Sometimes reality doesn’t make a lot of sense. Like when Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, host of ‘the alternative to copenhagen’ climate change conference, says at the opening speech to 33,000 well-wishers from every continent on earth, ‘men shouldn’t eat chicken with hormones or they will become gay,’ and, ‘men shouldn’t eat GMO potatoes or they will lose their hair and given how many potatoes Bolivian men eat, we soon won’t need barbers,’ and ‘coca cola is best used for cleaning clogged drains’ (disclosure: I am both translating and paraphrasing, but this is directionally correct).
Somehow I ended up with a press pass, so I had good access to most of the key events. Because of the work I do with Blu Skye, I kept my profile low and slunk around in the back of the room wearing dark glasses (the dark glasses were only metaphorical as I lost my glasses kayaking on the Chacabuco River in Chile, but that’s another story). There were indigenous people from throughout Bolivia in the wildest local costumes, European activists running around with lamb head placards telling people not to eat meat, serious intellectual anti-globalists, mustached and loud pro-socialists, hippie journalists, and even two women from Soweto, South Africa who after traveling for three solid days were found lost and hungry at the registration desk, got saved by our hostess, Anna, and ended up running with our little ragtag entourage.
For all of this nuttiness, and the conference’s decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-socialist/communist agenda, the 3 day event had an amazing diversity of culture, language and orientation and produced some good principles and a few practical ideas for reducing the human-related gasses that contribute to our changing climate. In the end, the event itself was a gathering of climate concerned people with a vague yet passionate agenda, who participated in a packed agenda of working sessions, music, dance and singing. When the Coca Grower Union members started tossing bags of fresh coca leaves into the crowd during the music set just before the final document reading ceremony attended by Evo, Venezuela president Hugo Chavez and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, I knew that this was indeed the Woodstock of ‘climate change’. A grand fiesta, love fest, party. A turning point indeed, but from where to what exactly no one is sure.
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