Archive | October, 2020

Birth Mark: Reminding Ourselves Why We’re Here, Dr. Robert Zuber

25 Oct
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The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.   Mark Twain

Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.  Diane Setterfield

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.  William Blake

A birth-date is a reminder to celebrate the life as well as to update the life.  Amit Kalantri

Lowly seeds are nourished in the earth, and then later the ravishing blooms appear. Moderata Fonte

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.  T.S. Eliot

You were born with a broken heart.  From the cracks of it love oozes out.  Lidia Longorio

This weekend represents, for me at least, the annual ritual associated with the closely aligned birthdays of the United Nations (important) and my own (not particularly important). 

This is not a “major” birthday for me, but it certainly is for the UN, marking 75 years of existence and generating strong and diverse assessments from those across a wide spectrum – those who stress the indispensability of the UN to global peace and progress and those who feel disheartened that an institution birthed in great promise and even love from the “broken heart” of a devastating world war could have squandered portions of that potential to the political machinations of its member states.

Indeed, these and other assessments are understandable.  The UN often comes across very often as a stodgy and predictable bureaucracy with member states calling the shots and represented by diplomats whose main task, it sometimes seems, is to put the actions of their own countries in the best possible light, even when that light is dim at best.   The UN is also brimming with NGOs, a number with large brands and budgets, that often pursue single-issue agendas and struggle endlessly over resolution language that governments are mostly free to accept or ignore as they see fit.  Moreover, regarding the core issue on which most people assess the UN – peace and security – the UN’s Security Council is often mired in political in-fighting that impedes its ability to prevent or resolve fighting elsewhere.

On the other hand, the UN is the place where a wide array of pressing concerns are raised for potential resolution in multilateral spaces; indeed the only “spaces” where such resolution is often feasible. Even while national interests temper levels of global urgency that many of these issues demand, that so many pieces to a more peaceful and sustainable world find meaningful expression in UN conference rooms and (now) online forums is a tribute to the norm-building across borders and regions for which the UN seems uniquely suited, even if circumstances on the ground don’t always shift sufficiently in response.

Given this, it turned out to be quite a good birthday week for the UN, with some hopeful progress on peacebuilding highlighted in Central African Republic and Abyei and with a variety of important discussions taking place across all six General Assembly committees.  Of particular interest to us were discussions focused on protecting free speech for academics and other citizens; on burdens to nations and communities arising from excessive external debt; on the status of minority groups  scapegoated for the spread of COVID and its economic consequences; on preserving the dignity and rights of persons displaced from their homes due to climate change and armed violence; and on the struggle to create safer spaces for journalists and civil society advocates seeking to report on and put a stop to war and human rights abuses.

There was much more this week where this came from, underscoring the UN’s role as a place where key issues and themes – virtually all with implications for international peace and security — can get at least some of the policy attention they deserve and, in the most successful instances, actually shift circumstances in families and communities for the better. 

Also in this 75th birthday week, the UN was able to announce two major breakthroughs, a cease fire agreement to pave the way for reconciliation and reconstruction in Libya and the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Both admittedly have long hills to climb before full sovereignty and sustainable peace is obtained for Libya, and before the nuclear weapons powers (not signatories to the treaty) agree to renounce their weapons rather than modernize them. And yet both bring hope and even inspiration to the global table, and both are testament to the UN’s increasing determination and skill in mediation, to the larger policy role being exercised by small island and other small states on issues from climate to nuclear weapons, and to the determination of NGOs long-seeking a pathway out of dangerous impasse that has for too long kept these weapons at the core of national security doctrines.

And so it goes for the UN whose trajectory is not so much unlike our individual ones – potential achieved and denied; promises kept and abandoned; changes to habits of work welcomed and resisted, truths about what can and cannot be accomplished shared and hidden.   For the UN there is much to celebrate but also to confess, to fix, certainly to “update.”  In that “twilight” in which the UN continues to bask, we must acknowledge that while we might not have evolved so much as a species, the world has shifted dramatically since the UN’s birthing.  And these shifts are now more rapid, more ominous, more complex. The UN’s relevance going forward  is thus related to how we mange those shifts; how skillful, urgent and inclusive our responses to current threats and challenges can become; and how resolved  we are to keep from “kicking the can down the road” for younger generations to deal with.

As individuals, as members of families and communities, as diplomats and policy wonks, we exist in our own twilight, between birth and death, between relevance and obscurity, between promise and fulfillment.  And for people like me who tend to celebrate too little and ponder too much, the “mark” of our birth lies in continually ascertaining why we are here, what our purpose is, what we most need to do, share and inspire before our own lights are finally extinguished.

This is a specific kind of “updating” which can be as relevant to the institutions we work with as it is for ourselves.  What is calling us to urgent action now?  How do we ensure that all our skills, wisdom and experiences remain in play?   Who do we need to reach – and reassure – that everything that can be done to uphold rights and improve circumstances is being done, that risks are willing to be taken to ensure that promises remain binding, that the most hopeful of our dreams are truly becoming incarnate, and that we refuse ourselves the luxury (even arrogance) of taking credit for resolving problems that didn’t need to occur in the first place?

In a world of threats such as climate change and biodiversity loss that are recognized but not yet remedied; of a spreading pandemic and the deaths, distrust and destroyed livelihoods it leaves in its wake; of political agreements and resolutions signed and then ploddingly implemented; of weapons banned but not renounced by those who hold them; none of us can say with certainty where this current iteration of human progress and folly is headed.  What we can say with some certainty is that the future will require us to break free from some of the habits and their justifications that keep us in the mode of chasing after crises rather than minimizing risks, of hiding our light behind our bureaucracies and their mandates, of consulting the same voices and expertise over and over rather than considering fresher (if not necessarily better) alternatives.  

As part of my own “updating,” I plan to spend some of this birthday and beyond looking intently for those “lowly seeds,” those voices and potentials largely unheeded, those stories of birth and inspiration largely ignored; those who actually have potential to generate the “ravishing blooms” which we have almost forgotten can exist at all, let alone exist for all.  If the UN is to turn its own 75th birthday into conditions for many returns (and we genuinely root for that outcome), it must better honor its own capacity to nourish inclusion, not only with regard to the issues and crises to be resolved, but with regard to the full range of persons with their own “birth marks” who are able and eager to contribute.

Ballot Blunders: Election Influence in a Partisan Age, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Oct
Oregon's vote-by-mail gets scrutiny from inside, outside state

To win the people, always cook them something savory that pleases them.  Aristophanes

Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. Will Durant

Good governance in a democracy is impossible without fostering in our communities and the electorate, an appetite for leaders who are committed to respectful conduct. Diane Kalen-Sukra

The wish to be elected cannot be more important than the wish to do the right thing.  Victor Bello Accioly

An election must be more than a search for honesty in a snake pit.  Stewart Stafford

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.  Alfred E. Smith

This is likely to be news to none of you, but the US is holding an election for president in a bit over two weeks.

And while national elections are frequently held with greater and lesser degrees of integrity – voting results New Zealand and Bolivia have recently attracted a fair amount of attention in the global press – the US presidential race has become something of an obsession (if not a circus), especially for policymakers and poll watchers in many global regions.

Despite (or perhaps due to) our commitment to weigh in on national issues only to the extent that they impact multilateral effectiveness, we have shared more of this obsession than would normally be the case.  It is a temptation at the ready to spend endless ink critiquing one’s own country under the guise of interrogating multilateral processes.  It is a temptation we have largely avoided over the past 20 years, though challenges to multilateral cooperation on pandemics, food insecurity and climate change have never seemed as daunting – and untimely – as they do at present.

Some of this recent obsession has a “bull in a china shop” feel to it.  Even after the past few years of attempting to roll-back US engagements in the world, my country retains an outsized influence in economic, military and even to some extent in diplomatic circles such as the UN Security Council.   And as citizens and leadership gawk in amazement (at times even pity) at the acrimony and disinformation that has infected our political life – or at least forced it out into the open – many fear the implications for small states and vulnerable peoples when rich and powerful states see their often sub-optimal checks and balances heading completely off the rails. 

When the largest animals scuffle, the smaller ones have the sense to move away.  But in a world that is as interconnected as this one now is, there is simply nowhere to run.  Many smaller states – in Latin America certainly but also in other global regions – have had to adjust with alarming frequency to the political and economic whims of their northern neighbor.  But in this time of pandemic and security unpredictability, when that neighbor seems to have less and less interest in honoring agreements and championing core norms and values meant to bind states in collaborative action, the chills felt across multiple global regions are no trifling matter.

And so this US election does matter to many beyond national borders as well – a referendum not on our hegemony so much as our sanity, not on our irascibility so much as our reliability.   Despite our laundry list of hypocrisies and self-exemptions based on some perverse notion of exceptionalism, there has been some sense at least that the values we say we admire – and that infuse most of the multi-lateral charters that we once sponsored and from which we now seek our distance – were deemed ours to uphold as well to champion for others.  There was some sense, albeit one now largely relegated to our rearview mirror, that to whom much is given, much is expected; that blessings are to be shared more than hoarded and that others have a right to judge us as we often judge others — by our deeds and not by our carefully and often self-righteously crafted brands.

As elections draw near and anxiety levels rise within and across borders, a couple of points on where we currently stand.  First a reminder that Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to which the US accedes — conveys to all people “universal and equal suffrage,” which pertains not only to the right to vote, but to participate in civic life and have access to public services.    These are rights which the US has steadfastly – if imperfectly – sought to encourage in other states. 

Thus the shock from many global quarters as measures to disenfranchise domestically have been as numerous and shameless as the disinformation that accompanies them.  Thus the shock as our pre-electoral discourse lays out political competition among erstwhile domestic enemies seeking each others’ ruin rather than among citizens who share a franchise and a constitution.   Thus the shock as domestic gun sales go through the roof as though we were preparing not for a peaceful transition of power but for a violence-prone showdown among people whose differences – real and provoked — can no longer be reconciled.

As the agencies of the UN know full well, elections, are a pre-condition for good governance, not its guarantor.  But elections matter most when they are conducted with proper regard for rights of access, and when they are free of fraud and intimidation, as they can then contribute to elevating the legitimacy and authority of the duly elected government.  To those ends, many millions in the US are now determined to cast their ballots, even if it takes a full day to exercise their right to do so, and even if it is often with fingers crossed that their ballots will not arbitrarily be discarded or “harvested;” fingers crossed that the local heroes who have committed to deliver massive numbers of ballots by mail, who will count and certify ballot totals, and who strive to minimize illegal impediments to the legal exercise of a franchise, can somehow help produce a result that we can, quite literally, all live with.

In this context, the campaign season for this election is as troubling as any potential outcome itself, for it reminds us once again of how far we have fallen from the grace that our founders sought to bestow on those who would follow, a grace that we have sullied through selfishness and willful ignorance, through self-justifying lenses of partisanship and a corrupted nationalism which, as lamented this week in the General Assembly’s Third Committee by UN Special Rapporteur Okafor, “obscures multilateral benefits.”  Added to this is our propensity for short-termism that soils our own bed and risks a world for our progeny bereft of any bed at all.

Though we are hardly alone in this, we in the US have slowly chipped away at the effectiveness and credibility of our structures of governance.  We seem more willing than ever in my lifetime to gouge and humiliate each other in order to “win” and, if victory eludes us, to then deliberately and systematically undermine those who prevail even before they are formally inaugurated.  As the Washington Post wondered this week, can any election promise a viable path out of the extreme partisanship that has marooned us on ever-distant islands of opinion and practice?

We’re about to find out.  If you are in the US and legally able to do so, please vote.  If you are not so authorized, help us prepare for the possibility of fresh assaults on the integrity and legitimacy of multilateral processes that we and so many others have strived to uphold.   In either case, we would do well to prepare as best we can for choppy seas that will take all our wisdom and patience to calm and will leave more than a few immobilized with some incarnation of post-electoral nausea.  This election might actually result in a path that takes health disparities and climate threats more seriously, that honors more of our international commitments and shares governance-related information more transparently.  But an election alone will not be enough to rebuild trust in each other, to restore credibility within and across borders where it has been discarded, or to heal domestic divisions that have in some instances been festering for years.  

A commitment from elected leadership to “respectful conduct” would surely be one desirable electoral outcome, as would leadership more interested in “doing the right thing” than in consolidating political power. But these outcomes require common undertakings by the rest of us as well:  a pledge to respect each other across differences and to uphold rights and dignity of those beyond the boundaries of our tribe better than we have done to date.  Whether we recognize it or not, we’ve mostly all been swallowing pills of partisanship and self-interest. If upcoming elections are to achieve the larger result we need them to achieve, it’s past time for us to toss away that bottle.

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Partisan Appeal: Making Space for Conflict-Related Mediation, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Oct

In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you’ve heard the other side.  Euripides

A judge, replied the Empress, is easy to be had, but to get an impartial judge, is a thing so difficult. Margaret Cavendish

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. Ken Liu

The fact is that in spite of his cautious nature the scrupulous Giese more than once jumped to premature conclusions. Even when on their guard, human beings inevitably theorize.  Stanisław Lem

Meditation is essentially training our attention so that we can be more aware— not only of our own inner workings but also of what’s happening around us in the here and now. Sharon Salzberg

[We live] rather in the midst of imaginary emotions, in hopes and fears, in illusions and disillusions, in fantasies and dreams. Ernst Cassirer

All roads taken lead us only to ourselves.  Kilroy Oldster

This was another busy and mostly virtual week at the UN in New York as all six General Assembly committees began their work to craft resolutions corresponding to core UN priorities:  disarmament and the rule of law, human rights and financing for sustainable development, special political missions and moving remaining territories towards self-governance.  Watching this process over many years, we lament that the relationship between these carefully-crafted global norms and concrete improvements in the lives of constituents is not always apparent and certainly could be made more so, especially to the constituents themselves.   

Beyond the committees, two events stood out for me given my own interests and biases.  The first was an event organized by our friends and partners FIACAT together with the European Union focused on cementing recent trends towards the abolition of capital punishment, a particularly noxious remnant of a time when we believed more fervently in the “value” of vengeance and retribution, when we acceded to the alleged “right” of the state to take life without recourse to accurate assessments of guilt let alone to the evolving sentiments of the public.  A case now in Oklahoma involving one Julius Jones who most assuredly did not commit the crime for which he is being held – often in solitary confinement – and for which he might actually be executed is only one of too-numerous instances demanding a rethink of an irreversible punishment within those dwindling number of states (including my own) that continue to employ it.

The other discussion of note took place in the Arria Formula format of the Security Council, wherein this week  Germany, Vietnam, Switzerland and Belgium sponsored a discussion on “Mandating peace: Enhancing the mediation sensitivity and effectiveness of the UN Security Council.”   Such mediation is encouraged under Article 33 of the UN Charter as one of the “non-coercive” tools available to the UN and especially to Council members  in discharging their duties to maintain international peace and security.  This particular discussion was based on a report crafted for this occasion by researchers at Notre Dame University with the same title as the event itself.

This Arria Formula sparked high levels of attention from the entire UN community.   As we have noted in the past, UN member states are becoming increasing nervous about a Security Council that is often frozen by its own internal controversies, by the willingness of the permanent members to ignore resolutions they seek to impose on others, and by conflicts that are not addressed at sufficiently early stages and thus require coercive responses when less coercive measures – including mediation – could have put out the fire at a point when it could more easily have been contained. 

States have increasingly embraced the language of conflict prevention, and this to our mind has been a welcome development, at least on the surface.  So much hunger and displacement, so many disruptions of educational and health access are due to conflicts about which we have collectively dragged our feet.  And when we have gotten on top of specific threats, our recourse to the language of “condemnation” and the threat of sanctions – both Council-approved and unilateral – has had a predictably polarizing effect on conflict parties.  In an era where trust is at a premium and political interests are highly partisan, states increasingly recognize that coercive responses are likely only deepen the distrust we need to overcome if progress on preventing and resolving conflict is to occur and, indeed, if our entire multilateral apparatus is to achieve more than rhetorical victories over all that now afflicts us. Sadly this “all,” Turkey and other states reminded the rest of us at this Arria meeting, remains headlined by the “scourge” that is armed conflict.

During this session, one state after another enthusiastically advocated for mediation resources and other, early-applied, less coercive measures in response to conflict threats.  In so doing, many states such Costa Rica and Italy recognized that the background of mediators is one key to success, advocating for mediation that is both gender-balanced and gender-sensitive.  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines took this one step further, noting that where the application of resources such as mediation are concerned, “neighbors know best.”  Indeed, calls came throughout this discussion for mediation that prioritizes “what is happening around us in the here and now,” with special attentiveness to, as Finland noted, the increasing “complexities” that characterize conflict contexts.  And if the Security Council can fully grasp, as claimed by SRSG Haysom, that “negotiated settlements must take priority over imposed settlements” (though both can unravel), then mediators must be given space for flexible responses to shifting conflict circumstances and Council members who might be overly addicted to coercion must hold in mind the importance of  isolating mediators from responsibility for any subsequent imposition of sanctions or other coercive means.

Amidst calls from Portugal and others for regular deliberations on maximizing the value of mediation and other “Chapter VI” responses, it is important that member states be clear with themselves about the often-profound degree of difficulty in maintaining the integrity and independence of mediators given the current avalanche of partisan views and “minds made up” long before all relevant evidence and context have been considered.   We are indeed inclined, perhaps more than ever in our recent history, to “jump to conclusions,” to bend facts to suit our personal and political interests, to live in a self-authorized realm of “imaginary emotions,” illusions and fantasies. We have substituted out honest inquiry with conspiracies and rooting interests.  We have cashed out insights that could benefit all for the sake of biases that elevate partial truths to universal status.  And we are amply suspicious of the motives of others, even when it is our own motives that require closer scrutiny.

I have seen a bit of this tendency myself in years of counseling.  At the level of conflicted couples and “neighbors,” suspicion is often palpable.  People are quick to assume that mediators who struggle hard to maintain independence are actually giving in to partisan values and outcomes, that once the curtain of “what is best” is pulled, it will surely reveal grave mis-readings of the “history” that mediators allege (and often honestly strive) to understand.  Indeed, many of us nowadays spend so little time listening to persons and ideas that threaten or oppose us, so little time exploring self-accountability for festering disputes small and large, that we can barely imagine what non-partisan engagement might look life.  Too often, we are simply waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the mediators or counselors to “show their hand” and commit the errors that reinforce our fears of and reservations regarding discussions mostly shielding biased revelations.

During this Arria Formula, a German minister wondered aloud, as a response to the report under consideration, whether Council mandates on mediation, including in the context of peacekeeping operations, are simply “too political to succeed?”  Certainly they are often seen as such by conflict parties, especially those whose biases and rationales for ongoing violence have also been allowed to harden.   But this points to an even larger problem, one we at GAPW strive regularly to identify, and that is the hard road that inevitably leads us back to ourselves.

In the end, as important as carefully worded resolutions and carefully crafted mandates might be, we must take time to address the social climate that we have conspired to create, one enabling the growth of hyper-partisan worldviews, a climate conducive to the insistence on unbiased perfection in our mediators that we are unable to guarantee in ourselves.  If we want less coercive, more inclusive solutions to conflict, and we certainly should, it will take more than discussions about our policy tools and options; it will also take discussions focused on our capacities to engender trust within a security and political environment that is now giving too many people sufficient reasons to withhold the risk of trust altogether.

Slowly, inexorably, our views and affiliations have calcified as dramatically as our arteries.  It is this hardening of hearts, and not a lack of UN Charter guidance on mediation and other non-coercive tools, that constitutes the greatest impediment to the development and implementation of flexible, context-specific, attentive, trustworthy responses to conflict threats. This “other” conversation, the one about our human capacities and barriers to progress we erect ourselves, is one that we would do well not to overlook.

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Bee Keepers: Bending the Curve of Life under Stress, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Oct

By the Late Tara Tidwell Bryan

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.  Rainer Maria Rilke

That bird sat on a burning tree and sang the songs that this creation had never heard before. Akshay Vasu

The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. Anaïs Nin

 If we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us.  Wendell Berry

I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it?  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We were all forged in the crucible.  Gayle Forman

Because God took one look at Adam and said, ‘Wow. This guy’s going to need all the help he can get.’ And here we are.  Nancy Mehl

I had a lovely and important message this week from a former intern now working in Vienna.  A Polish citizen great of skill and big of heart, she lamented her current assignment with a multilateral agency, not out of ingratitude so much as impatience to move beyond bureaucratic maintenance towards those issues in the world that now beckon so many in her generation.  As she put it to me, “I wish one day I could do something that actually matters.” 

The stakes are high for this generation and the need to matter is often acute.  Indeed, I think we under-estimate the longing of many people of all generations and life-circumstances to have or recover lives that matter more, incorporating higher levels of significance and even adventure than their daily routines and “realisms” generally encourage.

Many of us scoff at people of middle age who harken back to secondary school as the highlight-reel of their lives.  But there is a clue in this that we are in danger of missing and are, in turn, endangered by missing.  I remember listening to family members talking about their military service with a fondness that exceeded most all of their story-telling.  That fondness, I was quite convinced, was related not to the violence of war but to the significance of service.  This was a time in their lives when what they were doing really mattered, when the merits of their sacrifice were both encouraged and honored in a way that, in many instances at least, had not happened to them since.  Few listened to them anymore.  Few sought out their advice or paused to hear their stories.  Their service was “past tense” but so was its mattering.  What was “forged in the crucible” of war had become voices largely of nostalgia, almost empty of any larger impact.

Staying on this theme, I have seen so many photos since the recent, dismal US presidential debate of “patriots” who have been dubbed (and denigrated) as right-wing warriors, folks apparently preparing for some sort of “war” with their fellow-citizens, testing the limits of official response (and implicit permission) by grabbing their guns, donning military-style gear and taking to the streets to “defend” some makeshift iteration of morality, order and legacy.  Without endorsing one iota of the tendency to conspiracy and lawlessness, I also wonder how long what I see in their faces and hear in their words has been simmering?  But it is apparent that, in part due to a self-serving shout-out by the US president, these folks matter now, more than they have perhaps mattered in many years.  Their ideas and actions have consequence again, both for their own self-worth and – as they see it at least – for the future of their country.

There is no part of that truth-defying intimidation and incitement that I can support; but as someone whose ideas and opinions on global issues and the “psychology” of our collective responses carry more weight than they surely deserve, I don’t overlook the fact that the people who do matter in this world continue to represent an all-too-small subset of the people who should matter. And some of these folks, in ways that are sometimes both violent and reality-challenged, are now declaring their insistence to matter.

The irony for me in all of this is that there are now so many crises vying for higher levels of attention and response, many of which have been either enhanced or exposed by virtue of the current pandemic.  At the UN this past week alone, three events of existential importance, mostly virtual, called attention to threats that we have not done nearly enough to mitigate and for which we lack both full disclosure from leadership and sufficient hands-on-deck to truly care for our present and do “full justice” to our future.

All three of these High Level events were dripping with opportunities to matter, and all attracted a bevy of senior leadership from the world’s governments.   Friday’s discussion on nuclear disarmament highlighted the dangerous expansion and/or reintegration of “modernized” nuclear weapons capability into national strategic defense doctrines, complete with threats to resume nuclear testing and move offensive capacity into outer space.  There was also some reflection (mostly by Palau and other small states) on the impact of excess military spending on funding access for development needs and related global concerns including those highlighted in the UN General Assembly earlier in the week.

One of those concerns took center-stage on Thursday as states convened to assess the impact, 25 years on, of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s equality.  With statements (mostly by men) lasting well into the evening, one leader after another delivered prepared and often unremarkable statements seeking to convince us that gender equality is both indispensable to peaceful societies  (surely right) and  lies at the very heart of their domestic policy — though equality progress in many of these societies remains limited at best.  Perhaps the presidents of Luxembourg and Costa Rica put it most helpfully as they focused their remarks  on enhancing the “practical dimensions of equality” at a time when “not one nation” can claim to have achieved the goals of Beijing.  “Not one.”

Lastly, Wednesday’s High-Level event was, to my mind at least, the most urgent of the three.  On this day, world leaders and others convened virtually to assess the rapidly declining health of global biodiversity  on land and in the sea, a decline so precipitous that it directly threatens the health of our agriculture, indeed calls into question the viability of the entire food cycle, not only for ourselves but for the still-abundant life forms with which we are still privileged to share this planet.  And while most of us are rightly appalled by the sight of slaughtered elephants and emaciated polar bears, biodiversity loss is felt most acutely at the lower levels of the biological chain:  the bees which are disappearing from our farms and gardens, the insects whose presence is no longer in sync with the birds who need them to sustain their migrations, the coral reefs which have been bleached into oblivion by warming seas. The image offered up by the director of the UN Development Program, of trucks full of bees traveling  to save California farms from unpollinated crops, was a stark reminder of how disruptive we collectively continue to be to the natural rhythms and needs of our now abundance-challenged planet.

The science on this potential mass extinction event we seem determined to create is clear.  As UNSG Guterres noted on Wednesday, we must now find a way to “bend the curve” on biodiversity loss and we are running out of time to do so. Such bending requires more thoughtful attention to economies pitched more to destruction than protection. But it also requires more initiative and activity at local level, urgently appealing to those many people (including and especially indigenous people) with the energy and skill to matter: to help lay the groundwork for a future in which loaded guns, clenched fists, predatory economics, bloated military budgets and unresolved inequalities and exclusions no longer have pride of place.

Such a future must also be more attuned to the very human though often unrequited desire to matter.  A young woman from India speaking at the biodiversity summit responded to what she interpreted (and not without reason) as a string of often “empty statements” by global leadership:  “We are ready to do our part,” she intoned, “Are you?” 

Like my former intern, this young woman is clearly determined to matter, and there are many millions more like the two of them. Our task now is to get back to work on what ails us as a species and as a planet, in part by getting to the heart of what it means to matter, what people of diverse backgrounds require such that they can call forth more of the “riches of life” for themselves and for all with whom they come in contact. It also means learning how to better accompany each other as we “sing the songs that creation has never heard before,” including songs revering the presence of the bees, the trees and other life forms on which our own survival depends and that we simply must do more to keep.  

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