IEF in the Netherlands
The International Environment Forum organized a lecture at Wageningen University in the Netherlands on 24 April 2019 with IEF President Arthur Dahl speaking on "Global Governance for the 21st Century". The lecture was arranged by Sylvia Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, who teaches at the university, and who also held a seminar on science and religion, and organized a workshop on quantifying the unquantifiable looking at how to measure people's relationship to nature and biodiversity.
IEF members Maja Groff, Wendi Momen and Arthur Dahl also participated in the 2019 Justice Conference at the de Poort Conference Centre near Nijmegen on 19-22 April. The theme was "Actions that Heal, Narratives that Reconcile: Actualising Justice and Unity".
Arthur Dahl gave the opening plenary on "Responding to the Migrant Crisis: Educating Receiving Communities", and shared another plenary with Maja Groff on "Building Global Unity for Global Governance Reform: Towards 10,000 Conversations". Maja and Arthur also co-lead two workshops on "The Establishment of Peace as a Duty of the Entire Human Race: A Study of the Letter of the Universal House of Justice of 18 January 2019" and "Perspectives on Comprehensive UN Reform and Ensuring a Just International System".
There was a beautiful spirit and some very inspiring plenary presentations including representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States: Professor Funmilola Fagmamila, one of the founders of BLM, and Hawk Newsome, head of the New York Black Lives Matter. Their presentations reflected positive responses to issues of police racial bias and brutality. Other speakers discussed the importance of truth in healing and reconciliation, the problems with "us" versus "them" narratives, and rewriting narratives from his-stories to her-stories to our-stories. [photo album]
Last updated 9 May 2019