With the world facing global crises of climate, war and inequality leading to mass migration and international division, how will Global People Power help solve these problems?
Global People Power aims to tackle global problems by having people register as Earth Citizens in order to cooperate across international borders. Earth citizens will soon be able to suggest, debate and vote on global policies.
At national elections they will prioritise their votes for politicians who themselves have become Earth Citizens. In this way “we can gain our democratic power and sovereignty in a globalised world,” says Aisha Hannibal, Co-Founder, Red Tent Directory.
The demonstration aimed to recruit new Earth Citizens and to ask people what they think the world could and should agree to act on together. (see film below)
Barnaby Flynn, membership recruiter for the Royal Society for the Protection of birds (RSPB) and founder of Global People Power argues that Extinction Rebellion (XR)’s democratic citizens’ assembly question process could be more ambitious.
He suggests that it needs to focus more on the systemic root causes of the climate catastrophe and mass extinction, what the key barriers and to solving them and what policies are needed to tackle them locally, nationally and globally. He wants to invite other XR rebels to become Earth Citizens too.
“I prefer Buckminster Fuller’s ideology [which] said don’t fight the existing system, make a new one which makes the existing one obsolete.”
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) advocates that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely to be due to human activities.
A Lumberjack, Will, who was protesting thinks that GPP will be useful for “people who are interested in what’s going on in the world [and] will hopefully network with each other.”
Barnaby Flynn suggests that right wing has used populism to gain widespread support and since this means more of society is right wing, the centre ground id therefore moving further and further to the right. With power, jobs and taxes moving beyond national borders and being further controlled by big businesses.
“Inequality [has grown] massively and corporations [demand] austerity of countries. They [demand] less workers rights and less environmental standards.”
“We need to realise our power. For many years [we’ve] accepted this crazy norm of inequality and those that have and those that don’t,” says Kelly, an actor at the demonstration.
“Financial crises [have been] driving immigration [resulting in] pressure around the world,” says Will.
“Its International Women’s Day [so] we want to overcome thousands of years of male dominated hierarchical power structures and we want to have more women suggesting policy proposals [to GPP] initially to redress that historic imbalance,” says Flynn.
.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }“We can celebrate and be proud of who we are and where we’re from and our culture but first and foremost recognise our common humanity because we’re going to need to do that if we’re going to work together to cooperate with each other,” says Flynn.