United For Progress: Climate Rescue Policy Center of America! by United For Progress

Wow, this is a wonderful vision. I am curious about how we will be connecting the different entities within Boulder before then going out and connecting different communities for change? 

In particular I have firmly established contacts in the upper echelon, the cream of the crop of Hollywood, and within MIT, in addition to a large body of various small communities engaged in sustainability practices ready to join up and engage once we are more official.

The main issue and you NEED to know this is exclusion, not just within those groups and communities but within Boulder CO. We need to open source this and invite people to share their ideas and we need to do it asap.

I should add what all this really is about is diplomacy, and in my mind being successful as a diplomat requires empathy, the desire to understand other people and their plight. My work began in 2006 after I emailed Noam Chomsky to ask what he thought about it, and began these projects which are more detailed here: Facebook.com/occupythisfilm and Facebook.com/Viewfinderfilmcollective

Essentially this is an empathy machine. It is designed to bring people together with the purpose of seeking understanding so that we might solve more complex and larger scale problems that effect us all. Very similar to how James Greyson and his projects such as Planet Leavers and Climate Rescue Center are against reductionism, my projects are heavily based on the political theories of Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky and my projects are designed to work only if we can bring people together in a meaningful way.
 

Hey my name is Eliot, I'm working on putting together a collaborative proposal for this colab. It sounds like what you are trying to do could be similar. It'd be awesome to meet over the phone or in person to talk about this contest. You can reach me at biomimicry@colorado.edu

Let me put it this way guy, I am the only grandson of General George S. Patton's personal chef, I'm not saying you should endorse me because if you don't I will refer you to the former Dean's Assistant from the Air Force Academy back in '55 (where my G15 Iron Chef grandpa resided for the first 3 graduating classes as Executive Chef) who you might know today as Buzz Aldrin.

But because I can cook better than my grandpa. As a promise. If you endorse me I guarantee on a  personal concert for you in my hometown at whatever bar you want that's here.

Sorry I have a sensitive chip on my shoulder because I was in 5th grade math classes in the first grade. But it's all love! #enormousgreenragemonster
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZTpLvsYYHw

It is clear that you have been putting some deep thought into many solutions. A point of clarification for me: is this proposal about bringing manufacturing back to a community or about creating platforms for innovation or something else? Because you have such a broad understanding of the whole, I may be missing something. For now, I am a bit confused on the scope of work you propose. It might be useful to tighten the scope up a bit. 

So with that in mind, I think it's only sensible that an organization like this seek to assist and bring together people in a way that is both fun and pragmatic, for a small community to respond to the threat of climate change, it only makes sense to me in some way to focus intensely on the particular needs and functions of that community, that is why I have described this in part as a way of helping the local economy, and there's a lot of other variables to consider as well, for one it's one thing to say put a measure on a local ballot to say ban fracking in that area but to continue getting fossil fuels from somewhere else.

There are a lot of simple ways that we can cut back on our carbon footprint by simply reducing our need to outsource goods and services and promoting local businesses, especially thinking about food and energy production, I think if we can find a way to tie that side of things in with shaping public policy on all levels to have a positive impact on climate change that we can maximize impact and create a robust hub that will continue to grow and give people a great reason to come together and collaborate.

In example, the notion of say providing a tax incentive or something for people in a community who make a notable effort to promote local businesses (such as a community garden and farmer's market or something along those lines), or for businesses that have a positive effect on the environment, might sound really great on paper but practically speaking for it to have any real effect and be a viable thing to do those businesses in turn would have to be successful and there would have to be a significant movement around that kind of local production. So inasmuch as this is about shaping public policy it's also about physically building and shaping communities to better facilitate and make use of those policies.

I'm thinking much less on the side of we need to do this because it's an urgent response to an environmental crisis and more on the side of we want to do this because working in this way will only make our communities much better, and help local economies flourish while at the same time having a positive effect on the environment.