By Carol Somplatsky-Jarman, Friday, December 11

Buzz, buzz…. Buzz, buzz, buzz…

I hear an intermittent buzz of Bill’s Blackberry, which goes off (accompanied by a flash of red light) every time an email comes in. 

It has been like this for more than a week, long before we arrived in Copenhagen. 

It is Friday, December 11, and we are preparing for a typical day at the Bella Center. We have arrived to get the Daily Program, Part Two, checked off the side-events that have made our list of finalists. 

“Climate Justice from Copenhagen:  Sharing the Global Effort Adequately and Equitably: with Christian Aid," definitely. 

Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Laureate for her work with the Greenbelt Movement in Africa) talking about her work, on the list. 

“An Integrated Science and Policy Approach for Real Impact, IIASA and TERI” by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis I think is a pass. 

The emails keep coming in.  The International CAN(the international environmental NGO umbrella group) is now at noon, not 2:00pm.  (Tough luck for folks not on a Blackberry).  The US CAN meeting will take place at 5:00pm in the Piet Hein room (our rooms are all named after famous Danes, and with each with a little biography lesson near the door—Karen Blixen, who under the pen name of Isak Dinesen wrote Out of Africa; Victor Borga, the famous comedic pianist who left Denmark just in front of the Nazis in 1940; Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, an expert in quantum mechanics and atomic structure who was also a member of the Manhattan Project).  For those like Piet Hein, we read the biography.  (Danish scientist, mathematician, designer, inventor, writer, and  poet, who joined the Danish Resistance in World War II and whose poems became anti-Nazi graffiti across Denmark*).  An email announces the Sierra Club meeting at 6:00 in the same room.