Climate change: From Copenhagen to Santa Rosa

The Santa Rosa activist and community organizer said hearing from indigenous people whose island was disappearing, or whose house had washed away, was powerful.

“You don't have to prove global warming to them, because they are living it every day,” she said at a meeting Saturday in Santa Rosa sponsored by the North Bay Institute for Green Technology, and Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based, non-profit agency.

About 50 people attended the event at the Finley Center.

She said she found another reality at the United Nations climate change conference in Denmark that was not being portrayed in the news media, which focused on orld leaders in attendance, like President Barack Obama and Prince Charles.

“All of a sudden, those people, those children, were real,” she said of people impacted by climate change. “They were right in front of me and I could hear their stories.”

Saturday's meeting, which was intended to help launch local actions to address climate instability, featured video testimonies from residents of various countries.

A man from the Yukon in Canada spoke of the melting permafrost and lakes going dry; a Peruvian mentioned glaciers disappearing in the Andes and excessive rain hurting crops. A resident of the low-lying Maldives Islands said he might have to leave his home because of rising sea levels linked to global warming.

Kevin Danaher, co-founder of Global Exchange and executive co-producer of the Green Festivals, said there needs to be a revolution where global values take precedence over “money values.”

“Corporate domination is what we're fighting against,” said Danaher, who compared that corporate model to the Titanic, which is sinking because it hit “the iceberg of unsustainability.”

One development that was lauded Saturday is the establishment of the Sonoma County Climate Protection Authority, described as a pioneering regional government body set up to address reducing carbon emissions.

The group, which has representatives from all nine cities in Sonoma County as well as the county government, is set to have its inaugural meeting on Tuesday.