I attended a meeting in 2005 where well-intentioned people spent a lot of time and energy working on ideas to organize a conference, and much was discussed about what should be done to make this happen and why. This conference would take place at the same time as two other huge UN conferences, the Peace Forum and the Urban Forum, and presumably link the content of both in some way. The people at this meeting seemed to feel that their core issue of environmental sustainability would not be an integral part of these other conferences and neither would be effective without considering this.

It occurred to me, as it often does, that there was a huge set of assumptions directing the discussion and ideas for action of everyone in the room without once having those assumptions discussed or described directly. It was easy to see what some of these assumptions were by the language of the materials prepared, and very clear from what some individuals said. It was a very academic, homogeneous and somewhat anti-corporate group. The person from Industry Canada felt the need to introduce himself by apologetically explaining that despite his work, he was an active outdoorsman and bike-rider. Some of the young people there made no bones about the fact they believed big government and big business is invariably corrupt, but I wondered about who funded the building we were in, and where their money came from. And just how these assumptions contributed to sustainability...

My contribution was to state the critical need for us to do just that: identify the values, assumptions and expectations that each of us had brought along into the experience and discover their validity or at least the extent to which they were shared by the group, before building anything on this foundation.