(Worldchanging shares many connections with the Tällberg Forum, the annual meeting of minds by the shores of a Lake in Northern Sweden, with Alex, Alan and Nicole all having attended in past years. Alan reports on this year's conversation. -ed)
What do global warming and Swedish day care centers have in common?
A train journey of several hours to participate in the annual Tällberg Forum provides time to reflect on what may be the most critical, and scarce, resource of all: time.
The problem is local and quotidian, and global and mammoth, at the same time. In my Swedish day care parents' cooperative, for example, a shortage of time has slowly been eroding our capacity to keep up with maintenance tasks, while taking its toll on the various meetings and celebrations that form the heartbeat of our small-but-important (to us and our children) community. Attendance is down a bit, complaints are up, and there is no extra time in the storage shed. "Full up" is the phrase used by more and more to describe even their family calendars.
The day care center is just one example of what appears to be a global epidemic: time is running out. It is as though someone has opened a leak in the hourglass of civilization. Everyone is complaining about it. Less time for friends. Less time for oneself.
Less time to save the Earth and its living systems.
This is also the message of scientists gathered here in the tiny village of Tällberg, which for some years has hosted an annual gathering of leaders to discuss the topic, "How on Earth Can We Live Together?" The 2008 Tällberg Forum is now under way, and live on the web.
As I write, Johan Rockström -- the head of Stockholm Environment Institute -- has just fallen off the stage. He did it on purpose to illustrate a point: things change, no problems are visible, until suddenly ... "Shit!" says Johan, as he tumbles off the stage dramatically and unexpectedly. That's a nonlinear change, a "tipping point."
The Earth system is tumbling toward a number of them, and for the past two days, an interdisciplinary team of scientists here (including Jim Hansen, who just testified the US Congress twenty years after his path-breaking testimony in 1988) has been defining a consensus on the "safe boundaries" in ten different Earth systems, from biodiversity to ozone to freshwater to climate. Johan, Jim Hansen, Diane Liverman, Tariq Banuri, and Will Steffen and others on the stage now, and are starting to report on that consensus. Hansen is explaining how they came to the conclusion that the target for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should be "lower" than our current levels (rather than a cap at some higher level). Why 350? "Because we must avoid consequences that we could not bear under any sensible concept of stewardship of civilization, and the remarkable planet on which civilization developed."
These worried-but-understated scientists seem positively optimistic compared to James Lovelock, who sent a video message that basically told us, "It's too late." Gaia's going to heat up in order to shed us like a bad case of the fleas. He advises us to start planning for the salvaging of civilization in a world gone mad -- mad in the sense of very, very angry.
The scientists on the stage are saying something much more hopeful. The "planetary boundary" message, they say, gives us a clear and positive message. If we stay inside the safe zone, we can continue to do what do. Yes, we've passed some, but we can pull back. We need to understand where the boundaries are, and how to live within them. Then, says Will Steffen, "the second half of the century will look very different."
The group is debating what "different" means. A Fortress World? The end of coal? And what of those in poverty? The debate goes on ...
Meanwhile, during the past two days, another group was convened in the same hotel in Tällberg to discuss the ethical or moral implications of this increasing urgency, this skyrocketing risk of going beyond the boundaries that result in irreversible change. Scientists are doing their best to communicate this danger. But the rest of us must respond. It is a moral obligation. What does that obligation look like?
I sat with that group, which included business leaders, religious historians, indigenous people, NGO leaders, etc. The conversation was hardly simple; it produced no new agreement or statement (while the scientists produced a draft paper that they will aim at the leading journals). But the actual ethics, most seemed to agree, are no different than they have ever been. Think long-term. Act for the good of the whole. There is, however, an increasing imperative to "act now." When the house is burning, there is no time to reflect on whether you can live with an ethical compromise.
(We also discovered that much of the ethical reflection work had been done in other fora, such as this report on a seminar convened by the Yale School of Forestry.
It is difficult to imagine that all of my time-stressed Swedish neighbors are going find the time to read a scientific warning on the world's transgression of multiple tipping points, much less add it to their "full up" calendars. But I do plan to talk with them about it at our next cooperative day care workday -- at least, I'll talk with those who can make the time to actually attend.
Fortunately, it's not all talk here in Tällberg. There is also song. Last night we were treated to amazing concert in a local church, with many different artists. The high point was an a capella, improvised duet between two phenomenal women, Sofia Jannok and Ghada Shbeir -- a Sami, and a Lebanese, each singing in the ancient styles and languages of their very different peoples. They had never sung together before this event. And yet they created, with just two voices, a soaring sense of harmony and creativity, longing and grief, friendship and promise.
And that, at least, is a good beginning.
Photo: Bo Ekman, founder of the Tällberg Forum, opening the proceedings in the company of a symbolic fence -- a boundary at 350 ppm for carbon dioxide.
