In a stunning blow to the heliocentric view of our galaxy,  a newly-uncovered edition of the Vatican Index of Forbidden Books of 1635 reveals a  number of  previously unreported spelling errors in Galileo Galilei’s famous Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo.  That work was widely regarded as the central scientific case against the Catholic Church’s depiction of an Earth-centered universe, and the  lynch pin of Copernicanism.

Skeptics of the heliocentric universe theory were quick to suggest that the newly revealed errors undermine the entire body of Galileo’s controversial work. ” I think there’s no question we need to re-examine the theory, also supported by Al Gore, that the sun is the center of our solar system,” said Earl Billfold, an analyst at the Knot-Paydoff Foundation for Scientific Rigor.  ”This is inexcusably sloppy science, which  has hoodwinked millions of people for centuries into falsely believing that our planet is not the center of the universe.”

Oooh, how cool is that. I just coined an as-yet unused adjectivalization — perhaps the last?– of a twitter term! Ahem, now back to our regularly scheduled post.

Want to know what people are tweeting about your site? Of course you do. And you can do that by plugging your site’s url into the absolutely wonderful Topsy, which unpacks short urls and so knows when you’ve been tweeted by a bit.ly or an ow.ly or a j.mp link, and has lots of added benefits like being able to filter by “influential” tweeters and letting you check out the tweet juice of individual tweeps.

And I mentioned some time ago a Chrome extension called Twitter Reactions which shows you, while on a page, what’s being tweeted about it — bringing the live social conversation to that static html page.

But today I found Twitter Pulse — fantastic. It shows you the most tweeted pages on a site for the last 24 hours, 7 days, or all time.  What’s the Twexiest page on YOUR site?

Trending heavily in the last 24 hours to become the number two link for all time on the Greenpeace International page? Whale Trial Pledge — our action in support of the unfairly persecuted (for so says the UN) Junichi and Toru of Greenpeace Japan, facing charges for exposing a government scandal.  Shown YOUR support yet?

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to hang out with a fine bunch of rabblerousers. We talked about movement building, and the kinds of things that make some campaigns successful in attracting big, unruly crowds, and the kinds of things that turn those big, unruly crowds into game changers.  We workshopped a set of questions worth asking if you want to gather a storm crowd and generate  some lightning.

1. Can you tell the story of our campaign to a 7 year old?  Who are the bad guys? How are they vanquished? Who saves the day? Even better, can you describe our campaign in a tweet?

2. I support you. Why do you need me? How can I make a difference?  How can I be part of the story? How can I bring it into my own community? How can I make my friends care about it? What have you got for me to do that’s more than a petition and less than getting arrested? Are you willing to let go some of your control, and let me have some responsibility?

3. Have you got objectives for which large numbers of people are going to be essential? How will we make a difference?

4. What are your key moments? When can people intervene and make a difference?

5. How are we a threat? How do we provoke the pushback that creates movements — where Goliath goes after David, when Gandhi or Mandela or Rosa Parks got thrown in jail?

6. Can we reach the decision makers directly? If not, what are the leverage points or power constituencies that we CAN reach that have the ear, or some other part of the anatomy, of the decision maker?

7. What makes our campaign cool and sexy?  What makes it witty? What makes it hilarious?

8.  How can we get others to carry our message? Who are the Third Party Validators who can say exactly what we say, but won’t be dismissed by the people we need to sway?

9.  What parts of our work can others do better? What part of the work are we uniquely suited to do? How do we focus on those things, and let others do what they do best?

10.  How do I know that others are involved? How do we create the sense of collective, of community, of movement? What are the signals by which we recognise each other, where are our gathering points, where are we counted?

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.”

I always saw Greenpeace as fitting nicely into that old “Think Different” Apple ad.  So in the early days of the “Green my Apple” campaign, when the company was (gently, lovingly) lambasted for the number of toxic chemicals in its products,  I was disappointed at how Indifferent and Undifferent they were thinking.  Steve went ballistic at a taste of his own medicine. He dug in.

But he had a problem. Because we weren’t actually talking to him — we were talking to his customer base.  He could afford to ignore Greenpeace.  But his customers? To them he has to listen. And when we said “We love our mac. We just wish it came in green” we were speaking with their voice, and they liked what they heard.  In the best Lao Tzu style, we won without ever going to war, when the words “A greener Apple” appeared on apple.com, linking to a policy which delivered on nearly all of our demands.

But this month, Apple showed its true colors as a renegade by leading the pack in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics in the number one slot, and the launch of the iPad kept Apple true to their green word: it’s PVC, BFR, arsenic and mercury free. Which means that if it ends up in India or China or Africa at the end of its lifecycle, to be cooked apart by 12 year old scavengers recovering precious metals or components, it won’t be poisoning them.  The world is measurably better for this. And by greening Apple, Jobs is helping green the whole electronics industry.

But there’s more to be done.  The green iPad shouldn’t be operating in a brown cloud.  It shouldn’t be powered by dead dinosaurs. It shouldn’t be running its thin, sleek screen on electricity with a fat flatulent carbon footprint.  Apple has the power to change minds, to change the world, and they should use it more to ensure that the cloud computing sector, our servers, our infrastructure, that internet that you’re holding in your hands when you hold an iPad is powered by green energy.  When Apple walked out of the US Chamber of Commerce over disagreements about the Chamber’s stance on global warming, they were showing the kind of leadership we all need.  Keep it up, Apple. Be that renegade, that energy revolutionary, that crazy force which refuses to accept the world as it is, but demands it to live up to a personal vision of what it could be.  

Because the world needs those rebels now. It needs the renegades who won’t accept an unacceptable status quo, and who push the human race forward.

Take it further, Apple. Kick it up a notch. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the only ones who do.

We’ve been interviewing for more than a few staff positions here at Greenpeace International, and I’ve been sitting in more interviews than I’d like. They’re exhausting! High significance, need for constant high-energy attention to meaning and nuance, and they require me to summon my inner organizational representational extrovert, which I can do, thank you very much, but which costs me in energy. (A natural extrovert finds extroversion exhilarating – me it stretches like a bungee cord.)

But one thing I really enjoy is when internal candidates apply, and I get to peek into my colleagues’ CVs — it seems there’s always surprises, even when I think I know someone well. As there was last week, when I learned that someone I’ve worked with off an on for more than a decade was working to oppose the stationing of Cruise and Pershing missiles in England, at the same time that I was opposing their manufacture and deployment Stateside. Never knew. Should have guessed.

I’ve been reflecting on that time a lot lately, as I’ve thought about the role of the TckTckTck campaign — the public face of the Global Coalition for Climate Action (GCCA) — in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit. › Continue reading…

It’s been a good week for get out of jail cards — just don’t let anybody tell you they’re free.

At the beginning of the week, I had two lots of friends who were facing the prospect of spending this weekend in jail.  One set in South Dakota facing sentencing for draping a banner on Mt Rushmore reminding Obama that history honors leaders, not politicians, and his chance to make history is in turning the tide on climate change.  In Denmark, the Red Carpet Four had already served 20 days in jail without trial, across Christmas and New Years, with no visitation rights.  They were being punished, in effect, for making monkeys of Danish security when they breezed into a Head of State dinner hosted by the Queen.   A limousine, a Tux, an off-the-rack dress, and a motorcade with the Greenpeace logo and the words “Planetary Emergency, Authorized Personnel” on it was all it took to get an audience with 120 world leaders, whom they asked to drop the caviar forks, put a cork in the champagne,  and go make a climate treaty.

In both cases, prosecutors likened the activists, in words or deeds, to terrorists. Threats to democracy.  Law breakers.

Law Breakers? We’ll take that. But terrorists they are not, and when it comes to Democracy, those who take up civil disobedience in the name of a cause are Democracy’s champions, not its enemies.

Rosa Parks was not a terrorist. Gandhi was not a terrorist. Law is made when law is broken, and truly big change seldom happens from within the system. Somebody has to throw the tea overboard to get things moving.

Right now, our elected leaders are failing to address the gravest threat our world has ever faced. The longer the inaction prevails, the more action we’re going to see by civil society.  More and more people, mostly, but not all, young, will choose to take non-violent direct action — because civil disobedience is a last resort. It’s what a movement does when the legal channels have been exhausted. When the courts and the politicians and the corporates have been asked, and failed to respond.  The people who make that choice are not criminals.  They’re heroes.

I found it somewhat ironic that in the case of the Mt Rushmore folks, most were given sentences that involved community service.   Now that’s a case where the punishment fits the crime.  Because in fact, a community service is exactly what they rendered when they raised their voices, as big as a mountain, to let Obama know that we’re not the only ones watching — the future is.

And when the history of climate change is written, the real criminals will be outed, and they were not the folks who faced the possibility of jail this weekend.

Ok, too much panetone trifle over the holidays, let’s start back into the New Year light.

I remember back in the 90s being very excited about an application with which you could apply a virtual post-it note to a web page. We thought this was killer — you could surround greenwash pages with reality checks, you could cross-reference pages trumpeting nuclear power as a global warming solution with all the reasons the Kyoto scientists refused to put it in the credits column. But of course, it required a dedicated app for those who posted and those who read the notes, so we had a very small community of people reading one another’s comments. The app never took off in a way that it really made a hit.

But twitter has an API call that allows you to gather references to any page into a single set of tweets, and some clever git named Gombo has made a Chrome extension called Twitter reactions out of it. Hey Presto, post-it notes for the web, and another great way to do page commentary and brand monitoring with Twitter.

Thanks, Gombo!

I’m going without food today, for the first time in my life, in solidarity with the seriously hard-core folks doing the Climate Justice fast, some of whom have been more than 40 days on only water and electrolytes.

There was a proposal some time ago for Greenpeace to call for a global fast to ask heads of state to sign a fair, ambitious, binding climate deal, and a long wrangle about the conditions that make fasts effective and the conditions that make them useless. I was opposed to it as an organizational tactic, and I remain so.

What I do today is a personal choice, one which I take out of respect for what the long-term fasters are doing. I’m in awe of their personal committment to the cause of stopping runaway climate change. They’ve engaged me emotionally, and I’ll proudly stand with them for a day with a tiny symbolic shadow of their action.

Greenpeace Board Chair Lalita Ramdas made me think hard when in her blog, she came at it from the angle of personal discipline. Making a choice, and sticking to it. › Continue reading…

I wrote this in 2001, at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg which was considering [urgent] action on climate change. I hope, that as Ministers now consider the draft agreement for [urgent] action at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, and Heads of State arrive to begin wrangling, that things will be different.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being a Head of State at the Earth Summit Copenhagen Climate talks

Hi kids! Have you been watching the proceedings of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg UN Climate talks in Copenhagen? Do you wish that YOU too could take bold commitments to save the world and turn them into mushy language full of loopholes, wiggle room, and ambiguity GUARANTEED to ensure you never have to lift a finger to save the planet???

Well now you CAN! Let’s pretend you’re a real world leader in Johannesburg Copenhagen! Here’s what you should do when handed a draft agreement.

Let’s say this draft contains the following statement:

All countries agree to phase out nuclear power.

Isn’t that just awful? So clear and so simple a child could have written it, but it’ll mean a lot of work for you when you get home. It may also make some of those pals of yours a little bit upset. They might not buy you any more elections! So let’s swing into action!

Now, if you’re a national delegate, you can tell the Chairman that you want to put that statement in brackets. Brackets mean you’re not entirely happy with that text, and you’d like to strangle it. Go on. Any country can do it, all by themselves, for any reason at all. Brackets are cheap, so sprinkle them liberally throughout any text that suggest actually doing anything! It’s so easy!!!

[All countries agree to phase out nuclear power.]

Now that you’ve got it in brackets, let’s add some cool inactivating phrases. Personally, I’ve always liked “take measures to.” Watch!

[All countries agree to {take measures to} phase out nuclear power.]

Still, that’s a bit too crisp. So let’s reach into our document hat and find another nifty nugget. How about “have instruments in place”??? Sounds like lawyers will get involved! Now THAT ought to slow things down! › Continue reading…