Over the past few weeks Groupe Intellex has devoted space to raise awareness of and prepare delegates for the forthcoming UN Conference on Sustainable Development taking place in June.
We have now brought these editorials together in a single edition to make it easier for readers to navigate and comment on the series. Some of these have appeared in previous posts but together they add up to a fairly weighty reading list that delegates might turn to in the 6 weeks remaining before the mechanisms of global diplomacy and lobbyists for corporate interests seek consensus and commitments that might flourish more effectively than those made in 1992.
Our focus kicked off with Marit Hendriks’ piece on ‘Sharing Experiences‘ and the need to learn from others without being tempted to ‘reinvent the wheel’.
This was followed by another essay on ‘the end game for the next generation‘ – an editorial that has been widely shared around the world.
Distracted by racing cars cavorting in the Middle East the short piece ‘What, on Earth Day?‘ made us think more about the silo mentality that compartmentalises discussions that are, or should be, interconnected.
The publication of the Royal Society’s report ‘People and the Planet’ gave us opportunity to start the ‘Ready for Rio‘ series and then the Ellen MacArthur Foundation weighed in with a brilliant exploration of ‘The circular economy‘ – by far the most widely read of our trilogy to date.
Finally – not least because you now have more than enough homework before Rio+20 – we reflected on a more spiritual view – taking the thoughts of Dr Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury – and suggesting amongst other things that our fixation on growth, markets and the commoditisation of everything was somewhat ‘eccentric’.
Groupe Intellex will, in the next few weeks, seek out and publish the news and views of others (your inputs are welcome) and will then report on the outcomes of Rio+20 and the prospects for further progress toward sustainable development.
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