Planetwork NGO, Inc is a San Francisco based network using information technology to address the pressing issues of our time – ecological, social & economic justice, and true democracy.

 

In 1998, Planetwork was founded in the recognition that the only phenomenon growing as fast as the global ecological crisis was the global communications system, and that these two phenomena must be connected in some meaningful way.

 

In 2000, Planetwork convened the first international conference on global ecology and information technology, and has continued to host major conferences and gatherings since then.

 

Long before anyone had ever heard of social media, Planetwork initiated the conversation around creating a distributed online social network to empower individuals and civil society, and published the ASN White Paper in 2003.

Jim Fournier – Cofounder, Chairman & President

has three decades experience in sustainable systems design, renewable energy and information technology – a former industrial designer, entrepreneur, software developer and industrial ecologist; left MIT to found an industrial design firm; owned and operated an international consumer goods design and manufacturing company; and developed 3D software as a Geometry Partner with Silicon Graphics. He currently serves on the board of Buckminster Fuller Institute, Channel G Network and Threshold Foundation’s Sustainable Planet Grants Committee.

 

He recently exited Biochar Engineering Corp after five years as the leading entrepreneur in biochar – a carbon sequestering soil amendment – one of the only effective ways to remove net carbon from the atmosphere. Biochar increases soil fertility and has great promise for mine-land reclamation, the focus of Biochar Solutions Inc., a profitable spin-off where he serves as Chairman. biocharsolutions.com

 

Currently working on a narrative that situates energy technology within the context of biological evolution; Meta-Nature shows how and why our moment in history may represent a shift point at the dawn of a new phase of climax technology leading toward a plateau of long-term stability. metanature.org

Elizabeth Thompson - Cofounder & Board Member

Has been a pioneer in the New York and San Francisco art and culture scenes for over 15 years. Her work has centered on the creation, dissemination and synthesis of leading edge ideas, people, and networks of communities across disciplinary boundaries and media platforms including the worlds of information technology, sustainability, global change activism, digital media, art, architecture and design.

 

Prior to founding Planetwork in 1998, Elizabeth survived a prolonged immersive experience in conceptual art as Director of the internationally acclaimed John Gibson Gallery in New York (1986-1993), and as a founding member of the Obie Award-winning experimental theater company: Cucaracha Warehouse Theatre, where she worked as both a performing artist and creator/producer of their renowned Summer Performance Art series (1987-1995). While with John Gibson Gallery, she designed and produced exhibitions in New York and throughout Europe including Basel, Frankfurt, Cologne, Zurich, Geneva and Paris. Immediately prior to fleeing the hyper post-modern New York art world for California’s utopian highways, she managed the studio of the renowned political artists, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. (1994-1996).

Author of Life Stories – interviews with 16 of the world’s leading environmental scientists. Heather would never tell you, but she is known and highly respected by a wide circle of the leading luminaries of our time.

Brad is the Founder of the Venture Collective, a 501(c)3 venture fund focused on systemic social change solutions. He is also Director of the Animation Archive for the Internet Archive, as well as investment analyst for digital media for the International Finance Corporation (venture subsidiary of the World Bank), and senior analyst for Jon Peddie Research. Called by Wired "an icon of 3D Animation," and by Animation Magazine as one of the "people to watch in 2001," Brad deGraf, has been a leader in computer animation in the entertainment industry since 1982, particularly in the areas of realtime characters, ride films, and the Web.

 

From 1992 through 1994 he was director of digital media at Colossal Pictures, which he and his partners spun off to create Protozoa (aka Dotcomix) for which he has served as Chairman, CEO, and Chief Creative Officer.

 

Credits include; Moxy, emcee for the Cartoon Network, the first virtual character for television; Floops, the first Web episodic cartoon; Peter Gabriel's Grammy award- winning video, Steam; Duke2000.com, a attempt with Garry Trudeau to get his Ambassador Duke character elected president; "The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera", the first computer- generated ride film; "The Last Starfighter", "2010", "Jetsons: the Movie", "Robocop 2", and many others.

 

He has a BA in Math from UC San Diego, and studied architecture at Princeton University and sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University.

An open-source, community-moderated, distributed platform for sentence-level annotation of the Web. If wherever we encountered new information, sentence by sentence, frame by frame, we could easily know the best thinking on it.

If we had confidence that this represented the combined wisdom of the most informed people--not as anointed by editors, but as weighed over time by our peers, objectively, statistically and transparently.If this created a powerful incentive for people to ensure that their works met a higher standard, and made it perceptibly harder to spread information that didn't meet that standard.

These goals are possible with today's technologies.

They are the objectives of hypothes.is.

The Internet, peer-reviewed.

 

Evolver is a social network for conscious collaboration. It provides a platform for individuals, communities, and organizations to discover and share the new tools, initiatives, and ideas that will improve our lives and change the world.

 

Evolver.net brings together a global community that shares similar interests and values. It provides a platform that helps us find the resources, peers, news and information that makes a difference. Evolver.net is collaboratively filtered and professionally curated so that the best material gets disseminated widely.

 

 

 

The VISION | of ONE Becoming ONE begins with connecting the individuals, communities, and organizations that exemplify a world whose foundational principles are love, collaboration, and social healing, and watching those principles in action spread through all sectors of business, society, and civic engagement. ONE Becoming ONE recognizes that the world is in a pivotal moment and that old systems are crumbling, while the new ones have not fully manifested. ONE Becoming ONE is a structural and technological midwife to the new systems, paradigms, and ways of being. We understand that birthing whole systems takes courage, compassion, precision, and love in action. We are committed to combining our resources, wisdom, skills and knowledge base to implement with acuity the most significant system of sharing and response ever seen on our planet. Thus we envision a global “Life Star” system that instantly mobilizes information and circuitry necessary for collaborative response in real-time.

 

The HISTORY | ONE Becoming ONE was founded in 2011 by Seattle Firefighter Erik Lawyer who recognized that current systematic response systems as seen in the Emergency Services and even those in place in the Military can be used for high-precision global mobilization, connection, and response for the purpose of healing, love, and open source collaboration. The same structures that have powered up some of our most effective systems-for better or worse-can now be overlaid for global transformation. Lawyer acts as a bridge-builder in that he represents a pillar of society exemplifying some of the most highly refined and trained. His inside view and understanding plus his ability to connect with a much wider circle to communicate love, compassion, and viable actions for change puts him right where we need him to be: as a spokesperson for ONE Becoming ONE and its ongoing efforts.

Climate of Denial film synopsis

 

Reuters reports that concerns over climate change have risen only slightly since 2009, as consumers around the world worry more about issues immediately impacting their daily lives.

 

Climate of Denial features interviews with leading climate visionaries and thinkers who tell of their life's work and what inspires their vision, and the struggle with our collective denial of the magnitude of the problem. Their personal stories and insights narrate of state-of-the-art imaging of precipitous glacial ice melt and atmospheric temperature changes that graphically illustrate well-studied but poorly understood phenomenon. Through the use of unconventional editing techniques, the film seeks to pull away the veil of denial by contextualizing the hard science with the psychological forces that compel us to look away.

 

The film opens with the words of Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his research on the hole in the Earth's ozone layer, and who first proposed the concept of "nuclear winter." When asked how he would explain global warming to his grandchildren, his poignant reply, "I haven't told them yet... I want them to remain children awhile longer..." speaks to our collective innocence and uncertainty in the face of a frightening unknown.

 

As humanity has never faced such a global game changer in our evolutionary history, there may be no mechanism within the collective psyche to comprehend the magnitude of the crisis. As Hollywood has placed global warming within the realm of science fiction, too frightening and abstract to truly consider, how will we find the courage to face the coming storm?

 

With Paul Crutzen, John Latham, Steven Salter and Jim Fournier. Other interviews under consideration include Jim Hansen, George Lakoff, and other leading thinkers and climate experts whose work may hold the keys to our future.

Lee Buric

Producer/Director

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

www.planetwork.net

 

December 10, 2010

UNFCCC COP 16

Cancun Mexico

 

Studies now conclusively show the imminent danger of ocean collapse due to increased ocean acidity as a result of CO2 emissions.

 

At the recent UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico, the highly respected Swiss NGO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature[1], convened a panel of marine biologists to present its latest findings on the danger of the collapse of ocean life due to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

 

New scientific consensus finds us now already at or above the CO2 level that could cause the collapse of ocean marine ecosystems within 50 years. This new information implies that even the most aggressive CO2 reduction targets currently under discussion would not avert the collapse of ocean life.

 

“Climate change may be all over the headlines, but it has an evil twin, caused by the same invisible gas, carbon dioxide, with more measurable, rapid and seemingly unstoppable effects," says Dan Laffoley, Marine Vice Chair of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas. “By answering the main questions people have about ocean acidification, we intend to break through the ignorance and confusion that exist, so everyone is clearer on what is happening and why this is a matter of the highest global priority."

 

To reverse the phenomenon and stabilize our oceans, CO2 emissions will need to be curtailed far more rapidly than previously understood, and large amounts of CO2 will need to be removed from the atmosphere, in order to return it to pre-1980 levels of 350 ppm or less. Current climate negotiations are still grappling with CO2 levels and associated temperature increases that far exceed what the scientific data suggests are sustainable.

 

“As the risk of crashing the food web in the oceans is now emerging as the most immediate danger among all global warming related phenomena, we must use this new information to cut through the well-funded denial and move forward together,” says Jim Fournier, Founder of Planetwork and CEO of Biochar Engineering Corp. “In order to protect our children and defend life as we know it, we will need to transform our society as completely and rapidly as the mobilization for WWII. Humanity now faces our most serious challenge; we will either rise to it or risk crashing the global ecosystem.”

 

[1] http://www.iucn.org

Global Cooling is an informal group of collaborating scientists from the US and UK examining Cloud Brightening; an idea for creating a controlled global cooling to balance global warming resulting from burning fossil fuel. This group is organized by Dr John Latham, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, who first published the idea, which involves seeding marine clouds to increase their reflectivity.