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Following up on our coverage of World Wide Views on Global Warming in April, Sea Change returns to this event that gathered citizen opinions on climate change in more than 40 meetings around the world that just happened. Sea Change Correspondent Cimbria Badenhausen attended the meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston. She and Co-Host Bill Baue also spoke with WWViews representatives worldwide, both before and after the event.
Global governance, participatory democracy, and citizen activism on climate change all took a giant step forward on Saturday, September 26, 2009. That’s when over 4,400 ordinary people gathered at 44 citizen consultation meetings in 38 countries around the globe to brainstorm solutions to the climate crisis as part of World Wide Views on Global Warming. The results of these deliberations will be delivered to national policymakers when they gather in Copenhagen for the 15th Conference of Parties, or COP15. That’s where the climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol will be negotiated.
Correspondent Cimbria Badenhausen will be there to cover COP15 for Sea Change Radio (click here to give tax-deductible donations to support Sea Change’s coverage of COP15.) To prepare, she attended the World Wide Views meeting in Boston. But before, she got a chance to speak with Bill McKibben, author of the first major book on global warming in the late 1980s. McKibben serves as a World Wide Views Ambassador. He also directs 350.org, a global climate advocacy group named after the safe threshold of carbon concentration in the atmosphere, which we’ve already surpassed. He’s helping organize a day of climate action on October 24.
Next, Cimbria spoke with Lars Kluver, director of the Danish Board of Technology in Copenhagen and of World Wide Views, about the design behind the meetings.
In advance of the meetings, Cimbria spoke by skype with Chandra Shekhar Balachandran of the Centre for Social Markets in Bangalore. There, he managed one of the two World Wide Views meetings happening in India (the other happened in Delhi.)
After the meetings, Cimbria and Bill spoke with Mohamed Nada of CARE Egypt, where he managed the World Wide Views meeting for that country.
The day after the meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, participant Larry Raglin shared his experience.
Finally, Bill and Cimbria spoke with Dick Sclove, founder of the Loka Institute, who helped conceive and design World Wide Views. 
And, he helped troubleshoot on the day of the meetings when he got an urgent e-mail from the WWViews global secretariat in Denmark, asking him to contact one of the National Partners. Here he is in a stairwell at the Boston Museum of Science, Skyping with Marilyn Effen in Bolivia.