The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. Albert Einstein
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. René Descartes
Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn’t quite as spectacular. Lisa Lutz
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The only crime is pride. Sophocles
You can’t make them change if they don’t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them. Andy Warhol
If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write. Martin Luther
When I was younger (no time recently) and cutting my teeth on nuclear and environmental activism, I was intrigued by notions being floated at that time to help complete the multilateral project through a significant reform of its infrastructure – practically and considerably modifying the statist assumptions of the UN and other institutions, assumptions which presumed that multilateralism was state business and only extended to others when states decided to invite their presence.
Those modifications were deemed necessary at that time by myself and many others not so much because of our demand for a “voice;” (after all, those of us working on nuclear and environmental issues were mostly people of privilege to begin with), but because it was unclear, absent significant pressure from non-government advocates, that states would be able to fully meet the moment – to shed their national pride, their diplomatic protocols, their sovereign concessions, their longstanding political grievances, their ideological predispositions and more — and demonstrate to the world that they are prepared to endure whatever pain is needed, do whatever is necessary, to heal our damaged planet, to move away from the precipice of nuclear and environmental catastrophe and repair our damaged politics.
A large component of fulfilling this agenda, of course, is the willingness to make use of all available wisdom and expertise wherever it might be found, to embrace the inconvenient as well as the comfortable, to shed the skin of predictability and replace it with innovation which – then as now – exists in far greater measure in cities and communities than individual governments and even multilateral institutions can apparently appreciate or assimilate (even if they would wish to do so).
In this context, the pandemic-inspired call by some states, and acquiesced by some others, to return spaces like the UN to the primacy of “inter-governmental processes,” represents in our view a serious misreading of our current moment. As many UN-based delegations themselves recognize, public trust in governance is lagging almost across the board. Some of that trust deficit is related to states which seem completely out of touch with the needs and aspirations of their own people, acting as though political power is primarily an entitlement to be used to the benefit of leadership and their circles, that promises are what you use to get elected (or coronated) and then tossed into some metaphorical recycling bin in case they are needed at a later time in an attempt to prop up support for shaky regimes.
But part of this trust deficit is related to assessments of state competence, the fear that (much like in individual therapeutic contexts) some states are only willing to make only the “spare” changes they are comfortable making, not the changes that this current brew of climate change, pandemic spread, biodiversity loss, food insecurity and conflict-without-end now requires of us. The UN, for instance, is a place where all the critical issues of our time are routinely discussed. And yet there is also a sense more broadly held than many would like to admit that when it comes time to move from urgent discourse to meaningful change, the system too-often pumps the brakes. Like the winter heat in my New York City apartment where the old radiators are permitted to emit only enough to stave off illness and frostbite, we are collectively still addicted to only the questions we are comfortable asking and those large, government-hosted events that produce only enough “heat” to keep some of us believing that this time – just maybe – the results will justify the vast expenditures of human energy and carbon emissions required to hold them.
As it was in my past, it is not clear that such a belief is now justified more than in part. During the next few weeks, the UN will be seen co-sponsoring a series of major events – on sustainable transport, on biodiversity loss and on climate change – all of which have vast and direct implications for what UNSG Guterres has branded as our “suicidal war on nature.” And while the Sustainable Transport event in Beijing produced some interesting remarks including calls to end “short-termism” by the Panamanian president, the Russia president used his time to tout the construction of new highways and designation of new air and sea corridors, reminding some of the very practices that made this event necessary in the first place.
This all-too-frequent confusion of roles and goals simply isn’t good enough to produce meaningful change, let alone to prevent a global “suicide.” Every day that we voluntarily pump the brakes on the changes we know full well we need to make, every day that we accede to unnecessary compromises and political conveniences, the world is one step closer to a miserable and preventable end. And every day our “leadership” fails to deliver progress on the challenges we are running out of time to resolve, it becomes harder and harder for individuals to choose the path of change and renewal in their own lives. We live in this conundrum now — of more than a few states becoming too comfortable making “spare change,” but also (deliberately or otherwise) impeding those many individuals, organizations and institutions – including many experts in the UN Secretariat itself — who would urgently and willingly rise to to a higher calling, people who recognize that the changes required of us going forward will only become more sudden, more painful to behold.
As Global Action moves inexorably towards hibernation, it has been emotionally moving to hear from so many former colleagues struggling to forge more sustainable habits in the absence of consistent state leadership, to somehow succeed in transforming long-standing dreams of travel and other leisure activities into higher callings of solidarity with those many millions who will never board airplanes or stay in resort hotels, who will never be invited to Glasgow or Beijing or other centers of policy attention, but whose very lives are impacted by the actions we take, all of us, every day.
I know that over this past pandemic year my own bucket list has shrunk to the size of a measuring cup. Despite a long adulthood of (relatively) simple living, I have also been so privileged to see enough of the world to know something of its wonders and its struggles, but also to recognize the degree to which the former face precipitous decline while the latter continue to expand. This is simply untenable. We can’t presume to care about the future of our children as pride and greed stalk every corner of our planet, and as the gaps between our urgent words and carefully calibrated deeds continue largely un-narrowed. Our excuses and rationalizations, clever though they may sometimes be, must come to a halt.
I have had quite enough of my own hypocrisy, throwing spare change at former neighbors and using far more than my share of available resources. But I have also had enough of “inter-governmental processes” that fail to deliver in proper measure what we all know we need with respect to every one of the UN’s core policy frameworks, from security and rights to climate and development. The choice at this point for states in capitals or multilateral settings seems clear – find the courage and cooperative means to clean up the messes we’ve collectively made or open the doors to the rest of us with mops and cleanser at the ready and fortified with the full determination to use them.
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