Global Forum: Something New Under the Sun

May d’Marie, a retired librarian from Sacramento, is handing out apple slices cooked in a solar stove at her side.

“This is where you cook only with the sun--no gas, no electricity or any of that other stuff,” she said.

D’Marie is one of thousands of environmental activists participating in the Global Forum, a serious-minded carnival of non-governmental organizations that is being staged in conjunction with the U.N. Conference on the Environment and Development.

Occupying a bayside park near downtown Rio, the forum offers a polyglot plethora of speeches, panel discussions, workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions, video shows, publicity stunts, brochures and press releases. Some of the participants are lobbying for environmental causes at the official U.N. conference, while others are drafting agreements with other non-governmental groups intended to complement positions taken by the official Earth Summit.

D’Marie, a volunteer with a group called Solar Box Cookers International, is cooking apples with sunshine. Her stove is a foil-lined cardboard box with a glass top and a foil reflector.

“It can get as hot as 150 degrees centigrade or 300 Fahrenheit,” she says.

“What do you do if it’s raining?” someone asks.

“What do you do if you don’t have gas?” D’Marie answers. “You have to find some other way.”

Like many participants in the Global Forum, D’Marie is promoting alternative energy sources to help reduce the use of carbon fuels, save rivers from hydroelectric dams and avoid the use of nuclear power plants. Others emphasize protecting natural resources, defending the rights of indigenous peoples, improving urban environments, relieving poverty and slowing population growth. It is a festival of ideas for environmental action.

The park has been turned into a mini-city of 35 large tents--sleek structures of green and white plastic--and walkways lined with booths and stands. Near the Solar Box stand are others occupied by such organizations as the Zambia Alliance of Women, the Amazonia AIDS and Health Project, the Third World Development Studies for Better Asian Life, the World Meteorological Organization, Future Earth and Friends of the Earth International.

One tent is used by Indians from North and South America, others by women’s groups and Japanese non-governmental organizations. There are even tents for some government-affiliated agencies, such as the Kuwait Ministry of Information and Environmental Protection Council.

At the Kuwaiti tent entrance, which is lined by potted palms, a small man sprinkles people coming in with rose water from an elaborate brass sprinkler. “For the heat,” he says. It is indeed hot under Rio’s tropical sun.

Inside, a video is showing oil pollution in the Persian Gulf from the war. “Globules begin to sink to the bottom, carpeting the sea bed,” the video narrator says. A photo exhibit documents other war damage to the Kuwaiti environment.

Nearby, occupied by a coalition of non-government groups called Global Heart, a green chalkboard invites graffiti. “May God help us about opening people’s minds,” someone has written.

“We are the tent of the unheard voices,” says Lysa Elgin, a volunteer for Global Heart. Inside, author Marina Raye of Manitou Springs, Colo., is about to conduct a workshop on “Love in Action.”

“I do a process that I call re-Earthing, and that’s processing conflict within different species and letting people take the species and take it back to let them access its earliest conflict,” says Raye. “If we can heal the earliest conflict in the earliest memory and in our cellular memories, if we can heal it, we can express our power and oneness.”

All the tents produce a greenhouse effect that can cause profuse perspiration. At the women’s tent, a large audience suffers in the heat as a panel discusses biotechnology.

Vandana Shiva of India, the panel’s moderator, complains: “I’ve been sitting here sweating it out like all of you and thinking of the people who build structures like this, who put up the tents and cover them with plastic and think they are being ecological.”

The Global Forum announced last week that it was short of meeting its $11.5-million budget by about $2 million, so participants are collecting donations. American feminist Bella Abzug passes her famous hat around in one meeting. In another, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. asks for a hat to be passed.

“I’ll start this with $300,” Brown says as he starts counting his money. Then: “All I’ve got is $200, but that’ll start it off.”

About $1,600 was collected at the session.

Other important personages and celebrities who have come to Rio for Earth Summit events include Placido Domingo, Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustav, the Dalai Lama, Jacques Yves Cousteau, John Denver, Shirley MacLaine, Ted Turner, Jane Fonda and the Beach Boys. President Bush and scores of other presidents and prime ministers are scheduled to arrive for the U.N. conference later in the week.

But other personages, famous in the world of non-governmental organizations, are the VIPs of the Global Forum. They include Charles de Haes and Gordon Shepherd of the World Wide Fund for Nature, Barbara Bramble of the National Wildlife Federation, Catherine Porter of the U.S. Citizens Network, Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute, Peter Padbury of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, Martin Holdgate of the World Conservation Union and Russell Mittermeier of Conservation International.