MARA LUCIA DE SANTOS (Translation): Sustainability for me starts with responsibility. We have to be responsible for each other - people living in the condominiums, those who live on the street. We can't build a society nor sustainability, at the cost of the people. Mara Lucia de Santos does not use the word sustainability very often. She uses the word survival instead. It is something she knows a lot about. MARA LUCIA DE SANTOS (Translation): I was a street kid and through the waste and recycling, I was rescued. I rescued my dignity, found my family again and I began to have sustainability, a very fashionable word today. But 70 years ago, no one talked about sustainability. We talked about the hard survival of the poor. She became a cart puller and worked her way up off the streets to running this recycling co-op. Mara employs only street kids. She want them to have the same chance that she had to climb up. GIRL (Translation): I love it here, I love it because everyone is like a family here. Mara may be big-hearted but show has nothing but scorn for the politicians who came to her country for the recent UN summit. MARA LUCIA DE SANTOS (Translation): I have felt this way since I was little, coming from a very poor family, so the Rio+20 conference only proved to me again that they are incapable of loving any kind of being, any existing thing on this planet, because they don’t worry about being, but about having. RIO EARTH SUMMIT, JUNE 1992: Coming up here today I have no hidden agenda, I'm fighting for my future. Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few point on the stock market. 20 years ago a 12-year-old girl stood up in front of the world leaders and she pleaded for change. RIO EARTH SUMMIT, JUNE 1992: My dad always says "You are what you do not what you say". Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown-ups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words. Thank you. That real earth summit went on to deliver historic agreements to national environmental protection but now, two decades on an environmental crisis appears closer than ever. And so the United Nations brought the world's leaders together again.. THOMAS STELZER, UN DEPT. OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS: The Secretary-General last year in Davos, addressed the world leaders of business and said the world is on a suicidal track. We need nothing less than a revolution. Thomas Stelzer is a UN Assistant Secretary-General the Head of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He said that leading up to the conference the UN had been trying hard to ring the alarm. THOMAS STELZER: Rio was the last and biggest opportunity to define a future strategy which helps us overcome what we have done wrong in the last decades. This is a copy of the draft text, a few days before the conference began, complete with the changes requested by member states. It’s awash with annotated objections leaving little hope of consensus even before the summit began. Thomas Stelzer says that he was disappointed that Rio's outcome did not go further. However he takes hope in developments outside the negotiations like Australia's own carbon tax. JULIA GILLARD, AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER: Thank you very much and thank you to our ambassador. THOMAS STELZER: Australia has shown us it is possible to introduce carbon pricing so this is something which is very innovative and which is not supported by many other countries so we look very carefully at how this will be implemented but this is something innovative which the world is taking note of. The conference sparked the predictable round of demonstrations. PROTESTER (Translation): The official Rio+20 is only empty talk, where the big politicians and owners of corporations are meeting only to discuss their own interests, only proposing a green economy, which is not the solution to environmental problems. But something had changed as well. Rather than simply protest at huge gathering of activists, and NGOs and entrepreneurs began forming their own collaborations, their parallel event was colloquially called the ‘people's summit’. There are many differences but surprising similarities between what is going on at the UN conference and what’s going on here at the people's summit. Both are truly global meetings, both have big players and minor actors and both are supposed to be talking change. The major difference seems to be cooperation while Rio+20 seemed deadlocked at the very beginning but at the people's summit everybody seems to cooperate, sharing strategies and making plans for change. Alnoor Lahda is a social media entrepreneur. ALNOOR LAHDA, SOCIAL MEDIA ENTREPRENEUR: Part of the beauty of these sorts of decentralised events is that like Occupy the best thing to come out of it is the contacts. So you meet all these amazing groups, other activists, you meet other campaigners who want to address the structural causes not just get involved in the process. Lahda took those new contacts and new ideas back to New York where at the office of the NGO, Purpose, he and his colleagues are trying to crack the difficult question of what comes next in the global change game. ALNOOR LAHDA: Yes, like this group gets to be a part of the network. You know what I mean? Purpose leverages social media to mobilise activists the world over around common goals. 2011 was the year when this kind of digital activism came into its own. ALNOOR LAHDA: One of the things I spend a lot of my time thinking about right now is the new tools of organising and globalising people, they have shown how we can deconstruct and destroy what exists and for me the promise of this is how we can use those tools to actually build something and build viable alternatives. In an effort to engage with these new forces, the UN organised event such as this, the Youth Innovators Forum, this was the only room I walked into at the main Rio+20 Summit, that was actually buzzing with energy. It was a discussion between a group of young entrepreneurs and elder advisors hand picked by the Secretary-General himself. RIO+20 SUMMIT: We are the future generation that will have to live and work with all that has been implemented... It included media mogul, Ted Turner and economist Jeffrey Sachs. JEFFREY SACHS: The good news is that almost no progress was made for 20 years. So you have this great chance! It is all for you. And it is a kind of grim reality but one you should embrace. Julia Silverman is one of those young people embracing what Sax calls, ‘grim reality’ and she was also at Rio+20 making business connections for the rather surprising source of electrical power that she has created - it is called the Soccket, a football that generates and stores electricity while it is kicked around. JULIA SILVERMAN: It will not generate anything huge, it is not going to power a computer or anything like that, but the need we are trying to meet is not huge, the difference between darkness and light or no power and some power in your cell phone instead of having to walk to charge it or for a kid to do their homework to walk to a city street and sit under a lamp light. Julia used to work at one of the largest multinational institutions on the planet the World Bank. But she does not regret leaving. JULIA SILVERMAN: I feel like in the current climate I'm actually able to make a lot more change and create more impact as a social entrepreneur and a small business owner with the Soccket than I was in my previous role at the World Bank. The company Uncharted Play is not pretending they have solutions to global problems but they want the ball to do more than quietly replace harmful kerosene lamps in developing countries. JULIA SILVERMAN: We use the ball as a launching point for conversation about sustainability, about where energy comes from, so the scientific side then also the softer side, creativity, innovation, thinking creatively about problem-solving in your community using the resource that you have. Creative problem solving on a global scale is something that Jeremy Heimans knows all about, he is a co-founder of Purpose and one of the most influential players in the emerging field of mass mobilisation using new technology. JEREMY HEIMANS: This is a fundamental difference and sometimes people go …well the fact that you can do things more quickly or why does that matter really? It does matter enormously when the rest of the world is moving as fast as it is, when media and the news cycle moves as fast as it does. So if you want to organise people and mobilise them and make them effective as agents of change you have to catch them at those emotional spikes. Jeremy also co-founded Avaaz and GetUp! in Australia which he says has more active members than all of Australia's political parties combined. JEREMY HEIMANS: We have been forced in a way to go out and create these new sources of power which are not only designed to help pressure and change those old institutions that are also effectively in the business of creating new institutions that might be more flexible, responsive, nimble, adaptive. For Thomas Stelzer this deeper involvement by ordinary people could also be the key to more effective multi-lateral negotiations. THOMAS STELZER: It is not enough to go to the ballot every four years and to vote. We have to hold politicians accountable. This is what all this stake holder involvement is all about.. The politicians, when they leave to go home they get absorbed in their day the day problems. We have to remind them what they have committed to. We have to help them to comply with their commitments. RIO+20: We have been given document that barely moves us inches. We reject this text because it is a failure of ambition. It is a failure of vision. We reject this text! Despite accusations that the Rio summit failed to deliver real progress, the UN insist that multilateral negotiations were still the main game. REPORTER: Do you feel that young people and capital are going to have the take over for where multilateralism seems to be failing? THOMAS STELZER: They will not replace multilateralism, but they have to became important actors of multilateralism. Multilateralism provides the framework for global solutions. REPORTER: Does it still provide the framework for global solutions? THOMAS STELZER: It is the only framework we have. Whether multilateralism can ultimately deliver a solution to global warming will not be known for a long time. But Rio seems to have been a turning point, a moment of turning away from the most powerful institutions in the world and turning towards new and innovative solutions to the crisis at hand. JEREMY HEIMANS: I do not know yet how powerful these countervailing forces of which we are a part will become. I think that is a big unknown. MARA LUCIA DE SANTOS (Translation): We must understand, if we want the next generation to have water and to know what a birdie is, a tree, a butterfly, this has to begin with us.