Shared Planet

I love it when this time of year comes around again. It's time for Shared Planet 2008.    It starts tomorrow evening right here in Birmingham, so I won't even have to sleep on a hard school gym floor for the weekend, I can enjoy all the wonderful delights and still come home and sleep in my bed at night.   I'm getting a bit old for crashing on floors... 

So, what's Shared Planet I hear you ask?  Only the biggest and most vibrant student activist conference in the whole of Europe.  It's organised every year by People & Planet and brings together anywhere up to a 1000 young people all committed to campaigning for a better world.  If I'm honest, it's still the highlight of my year as an activist even though I'm no longer very young myself (and it trumps our Friends of the Earth Conference every time by its sheer energy and innovation).

There are dozens of workshops on everything from Guerilla Gardening, Community living, sustainable economics or the funding of the fossil fuel industry, right through to essential campaigning skills like Non-Violent Direct Action, strategic campaign planning or media training.   Far from offering workshops that only direct participants towards the campaigns and issues which P&P work on directly, the ethos of the conference is to inform, inspire and equip activists to think about and take action on a whole range of issues that all are interrelated. 

And it's not only workshops.  The weekend is packed with discussions, debates, high profile speakers like our very own ex-director Tony Juniper, green MEP Caroline Lucas and this year there will be a live video link up with Nobel Peace prize-winner Wangari Maathai (whose autobiography I'm currently reading). There'll also be a live link up with young cocoa farmers from a Ghanaian Cooperative which really brings home to the student campaigners the real-world impacts of their Fairtrade work here in the UK.  All this, plus a wide range of films, fringe meetings, stalls and a big mass action taking place on Sunday against the Royal (Oil) Bank of Scotland - it aims to highlight their continued investment in the extraction of new fossil fuels instead of investing responsibly in renewable energy technologies.   The whole weekend is topped off with a massive party on Saturday night which never disappoints!!

I keep going back every year (even though I no longer work for P&P, and have long-since stopped being a student) because I still feel connected to the P&P network.  It was the place of my activist awakening, it's where I learnt everything I know about campaigning, and it's the place where I truly found my vocation in life.  Not only that, but going back to Shared Planet every year allows me to see the progress of the campaign that I worked so hard to relaunch, and be continually inspired and amazed by the huge impact it's having in universities across the country now.  That little idea I had one night whilst incredibly stoned in Oxford, has completely transformed the Go Green campaign and been taken from strength to strength by successive interns who have all added their creativity and passion to make the Green League work even better.   I hear universities are now falling over themselves to increase their ranking in the only league table which compiles their environmental credentials, and it's awesome to be able to come back to P&P and celebrate its incredible success year after year.

Another reason to be excited about this weekend is that it's also going to be the scene of the 2nd meeting of the new Young Friends of the Earth network I'm trying to set up in the UK.   We hope to be able to snatch enough time away from all the exciting Shared Planet sessions to finally get our registration papers together and elect some officers to take the group forward.  It's going to be an informal network to help young people in Friends of the Earth stay in touch with each other and come together for joint actions.  We're also hoping to be able to promote Friends of the Earth to all the amazingly skilled and enthusiastic P&P campaigners who leave university each year but don't necessarily take that obvious next step into joining their local FOE group - oftentimes they don't know we're there or working on similar campaign aims with similar grassroots tactics.     Most of all, we need to decide, as a new YFOE network, what activities we want to organise around Copenhagen next year.  

The UN climate meeting in Copenhagen next December is going to be THE defining moment which decides the fate of humanity.  That sounds a little dramatic maybe - but it's pretty accurate.  Unless the world reaches a global climate deal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions at that meeting in Denmark next year, it's unlikely we'll get it together in time to be able to avoid the worst impacts of climate change in the future.  The infamous Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, and we need a new global agreement which ensures that all countries play their part, in different ways, according to their own responsibility for causing the problem in the first place.  That's why it's such amazing news that we won our Big Ask campaign recently in the UK to become the world's first country with a legally-binding obligation to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 - armed with that we can lead the way by example and urge others to join us without seeming hypocritical (like the US has over the last 8 years).  That's also why the Obama video I posted below is so crucial and a very welcome change of direction which offers some hope that things might happen at Copenhagen 2009.

So yes, all in all, it promises to be a rather exciting weekend and I, for one, can't frickin' wait for Shared Planet 2008 to get started!