"Enough power for the great transformation?" - this is the question of the 4th Spiekeroog Climate Talks with a public production in five acts, which will take place on the East Frisian North Sea island from 22 to 24 November.
More than 30 renowned representatives from the social sciences, humanities and cultural sciences from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands will discuss problems of how society deals with climate change. Prof. Dr Reinhard Pfriem from the Oldenburg Center for Sustainability Economics and Management (CENTOS) at the University of Oldenburg, Prof. Dr Wolfgang Sachs from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy and Prof. Dr Ludger Heidbrink from the Department of Philosophy at Kiel University will be the scientific chairs. The moderator is André Karczmarzyk, organisational consultant and partner at ecco ecology + communication Unternehmensberatung GmbH.
The special feature of this year's expert discussions is that members of the Bremen Theatre Laboratory ensemble will work together with the participants and present the results in a public production in five acts on the evening of 24 November.
The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) has given its main report for 2011 the title "World in Transition: Social Contract for a Great Transformation". "An energetic shift towards sustainability is necessary to ensure that people have a future worth living at the end of the 21st century," explains Pfriem. The economist names five concrete attempts at transformation that will be focussed on at the conference: "1. 'Urban gardening', i.e. the return of productive gardens to the city and the question of urban subsistence in increasingly urban societies; 2. socially and ecologically oriented technology development and design; 3. 'social entrepreneurship', i.e. socially oriented entrepreneurship and companies with strategic growth limitation; 4. 'transition towns', i.e. cities in transition and sustainable urban development; and 5. regional development and strengthening regional economic cycles." By critically reflecting on these movements, the conference participants want to arrive at empirically substantive and theoretically substantial results. The overarching question is whether these and other social transformation movements have enough strength and enough in common to lead us into a future worth living.