Archive | November, 2021

Anticipating Newness:  An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Nov
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Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.  Kouta Hirano

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression.  Steven L. Peck

So many of us grow into doubting, hopeless, callous adults protecting hardened hearts. Medicating the pain. Life isn’t what we imagined. Nor are we.  Charles Martin

One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl.  Marsha Hinds

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.   Henry David Thoreau

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream. Dejan Stojanovic

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.   Françoise Sagan

As we close this long chapter of weekly posts in anticipation of less frequent but perhaps more impactful contributions, there is much to reflect upon, much to give thanks for.  While the audience for these posts has declined in recent times – a sign perhaps of a voice that has become tiresome and even redundant – I am so grateful to all of you who have dipped your toes in the water we have collected over many years, water which hopefully has helped to nourish both the day to day of this edgy world and that also anticipates a world that is on a path to become cleaner, fairer and greener, one more conducive to the health and well-being of our collective progeny.

I began these weekly posts several years ago in Advent and I will end them with Advent as well.  For those located (or stuck) within the Christian tradition, Advent is perhaps the most neglected of our ecclesial seasons.  We are so anxious to get to Christmas that we utterly fail this season of preparation, of discernment, even of longing.  We too often ignore the value in anticipation of a world in which human and divine converge, where a vast universe of creation deigns to shine its light on our relatively tiny planet and its equally tiny pursuits, light which emanated from the stars long before the dawn of the human age.  The light was there before we were, before our species embarked on this long journey – one clever in large measure but less so in wisdom – a species which now seems alternately passionate about renewal and resigned to what, in some key sectors of human existence at least, has become a precipitous and even ugly decline. 

This pervasive and creeping resignation is why Advent still matters, perhaps matters as much as the holiday season of incarnation to which it is attached, that holiday towards which we drive much too recklessly and certainly over the speed limit.   For how can we fully grasp the significance of the Christmas incarnation – of God with us (if you are able to accompany me there), and thus of a world that can be more than we have imagined it being — if we bypass the anticipatory stage to which it is rightly tethered?  How do we make full sense of a season which has become captive in too many instances of addictive consumption and awkward reunions around a dinner table without also sitting in contemplation of all that is in danger of being lost from life now, and all that could be if we were truly and fully engaged in the task of making it so, indeed if we still believed that such a world is possible?

The anticipation associated with this season is not to be confused with wishful thinking or an excuse to avoid the localized affairs which constitute so much of daily living.  Yes, the universe is vast beyond belief; yes, we are being called to discern more, to abandon resignation and embrace a kinder, fairer scale of possibility.  And yet, there are also diapers to change, wood and water to gather, children and elderly to protect and reassure, bills to pay, dishes to wash, bathrooms to clean, rice to harvest and cook.  On and on it goes, practical responsibilities that force our attention and focus our energy, the many details of responsible living which for many of us are challenging enough all year round, let alone as Christmas approaches, a logistical burden such that this seasonal call of the universe to us – this call of the divine if you will – cannot easily be heard let alone heeded. 

And yet we cannot escape the fact It is anticipation in its best sense that is the glue that literally holds this time of Advent and incarnation and its myriad details together, giving it a full meaning.  Theologians including Paul Tillich understood that to anticipate is to enable the energy of what our hearts long for to directly influence our thoughts and actions, to begin in essence to live in us as though the promise we anticipate is actually on its way, or more precisely is in some way already a living force within us, if not quite yet at its final landing spot. 

We don’t have to look far to see this insight in action.  The woman for whom an engagement ring is a symbol which allows her to anticipate and even map out the contours of a long life with another.  The child anticipating a bicycle for Christmas that is not so much about the object itself but about the future ability to ride through the parks and around the neighborhood.  The farmer attending to the question of to whom to sell and/or give his/her harvested crop while that crop is still months from its full ripeness. 

We know how to do anticipation.  We have experienced some of the effects of longings which have already taken up space in our hearts.  But it is so difficult now to capture this one, unique Advent longing as the logistics of the Christmas holiday drown out the promise of an Advent season that strives to beam hope into lives that, in too many instances, have largely short-circuited their hopeful connection.

But we must be clear: The problem we face now is more than logistical, more than ensuring that our personal effects are in order or that our laws and (in the case of the UN) resolutions are properly framed.  The problem now is in part that so many of us seem resigned to our current slide.  Many of us, including in our own policy sector, seem to be giving up on the possibility that climate change and species extinction can be reversed, that nations can replace enmity with trust, that the vast inequalities of wealth and power can revert to the mean, that our vast expenditures on coercive security measures can be diverted to solving problems that are still within our capacity to solve, that our communities and families can do better than building walls and shunning diversity.

Collectively, we are indeed increasingly in a resignation frame of mind.  We are increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone save for ourselves. But we are in some ways, if the sages and psychologists are on point, also desperate to be rescued from smug and callous versions of ourselves. Sadly our faith communities are simply not doing enough to reverse this toxic course.  This applies as well, perhaps especially, to my own Christian faith, one which should stake its claim fully on anticipation rather than resignation, at least if the core of Advent is to be believed.

In this regard, I am reminded of an old professor of mine at Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan, who used to refer to a Christian faith characterized by “pessimism about life and optimism about God.”  What this meant was that there buried deep within an otherwise hopeful faith is a resignation about ever having the world we might want, a world that is more than a snare and temptation to sin, a world envisioned by agreements like the UN Sustainable Development goals, but even more by the promise of incarnation — coming and already here –; a promise that is much more than an “empty bowl,” a promise to both honor and answer the vastness of a universe almost beyond comprehension, vastness which might otherwise make us despair of ever mattering in anything approximating the grand scheme of things. But the Advent promise reminds us that we matter anyway.  The world matters anyway. We matter to each other anyway. 

Mattering, perhaps, does not seem like a particularly high bar to many of you, but ours is a bar that has been slipping for some time and is now sliding lower still, a bar that needs so desperately to be repositioned such that it can inspire us to live out our lives in the light of the world we anticipate, to place our energies, talents and aspirations out where the light of a divine universe can shine upon them. We need to recover that place which confirms that a better world is possible, indeed that such a world is poised to appear if only we would consent to the “privilege of making humanity our footpath,” pledging to do at least our part to both anticipate the coming of a kinder, gentler, healthier planet and ensure its safe passage.

For the past six years, one Sunday after another, these missives have been devoted to that Advent spirit, one which eschews the temptations of inattentiveness, logistical chaos, personal resignation and, yes, of hardened hearts, one which attempts to inspire institutions large and small to keep the promises they make and, more particularly, that splendid promise of a world which has managed to come back from the brink, a world filled with people from all regions and backgrounds who have also found a way in this time of indifference, poverty and pandemic to come back from brinks of their own. For our part, we continue to live in anticipation of a world fit to sustain the lives of children, a world of doors not walls, a world of modest lifestyles and ambitious generosity, a world striving to bury every metaphorical hatchet — from hate speech to weapons of mass destruction.

For all our partial achievements and palpable failures over many years, this is what we continue to anticipate; this is what has been and remains alive in us; this is what we will do our best to grow and sustain until we meet again.

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Reform School: UN Lessons Incompletely Learned, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Nov
land reform | agricultural economics | Britannica

Agricultural Reform in our Distant Past

Enlighten yourself and then enlighten the world. Rashid Jorvee

We can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.  Wendell Berry

Reforming ignorantly, will consequence crisis and destruction.  Kamaran Ihsan Salih

I’m not good,” he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, “but I was worse.”  Becca Fitzpatrick

Education leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment opens the way to empathy. Empathy foreshadows reform.  Derrick Bell

The best reform is to repent.  Lailah Gifty Akita

It is very easy to point, but very difficult to refine and reform.  Sarvesh Murthi

We’re nearing the end of these weekly posts and there are so many people to thank, those who (often unknowingly) contributed quotations and images, those whose comments helped us to become something perhaps a bit more than one shrill voice amidst a cacophony of statements and other noises from both diplomats and NGO.  We are grateful to all of you, we will write many of you to say so individually over these winter months, and we will be sure to avoid any assumptions of value going forward without checking with you first.

Indeed, many questions loom at this moment, not only what is next for us but more importantly what is next for the institution we have tried our level best to discern over a generation.  What is next for a policy center which is itself not particularly adept at discernment, which does not easily own up to its failures, which asks the questions which makes consensus possible but not the harder questions of unintended impact?  What do we say about an institution that is constantly calling attention to itself, touting the multilateralism with the UN positioned at the center, promising global constituencies solutions to global problems that remain elusive at best while rebuffing suggestions that the UN was meant to do anything more, could ever anything more than “save us from hell?”  What next for a system that has managed to fold unto itself virtually every issue of global importance, but also one that is constantly being forced to cater to the states which fund its programs, the results of which are an endless stream of “what we are doing” and a trickle of “what isn’t working,” with sometimes uncomfortable consequences for both human dignity and planetary healing?  What is next for an institution that, at its core, tends to be a bit more smug than enlightened, that maintains the dubious assumption that changes in institutions are both possible and sustainable without simultaneous changes in those who manage those institutions?

To be fair, the UN has engaged in serious reform processes in most all of its Charter bodies.  The Economic and Social Council represents a much more formidable setting for discussions on sustainable development –especially on finance – than was the case a decade ago.   Pushed hard by small island and other developing states, and in response to the habitual gridlock on peace and security within the Security Council, the General Assembly has taken up the task of “revitalization” in earnest, a task which involves both strengthening the office of the GA president and clearing away the debris of endless resolutions tabled but not implemented, resolutions which maintain a GA “stake” in the large issues of the day but also help guarantee that such stakes will remain stuck in infertile ground until it is time to dust them off and peel away the accumulated rust in one year’s time.

The General Assembly has also been engaged – for what at times seems like an eternity – in prospects for reform of the Security Council, a body defined by its “provisional rules of procedure,” its endless and oft-repetitive speechmaking, the “bully ball” routinely played by the largest three of its five permanent members, and its inabiliy or unwillingness to ensure compliance with its resolutions (with the possible exception of peacekeeping mandates) despite both the coercive tools at its disposal and the erstwhile “binding” nature of such resolutions.  Indeed, interest by the General Assembly in exploring its own peace and security bona fides, including in Syria and through the Peacebuilding Commission, is due in part to frustrations about Council inaction and in part due to longstanding concerns that the Council has long since failed to accurately represent the will or security interests of the general UN membership.

And yet, some of those member states go to sometimes extraordinary lengths to campaign for a seat on that very same Council, in some instances because they believe that, together with other elected members, they can force change in a chamber which gives up its privileges with great reluctance; while others seem excited by the expectation of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with global heavyweights and perhaps just as eager for the prestige (and even deference) that comes along with the heavy burdens associated with that two-year tenure.

Where the Council is concerned, much of the reform energy, especially emanating from the Council itself, is focused on working methods – including the system of resolution “pen holders” and levels of consultation required (especially with African states) prior to the crafting of peacekeeping mandates or the application of coercive measures such as sanctions and arms embargoes.  And as pushed by a bevy of increasingly bold elected members (now including Kenya, Ireland, Niger and Mexico), the unfolded and sometimes even unwashed “laundry” of the Council is increasingly aired.   Such an airing has been duly noted in the General Assembly where Council reform energies largely take the form of membership expansion, veto restrictions for the permanent members and a more regular (and respectful) engagement with the General Assembly and other Charter bodies.

We have long welcomed such efforts as our own view has been (and remains) that the elected Council membership is where the drive for more equitable relations within the Council and more impactful (even enlightened) relations beyond chambers is most likely to emerge.  As conflict settings loom – having failed the prevention test and now dragging on year after year (and in the case of Palestine, generation after generation) it has become undeniably clear how the world has changed – in demographics and in global threats — certainly more than the Council’s permanent heavyweights have allowed the chamber they still largely control to change in response.

But it has also long been (and remains) our view that reform must be more than about tinkering with working methods, more than about clearing away the debris of endlessly tabled resolutions, backroom arm twisting and tepid commitments to consultation.  Yes, UN bodies are improving accountability to constituents in some aspects.  Yes, it has certainly been worse in terms of the hegemonic dispositions of the major powers.  Yes it has done legendary work in keeping alive millions impacted by the conflicts we have failed to prevent or resolve.  Yes, it has found space for virtually every area of global concern within its conference rooms, even if a number of those concerns – including technology, weapons production and climate change – are evolving much faster than our policies can address or at times even grasp.

We will have more to say about this in the months to come.  But for now, a note of caution to those who make policy in the absence of discernment, or who remain unwilling to ask the question of even our most cherished policies, “What can go wrong here?”  As hard as many diplomats and NGOs work in and around UN spaces, it might be too much to ask for those same stakeholders to invest a bit more in our own collective enlightenment, our own discernment, our own empathy.  But we must.   We all must.

Despite the disappointment that the UN, for all its access to expertise and accumulated wisdom, has failed to become a genuine learning community; despite the disappointment as well that we continue to run from our values and psychological resources as though fleeing a crowded room of unmasked, unvaccinated partygoers; it is still the depth of our character, our sustained empathy for the people looking to us for hope, which is key to pushing through our current bureaucratic limitations. Such are the barriers that stifle reflection and repentance, the ones that drown some of our best intentions under waves of protocol and status, the ones that funding and consensus alone cannot resolve, especially so when pledges of organizational or humanitarian support remain unmet and consensus sometimes means something even less than “agreeing to disagree.”

In this often august and intermittently smug and self-important community, the reform we need now goes beyond tinkering with working methods and levels of representation. What is needed is changes in how we choose to live, what we care about both in theory and in practice, the examples we set for others, the promises we insist on keeping no matter how inconvenient with regard to energies or financial resources. A women’s rights advocate speaking in the Security Council debate on Afghanistan this week began by confessing how “exhausted” she and other Afghans are by war and conflict. We must find the means to engage that exhaustion and other feelings lying largely beyond our own privileged experiences if she and many others are finally to find some place of dependable rest.

This is the truth of the reform we, collectively speaking, might continue to dodge or ignore, but make no mistake: we do so at the peril of our multilateral institutions and of our planet as a whole. Despite the failures of Glasgow and on Ethiopia violence, despite a more narrow, pandemic-influenced, state-centrism governing UN conference rooms, it remains true that our success as an institution requires that the people of this planet, the farmers and teachers, the journalists and caregivers, believe in us, believe that our rhetorical and negotiating skills represent tangible hope for their own communities, even believe that we are willing to change our ways, especially our most privileged and unenlighted ways, embracing what Mexico referred to this week as “dimensions of service” in that noble task of making life better for others.

If we cannot make these changes, if we are unwilling to make them, I worry for the future of an institution we still largely revere, but which has also sapped (at least for a season) all of our freely-given, if modest, organizational energies and resources.

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Chain Gang: Building Confidence in Global Governance, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Nov
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With appreciation to meassociation.org.uk

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. Charles Dickens

To grow up is to fight for it, to grow old is to lose it after having possessed it.  Eudora Welty

The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.  Robert Herrick

Your anchors are holding firm and they permit you both comfort in the present, and hope in the future.  Boethius

People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.  Marcel Proust

The truth of the story lies in the details.  Paul Auster

Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. Stephen Levine

The outcome of every worry is a worry itself.  Mahendar Singh Jakhar

Of all the week’s images that literally flood our social media and email inboxes on a regular basis, the most moving for me was to be found during an interview at the COP 26 event in Glasgow with Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and current head of the Group of Elders (https://theelders.org/), a group of former senior officials and global leaders who, together, seek to remind current policymakers of the accumulated wisdom and insight which can be elusive in the midst of policy tensions but which becomes clearer and more actionable with time and distance.  

Ms. Robinson has long been one of my few heroes/heroines at the UN.  Even while taking on difficult tasks and promoting controversial opinions she has been able to maintain her clarity and humanity.   Thus it was no real surprise that, while discussing the multiple frustrations associated with this COP including the omnipresent fossil fuel lobbyists and obstructionist governments (she mentioned Saudi Arabia by name, but there were others) seemingly content to kick urgent response to the emissions crisis to yet another COP, another parking lot for private jets and bad faith negotiations, another reminder to our youth that their future is being compromised yet again by older folks addicted to their privilege and deaf to the cries of those who that privilege continues to threaten, that in the midst of all of that, signs of her deep worry and compassion surfaced.

In fact, while speaking, it became clear that the venerable Ms. Robinson was fighting back tears.  She was hardly alone.  We might all be tempted to allow tears to flow at another opportunity for healing wasted at least in part, wasted by yet another UN-sponsored event that generated more carbon than hope, another lost opportunity for governments to overcome the prevailing sense that while the language of solidarity may remain hot, hopeful actions of solidarity remain lukewarm at best.  

In our 20 years or so of fussing over policy norms and those institutions such as the UN that create them, we have been steadfast in both highlighting and linking global threats – famine and impunity, destructive weapons and biodiversity loss, climate change and terrorism.  And while all these threats have complex and specific responsibilities associated with them, from delivering humanitarian assistance in conflict zones and restoring bio-rich habitat to ending cross-border weapons trafficking and creating dependable structures to ensure justice for victims of grave abuses, the need to address threats in tandem remains.  We now understand more of the linkages between the spread of pandemics and biodiversity loss, between biodiversity loss and famine, between famine and armed conflict, between armed conflict and rights abuses.  The chain that binds these threats seems to be getting longer not shorter, and we know (or should know) that inter-connected crisis are unlikely to be resolved merely by focusing on a single link of the chain.

Indeed, one of the benefits of the UN as an institution is the extent to which it tries to keep the full chain in view, even if bureaucracy (or the wishes or some powerful states) sometimes dictate that issues remain quarantined in places of specialized competence.  But many at the UN also recognize both that the quarantine must be only temporary and that we must generate the will and resources to meet this current moment, to reassure constituents that we genuinely have their back, to demonstrate that the challenges on our watch can be successfully implemented while there is still time for us to keep.

And this leads to the issue of governance and the officials which in some key areas have seemingly lost their way or, perhaps more precisely, lost our way.  We understand that UN diplomats more often represent positions than formulate them.  We understand that we live in a world of considerable tensions which multilateral spaces retain some ability to “soften.”   We understand that people have wildly different expectations of those who govern in national and multilateral spaces, specifically of their levels of attentiveness and promise keeping, regarding threats up and down the global chain. We understand that the UN maintains some genuine capacity, as former Slovenia president Danilo Turk noted this week, “to turn tensions into rules.”

But we also understand that trust in governance is at a precipitous juncture; trust in the ability of states to lead us away from the abyss, but also trust that officials can and will demonstrate the willingness to compromise their own position and status, to take the hard decisions that may cost them votes in the short term but that will guarantee a safer, greener, fairer world in which to exercise our franchise in the longer term.  While it is unfair to throw a wet blanket over all government actions and agents, the disappointing results of COP 26 are merely the latest example of officials offering half a loaf when a full loaf is required, offering “solutions” destined mostly to keep tensions and frustrations – especially those festering among the young – at a needlessly high pitch, allowing those with money and influence (as a friend from El Salvador recently noted) to “control all spaces of meaning and care for peace on earth.” 

And as places like the UN seem disposed to hold many relevant stakeholders without money and status in their own policy exile, and as some states persist in shrugging their collective shoulders while planning for the next, best, global climate extravaganza, one opportunity after another to point us in a healing direction goes by the boards.

Indeed, the frustration with officials and distrust of their intentions may well constitute as serious a threat as that of any other point in the chain.  This was the subtext of a Wednesday event featuring the aforementioned Danilo Turk and the former PM of Belgium Yves Leterme, both of whom shared concerns and recommendations at the UN this week on behalf of Club de Madrid.  They were clear that a large problem in the world now is not just the policies of states and their makers but levels of trust in institutions of governance themselves and, more specifically, the erosion of confidence in democracy, both its principles and its authority.  

Gratefully, Turk and Letterme came to the UN offering more than high levels of frustration and urgency regarding the state of democratic governance in our time.  Among their recommendations to the UN was for a “peer review mechanism” to assess the health and competence of democracies and an “anti-corruption court” to adjudicate the most egregious instances of state officials using public funds to bankroll private interests, including and especially their own.

These were welcome suggestions, though neither entity would likely be established quickly or absent tensions and controversies, including over sources and quantities of funding.  But such suggestions do highlight major truths of our time, including the increasingly widespread perception that we are not investing enough energy in the promotion of democracy — not simply the promotion of elections, but of inclusive participation in policy decisions and regular access to those in power. Alongside this is a related perception, that people with gobs of money and political status have become far too comfortable using up far more than their share of resources they did not earn for purposes not expressly authorized. Both perceptions, and the realities that lies behind them, are toxic to problem solving and trust building, two items that are clearly experiencing major supply-chain issues at this tumultuous moment in our collective history.

Given this, it is appropriate for all of us to join in wistful solidarity with Mary Robinson, to shed a tear or two over climate- related threats which have seemingly exposed every official inadequacy, every official compromise, every official misrepresentation of our current state of affairs.   She knows better than the rest of us that we cannot – must not – separate the resolution of the issues we care about from the quality and status of those given institutional power and authority to effect what we must hope are “good faith” attempts to resolve them.  At the same time, the rest of us must expand our own advocacy to include more regular attention to the instiutions and officials who can and must do more to become those “anchors” of hope, healing and comfort we need now; to better enable the contributions of youth and others to more sustainable ends rather than seducing or discouraging them with insincere invitations to participation; and to help the world in general sleep more soundly and live each day with fewer worries.

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Home Wrecking: Fleeing Callous Humans and our Warming Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Nov
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Tuvalu Addresses COP 26

We have become a place of long weeping; A house of scattered feathers; There is no home for us between earth and sky.   Rebecca Roanhorse

And so you travel.  Forgetting that the problem is you.  And wherever you go, you carry yourself.  Ezinne Orjiako

The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! Louis Yako

There is no destination other than towards yet another refuge from yet another war. Theresa Hak Kyung

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.  Jaclyn Moriarty

People returned to live on city streets and pavements, in hovels on dusty construction sites, wondering which corner of this huge country was meant for them.  Arundhati Roy

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. Padma Lakshmi

One of the seemingly eternal struggles of small organizations as ours has been for a generation is how to add value:  how to support the work of others without taking credit for its outcomes; how to call attention to the pain of others without appropriating that pain to raise our funds or build our brand;  how to join voices with others without losing our own distinctive notes; how to honor those “sculpting the mist” without losing sight for one moment of the privileges associated with honoring such profoundly challenging sculpting in the first place.

For me, for us, as we end our current iteration the journey towards a fresh engagement with global crises is already underway. What is already clear is that the path to engagement will likely run through the issue of displacement, those who have lost their homes as the result of family meltdown or economic collapse, those “taking refuge from another war” as we now see in Ethiopia, those who can no longer harvest their lands or their traditional fishing grounds due to ruinous levels of flooding and drought, especially those living on relatively remote islands facing climate shocks which they did not create, for which they cannot possible be prepared, and from the increasing fury of which there is simply nowhere to hide.

Of course, settling on a rubric is not the same as settling on a strategy to encourage and support change.  To that end, I joined yesterday with some activist friends on a march in support of unhoused people and the services which are both insufficient and indispensable in moving people off the streets, helping them find both stability and identity in multiple forms, from reliable indoor plumping to a equally reliable mailing address.

Sadly, this march took place not in a populated area, not in a place where homeless people gather, but in the parking lot of a sports arena.  Somehow, some way, the decision was made to organize a 5K walk in a place with no relationship whatsoever to the people for whom we were allegedly advocating.  There were apparently few if any unhoused persons on the march. There was no audience to inspire along the route.  There were no occupied homes or apartments in sight. There was no press to speak of.  No one could even enter the march route through security unless they could demonstrate that they had both paid their fee and had been vaccinated for COVID, two requirements virtually guaranteeing that none of those experiencing the “long weeping” of displacement (or perhaps none of those currently on the cusp of their own homelessness) would be able to join the lovefest ostensible organized on their behalf.

It was difficult to escape the conclusion that I and the others on that march had done nothing of substance to help the displaced.  What we had done, if anything, was to help brand the sports arena and the major donors who are, after all, so often the preferred destination for the efforts of the organizers.  It was all about money, we didn’t have much of it to offer, and so we were relegated to walking around an empty parking lot as though being exiled as punishment for our modest resources and/or our political naivete.

This trek in the parking lot at least called to my own mind scenes on the other side of the world: in Ethiopia where armed groups inch closer to Addis Ababa, creating both panic in the capital and fresh displacements along the route of conflict.  And, of course, in Glasgow where erstwhile global “leadership” convened, yet again, to offer a bevy of “solutions” to the climate crisis ranging from the genuinely hopeful to the merely distracting, a crisis already displacing millions with millions more likely to come.

More than officialdom made its way to Glasgow.  Thousands of young people did also, youth for whom climate change represents more than an inconvenience requiring more than a chain of UN-brokered “talk-fests” which might well result in more dangerous carbon emissions than prospects for meaningful change.  These youth filled the streets and, in some limited instances, the conference rooms, lamenting the reality that youth are much more likely to be heard than heeded, that decisions about the policy trajectory for climate mitigation and adaptation, for reducing disaster risks and increasing options for survival when risks turn so many lives of the affected into “scattered feathers;” these decisions continue to be made by older folks like me. Many of these decisionmakers are unlikely to ever be displaced from their private jets let alone their homes. Moreover, they will never have to sit across a table and break the news to climate-affected people that their dreams are soon to be burned or washed away, or that the footsteps of armed groups are fast approaching. Older folks not unlike myself will never have to share the news with affected people, as former Liberia president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf noted this weekend, “that they must leave their community or drown.” 

The youth in Glasgow this week were thankfully not marching back and forth across the parking lot of a sports stadium.  They were visible to the public, to the global press, surely even to those inside the COP 26 conference rooms. And their urgent, frustrated and at times defiant messaging was picked up, especially by those from the least developed and small island states who, as we and others have noted time and again, have done the least to create climate change but who suffer the most from its impacts. Such impacts include many displaced crossing borders and regions seeking a modicum of safety and stability from climate threats and the economic ruin and armed violence which often follow, those forced frequently to take refuge amidst hostility from people who, in more than a few instances, made significant contributions to the conditions that prompted displacement in the first place.

The impact of these youthful voices on small island and other officials was clearly apparent, including on  Fiji’s fine Ambassador Satyendra Prasad who bluntly asked, “If we are not to achieve 1.5 degrees, what are we here for?  Everything else is a side-show.” The president of climate-impacted Madagascar reminded us all that “forests are the lungs of our planet,” but that these lungs are being damaged at a staggering rate. And perhaps the most compelling address from officialdom was delivered by the remarkable Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who underscored the “immoral and unjust” implications of lives and livelihoods lost as we continue to ignore our climate pledges or fulfill them only incompletely. As did the youth on Glasgow streets, Mottley pondered boldly and wistfully, “when will leaders lead?”

On the UN side, Secretary-General Guterres warned about the “delusion” that we are making the progress we need to make on climate change. The former Ambassador of Jamaica, Courtney Rattray, now Under Secretary-General for the Least Developed States, made several high profile appeals for climate funding to help stabilize least developed societies and avoid mass displacement. And in a related event on tsunami risk, the head of the UN’s Disaster Risk Reduction program Mami Mizutori urged us to never forget the “the disasters we were unprepared for and the casualties they caused.”

But it was the ever-passionate David Attenborough, early on at this COP event, who worried and wondered if “this is how it ends” for we humans, allegedly the greatest problem solvers in the history of this planet?  Ends in fires and floods, ends in mass displacement and homelessness, ends in “bad faith” engagements by officials who know better and refuse to act on what they know? One compelling response to this lament came later from a Samoa youth advocate who reminded us of the power of words “to save us or sell us out.” You all know why you are here, she proclaimed. “Do the right thing” and while you are doing that, look to the leadership of Pacific youth. “We are fighting not drowning.” 

Indeed, their struggle must be our struggle as well. The alienation, insecurity and displacement they experience now are coming for us as well. For people like me, the grave might save us from having to confront the consequences of our folly, of our willingness to only make the changes it is convenient to make, not the changes that we know we must make.  But this should offer no comfort, no excuses.  Instead, while we are still able, we must do more to ensure that the toxic consequences of our inept climate and economic policies – the unhoused, the unfed and the unprotected – are not allowed to define life for other generations.

This week, Costa Rica’s president reminded delegations of the absurdity of conducting war — military or economic — on a planet which is slowly dying. He called instead for an “army of ideas, of courage, of peace.”  It is increasingly likely that such an “army,” if it comes to exist, will consist largely of the young.  If the rest of us want to make a real difference, including on the causes and consequences of human displacement, we will need to do more to support, sustain and enrich youthful aspirations.

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