to see that happen. I want this march to succeed in boosting climate
activism to an entirely new level. I want it to produce hundreds of more
savvy activists and hot collaborations. And I want you to consider joining
it, to think about it seriously, as I find myself doing. It is worthy of
the participation and/or support of every one of us.

*Why do I feel so strongly about this?*

The first reason is that climate change is, as the organizers note, not an
issue, but a crisis - a Very Big Crisis, with many side effects and
repercussions. Along with peak oil and other resource limitations - and the
wars, corruption, and social and economic disruption those limits could
generate - the climate crisis may be the defining fact of life for people
living through the coming decades. The time for addressing all this was
yesterday, and now it is today. The longer we wait, the messier it will
get. The earlier we take creative action on it, the more profound and
positive the transformational impact of our efforts can be. And, as my
friend John Abbe (who became Marcher #22) said, "The time to act is now
before it is more too late than it already is."

The second reason I feel strongly is that 27 years ago I spent 9 of the
most intense and transformational months of my life on the 400-person
LA-DC Great
Peace March<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-6c994b6d2cdaf5ebf9d830746e43afd1-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>.
As I describe in the Prologue to *The Tao of Democracy*
<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-51e877b4b3da728d18faf1ae2419b220-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>,
that experience gave rise to the vision of possibility that became my
life's work on co-intelligence, wise democracy, and our collective capacity
to effectively self-organize our communities and societies. This leads me
to believe that the potential impact of such a mobile activist community
will be at least as big from the exciting things that happen in and among
the marchers, themselves, as from the marchers' engagements with the places
they pass through.
MOBILE ACTIVISM

Early during my life on the Great Peace March, I wrote an article entitled
"Mobile Peace Activism". I explored the interesting ways that peace
marches, bikeathons, cruises, and caravans get attention and build
community. I'll share here some of what I wrote 27 years ago exploring the
question of why someone would go to all the trouble to organize or join a
complicated cross country march instead of engaging in traditional action
right at home?

*"Novelty plays a role in this. Travelling out-of-towners bring new life
and flavor with them -- the spirit of other places and a sense of
connection to those other places. Stationary people seem fascinated with
why mobile people are doing what they are doing....*

*"It is easy to get into ideological, psychological, spiritual, emotional,
organizational or tactical ruts when you are always confronting a desk or a
book [or a screen!] or the same faces at every meeting. There's something
about moving to another place each day or week that rubs off on your whole
way of thinking and feeling. Perhaps a certain responsiveness or fluidity
can develop, making it easier to break out of fixed conditions, to think in
new ways...*

*"Many of us long for a way to transform ourselves while we transform
society, to enjoy life while we are saving it from destruction. Mobile
activism tends to have transformative and recreational effects on the
participants while at the same time achieving external objectives.*

*"Most mobile activities demand a high level of cooperative living just to
keep moving down the road. This stimulates the formation of tightly-knit
mobile communities with strong feelings of being 'family.' This is both a
backdrop to activism and an actively-created part of it, a laboratory for
building effective, loving, non-violent lifestyles. And mobile activists,
in their trips from town to town, can weave together a greater sense of
community among the local activists with whom they work."*

Perhaps most significantly, when hundreds of climate activists walk down
the road together every day and live in tents beside each other every
night, THEY TALK. Among the things they will talk about are climate change,
activism, strategies, deeper causes, long term nuanced consequences, how
their grandchildren will live, and what REALLY needs to be done about all
that. Their diverse perspectives and information will churn together in a
thousand combinations and novel configurations. The march will be a
hothouse of new ways of thinking, feeling, and taking action. We could even
say that it will be "the other greenhouse effect" - a hundredfold
concentration and enrichment of the energy, thinking, and conversations we
already engage in together for a few hours or days at a time.

Carrying on such intensified interaction for EIGHT MONTHS cannot help but
generate breakthrough initiatives and collaborations, transformed lives and
lifestyles, new directions for the whole climate movement and every other
movement. That's what happened to me on the Great Peace March: My life
changed totally and my work on co-intelligence was born. As I noted in my
"Mobile Peace Activism" article, some of the most profound effects of
mobile activism are "the effects that all those activists create once they
leave the mobile activity and return home or involve themselves in other
forms of activism."

During the last decade I have often wondered if and when there would be a
resurgence of mobile activism -- of people taking the road instead of
taking to the streets. I see it happening now, with this climate action
march being perhaps the most ambitious initiative among many others.
DISTURBANCES TRANSFORMED BY DIALOGUE

Ironically, the most important thing that happened on the 1986 Great Peace
March was that it fell apart two weeks after it began. The founding
organization, ProPeace, went bankrupt and told us all to go home. 800 of us
did. 400 of us didn't. Instead of going home the remaining 400 of us
talked.... and the March was reborn in the middle of the Mojave Desert as a
self-organized mobile community that generated its own collective
intelligence and collaborative functioning woven out of complex voluntary
leaderful activity with nobody in charge. It was held together by
purposeful determination and rudimentary but dedicated conversational
processes, most especially "talking circles" (which I prefer to call "listening
circles"<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-d626422a237babd7cfe897fa0afca158-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>
).

Many of my readers and subscribers are practitioners of leading edge
processes like Sacred Circles, Open Space, World Cafe, Appreciative
Inquiry, Future Search, Dynamic Facilitation, and dozens more. The Great
March for Climate Action may not fall apart like the Great Peace March, but
it will surely be filled with powerful, smart, assertive, value-driven
people - exactly the kind of people who can make or break a giant
collaborative enterprise, who can get in each other's way or together
generate highly functional activities, breakthrough insights, and
innovative projects that change the world. This polarization of good and
bad possibilities will become even more intense in the potent greenhouse of
living and walking together day after day after day.

Perhaps the most significant factor in whether the best or worst occurs on
this march is how much opportunity the marchers have for high quality
conversations designed to support the emergence of breakthroughs, healing,
effectiveness, and joy. That's why I hope that dozens of practitioners who
read this essay will join this march. Together they can convene and
facilitate conversations that will vastly improve the march's capacity to
govern itself effectively, resolve its internal conflicts wisely, vibrantly
engage the communities through which the march passes, and ensure the march
positively affects the issue that may well impact more people and more
issues - from water to democracy, from justice to war - more profoundly
than anything else in this century.

That's why I invite you - I urge you - to seriously consider what role you
could play in support - or as part - of this remarkable effort. Depending
on how we each engage with this
opportunity<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-1b44221f55b69eb96896380fef4ffe7f-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>,
it could make all the difference in the world.

Blessings on the Journey we are all on together.

Coheartedly,
Tom

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
site: http://www.co-intelligence.org<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-502a6c29f46a7c09425c88d6eb333a36-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>/
blog:
http://tomatleeblog.com<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-1673d9fe7bb029fc8672ecc26f8e33c6-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>
Read Empowering Public
Wisdom<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-c5f80750a6ad410a19b5d2c71e75ebce-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>,
The Tao of Democracy<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-8700849586025ca1d77b4c858ae807d3-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>and
           Reflections on Evolutionary
Activism<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-b26f2a050ed6377621803269cee6eae8-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>
Please support our work. Your
donations<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1379281615-f20864b27364633a908482a369df50ae-3cdccf6?pa=539130248807666003>are
fully tax-deductible in the U.S.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Prefer plain text?

This format is what I am now using for all my messages. *If you wish to
receive my messages in plain text format* send me an email at
cii at igc.orgwith "Revert to plain text format" in the Subject line.
    ©2013 Co-Intelligence Institute | PO Box 493, Eugene, OR 97440
       This email was sent to michel at p2pfoundation.net. To ensure that you
continue receiving our emails, please add us to your address book or safe
list. View this email on the web
here<http://mad.ly/fd2e04?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1>
. You can also forward to a
friend<https://go.madmimi.com/forward/539130248807666003?amx=4386670875>
.
Unsubscribe<https://go.madmimi.com/opt_out?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&amx=4386670875>
    Powered by *Mad Mimi* ®
<https://madmimi.com/?pact=539130248807666003&fe=1&utm_source=Co-Intelligence+Institute&utm_medium=customer+promotion&utm_campaign=An+opportunity+like+no+other+-+the+Great+March+for+Climate+Action>

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/p2p-foundation/attachments/20130916/b5fa7447/attachment-0001.htm 