Archive | October, 2022

Preface to a Volume of African Reflections on the Future of Climate and Security Threats, Dr. Robert Zuber

30 Oct

Editor’s Note: While contemplating my next post, I was asked to write a preface for a volume on climate and security in African contexts written by diversely-situated African scholars. Without revealing the name of the book, which is yet to be published, I thought that some of you might be interested in our collective “take” on these pressing security concerns. We’ll advertise the book in this space once it is available to the public.

In the policy spaces which we cover, many of which are at UN Headquarters in New York, we see fresh evidence, if not sufficient implementation, of what we here refer to as the “climate-conflict nexus,” or what the authors of this volume refer to more explicitly and broadly as intersected “insecurity in the age of the Anthropocene.” 

Without minimizing any of the challenges facing African countries, the African authors of this compendium stress both internal issues of governance, terrorism and control of natural resources and of colonial legacies which have transformed but not abated, legacies which are perhaps more subtle but which nevertheless continue to keep an oversized foot securely planted on the neck of so many African aspirations.

Movement within global policy often crawls when running is called for, including on addressing climate threats, and yet there are signs that major institutions and their powerful patrons are beginning to take at least some responsibility for crises which they have enabled more than abated, crises related to (in my own country at least) growing economic inequities, concentrations of consumption and attendant waste for which the term “conspicuous” barely suffices, and levels of military spending which drain global coffers of funds which could be used to build more caring and collaborative societies and fund all of our sustainable development commitments.

The moniker inside the UN Security Council and beyond routinely stresses “African solutions to African problems.”  But this can only happen as the voices of African scholars and policy advocates, of civil society leaders and others living and working on the front lines of conflict and our ever-widening climate emergency, are respected and, above all, heeded. Some of this is happening at the level of international policy. Some demands have taken shape, albeit unevenly, and are now eliciting some positive global responses. There is more talk of a permanent African seat on the UN Security Council.  There are discussions about the importance of predictable funding for African peace operations.  There are reflections, including by UN Human Rights mandate holders, of the human rights dimensions of climate challenges, including the racially-charged implications of climate response which marginalizes those voices – including African voices — which suffer most from and contributed least to our climate emergency. There is even some remorse shed for failures both to ensure fair and adequate distribution of Covid vaccines and to support Africa’s own vaccine production capacities more actively.

But much more is needed to which this volume clearly and resolutely attests.  More self-reflection, sovereign respect and urgent climate action (including climate finance) on the part of major economic and political powers.  More efforts to eliminate corrupt practices and ensure that the abundance of natural resources across Africa yields greater blessings and fewer curses to African peoples.  More on the part of the major arms merchants to end the scourge of widely available, trafficked weapons to groups which terrorize and humiliate, and which impede even African states’ best efforts to roll back climate risks, ensure higher levels of food security, preserve and expand livelihoods, and restore the trust of diverse communities.  More efforts by African governments to ensure that a continent of active and often anxious young people can have confidence in state motives and plot a sustainable future which can be realized on African soil. 

As the authors note from their various contexts, if we are to effectively reverse what Gabon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs referred to recently in the Security Council as our current, “slow death,” this will require more from each of us: including higher levels of people-centered solidarity, more effective, collaborative policy energies, and sustained attention to the essential needs and aspirations of our brothers and sisters across a vast, diverse, multiply challenged and equally abundant continent. The authors of this volume are showing us the dimensions of a a more peaceful, sustainable path.  We need to walk alongside them.

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Morbid Symptoms: Shedding Tears of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

16 Oct

This is the time we have to walk stepping on the storm. Suman Pokhrel

We must rewild the world! David Attenborough

We are greater than, and greater for, the sum of us. Heather McGhee

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. Edward O. Wilson

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.  Antonio Gramsci

What remains in diseases after the crisis is apt to produce relapses.  Hippocrates

It’s just a hard moment for him, a low point, not some soul-shaking crisis; you know those aren’t sudden or public, they take years, worming inside you like a disease.  Stewart O’Nan

You have shed tears endlessly, and nothing seems to change you because you are relying on somebody else to do the job. Jiddu Krishnamurti

October is a particularly busy month at and around the UN as the six General Assembly committees scramble to put into consensus language operative paragraphs that are, sadly enough, often inoperable.  Year after year, these committees struggle with non-self-governing territories which remain less than fully free, and testimony from human rights rapporteurs which generate support mostly from the states who are already in compliance with those norms. In addition, we are witness to pious declarations of disarmament intent while nuclear weapons are both threatened and modernized and while massive defense expenditures both threaten the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals and find justification in the Russian aggression against Ukraine and other global conflicts where the major arms producers have a compelling interest.

There are many instances in UN conference rooms where the storm seems to be stepping all over us rather than its opposite, where our resolutions (crafted by diplomats with often too-little discretion beyond “instructions from capitol”) with some exceptions seem designed less to offend than to inspire, designed to do what diplomats do best, which is to keep the windows open perhaps in the hopes of better, stronger statements of intent, somewhere down the line.

Sometimes, the problems are running ahead of the resolutions, at times well ahead.  As we dither over language, the “symptoms” which that language highlights continue to “kill us softly.”  The “solutions” which we propose but don’t often enforce are as likely to breed relapse as not, as we manage just enough of the dimensions of our maladies to mostly ensure that our habits (of the heart and of practice) will generate variants on longstanding human disorders, like patients who take enough of the antibiotics to feel better but not to rid their system of what caused their infection in the first instance.

Some of the crises we face at the moment are loud and visible even to the crisis-resistant and at least some of the now-numerous and noisy crisis-deniers which have sprung up in our societies like vegetation enjoying an infrequent rainfall.  Ukraine has taken up much of the crisis-energy of the UN in this recent period, including in the Security Council where serial mind-boggling justifications and righteous indignation have largely obscured the direct threat which the Council continues to pose to the credibility of the UN system as a whole.  Indeed, as the Ukraine conflict lurches towards further escalation rather than resolution; as a cease fire agreement in Yemen has, at least for now, gone by the boards; as armed groups continue to threaten governance and livelihoods across the Sahel; as Haiti continues to struggle mightily with both anarchy and unwanted outside interference; and as violence against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories reaches a new and grisly threshold, the Council’s inability to agree on courses of action and then enforce those agreements is, for many, particularly gauling.

So too on climate change. While the activism of environmentally conscious youth becomes more and more definant, and as the UN prepares for a 27th “COP” event which is likely to again disappoint those looking for more from officials than the massive carbon footprint and tepid results we have grown to expect from these elite gab fests, more than the “Loss and Damage” reparations to which small island states are clearly entitled, the Security Council met this week at the behest of Gabon’s Foreign Minister to consider linkages between climate change impacts and the spread of armed violence by state and non-state actors across his African continent.

One after another, as is so often the case in the Council, members followed the briefers and opening statement by the Gabon Foreign Minister to either reinforce the conflict-related impacts of climate change in Africa and elsewhere, or else to deny that Council has any vested interest in a matter which ostenstibly lies within the jurisdiction of other UN bodies and which they would prefer to remain lodged in those policy agencies.

What we did not hear often in these carefully scripted statemens sent over from various capitols were confessions of how little has changed on climate change on their watch aside from emissions at still-record levels and an Arctic ice cap experiencing fall temperatures more appropriate to Portugal. There were no mea-culpas from the major emitting states. There was no mention by Brazil of the deforestation prioirties that are quickly turning the Amazon into a net carbon emitter rather than the carbon sink we have relied too much on it to perform. The emissions implications of the energy policies of the UK or other major powers were not up for review, nor was the degredation complements of arms production and trade fueling environment-wrecking armed conflicts of varying degrees of “legitimacy.” Indeed, it was Ambassador Kimani of Kenya, who is thankfully using his last months on the Council to set records straight, who reminded all of us of the colonialist double-standards which still threaten African progress on climate and development as a “natural capital superpower.”

Certainly we all need to set records straight as we are able. I came across a reflection recently that the most effective messages and strategies for social change are directed not at middle-aged contemporaries but at the next generations. But these generations don’t need our messaging. They know the “morbid symptoms” which characterize these times and they also know that we erstwhile adults have done little enough to mitigate their impacts. They also know, for all the floods and droughts, for all the fires out of control and species we never new existed on the brink of extinction, that the climate crisis remains akin to a tumor, a tumor the existance of which we can delude oursevels about only so long as the grave threats it poses remain hidden, subtle, not yet sufficiently affecting our own daily movements and priorities.

And let’s be real. There are too many “tumors” in our world now which are poised to become fully symptomatic at precisely the point at which our palliative options face severe limitations. More and more, our youth can barely grasp how it is that such threats are not sufficient to put habits and policies on a fresh course, do not represent morbid crises sufficient to replace the suits and private planes of our bubble-wrapped international events with the metaphorical equivalent of sackcloth and ashes. When will we be prepared to bring our “paleolithic emotions” and “medieval institutions” fully in line with the energy and commitment — our energy and commitment — which these times demand? When will we be ready to truly “re-wild” a life-endangered planet which is slowly slipping from our predatory grasp? When will we shed the tears commensurate with our prior indifference and future devotion?

I’ve been wondering the same.

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Bait Shop: Messaging Which Narrowly Compels, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Oct
The Middelgrunden Off Shore Windturbines located in the Øresund Straight separating Denmark and Sweden. UN Photo
From UN.org

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.  G.K. Chesterton

It might be a good idea if, like the White Queen, we practiced believing six impossible things every morning before breakfast.  Madeleine L’Engle

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut

Children see magic because they look for it.  Christopher Moore

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. William Blake

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains; Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend; More than cool reason ever comprehends. William Shakespeare

We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. Lynda Barry

It’s been a quiet few weeks from a writing standpoint, though a busy one in terms of fathoming what the next phase of our service is to be, service to causes larger than ourselves, service to those seeking more kind, inspirational and imaginative responses to our bevy of global threats than folks in my generation are currently able to generate.  

I am also reminded on this International Day of Older Persons that I am one of those, and that the task for us generically (If not gerontologically) is to share rather than control, to coach rather than compete, and to remind younger folks that –wrinkles and brain fog notwithstanding – longer years do not have to mean shrinking options.  Indeed, this has so far been a more productive and satisfying period of life than I had imagined it would be, than was the case for me in previous times, a season to invest in multiple issues and multiple actors at this moment of excess conspiracies and wanton policy foolishness. 

We have continued to engage UN spaces during its High-Level segment, despite the fact that, for us at least, the UN is in danger of becoming, as metaphor, smaller-sized bait on an increasingly exposed hook.  Despite all the pomp and circumstance, interventions by officials have largely lacked imagination, have largely deflected attention from the responsibility which in a state-driven system becoming more so, not less, is clearly theirs to assume.  Despite some valuable events on capital punishment (we will contribute to an event organized for mid-October on this very topic by our longtime colleagues at FIACAT), on nuclear disarmament in the midst of fresh threats of use by Russia, and on “transforming education” which was an important discussion if too schools-focused for our taste, the High-Level segment largely tread familiar ground.  It was left to officials such as Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados and the new President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, to remind the global community of our receding sustainable development promises and counter-productive policies such as those which seek to expand the “war on drugs” while neglecting the “first-world” loneliness, isolation and other mental health problems which generate the relentless demand for the narcotics which our “war” has utterly failed to extinguish.

We also did our own small event during the High-Level segment, a roundtable with Soka Gakkai International and the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy to launch the latest report by the Digital Economist, “Meeting the Climate Challenge” (https://docsend.com/view/d2d8aptxejxdiedy).  The somewhat overused title did not obscure some important insights including what Senior Fellow Satya Das referred to as our “Duty of Care.”  For us, this was a reassuring insight – that despite all of the attention on major international events which make more carbon than change, despite the “bait” of getting to hang out at Davos or UN “COP” events and discuss ideas (such as the DEs “global carbon levy”) with people who have the resources and access to implement them if not nearly sufficient will to do so, the planet is unlikely to pull back from the furnace to come without broader-based and more local commitments to care.  Care for our soils, for our trees, for our water, certainly for our children’s future.  We know, first-hand over many years, the limitations of policy to shift mindsets, to light a fire of change that can overcome the ashes of indifference.  Indeed, it is our view that our policy bubbles have largely done more or less all that policy bubbles can do.  It is past time to put our “duty to care” front and center in our climate response, and to do so in all the places where we matter. 

Despite all the splashy events with effective branding to boot, there have been some cold winds blowing through the UN since the easing of the Covid-19 pandemic.  As we have written before, some UN states have taken the opportunity to double down on their resistance to NGO participation beyond who the states might choose to invite themselves.  Access to events has hardly been impossible but has been granted with increasing caprice and some attitudinal version of “if you don’t like it, don’t come.” One doesn’t know from one day to the next whether a sojourn to the UN will result in a seat at a meeting or a rebuff due to some unannounced access change, including shifting meetings from “open” to “not-so-open” without a whiff of explanation.

Given the current state of affairs in our world, I can well understand why some states would not want scrutiny-obsessed groups like ours in the room, reminding delegations of the promises yet to be fulfilled, of the conflicts yet to be resolved, of the financial pledges yet to be delivered.  It can’t be comfortable for diplomats who work hard albeit “under orders” to have others constantly reminding them of hills yet to climb.  And yet, a colleague from Cameroon stayed with me for two weeks during the High-Level segment, a man attempting to protect and feed his people amidst a conflict which has received little policy attention and which continues to result in death, displacement and the wholesale degradation of the environment. While with me, the news came that his family home was burned to the ground. In essence, this is why we show up in line at the UN, day after day, year after year, hoping for a chance to plead the causes of people in desperate need who deserve as much from us as they were led to expect might be the case, certainly more than they have often received.

The discouragement of all this UN business, the small pieces of bait extending from the end of long hooks, has led us more than a few times to seek inspiration and imagination elsewhere.  This past month, the search took us to an all-September event led in part by our board chair, Christina Madden through her work with Criterion Institute, a “Convergence” of participants – most all women – in pursuit of a “feminist financial imagination.”  Despite online limitations, the discussions were beautifully moderated, allowing the conversations to drift between investment essentials and the values which, if well-embodied, can help ensure a feminist strategy free from reinforcing the patriarchal excesses of the current investment system in the main, a system which channels billions into private accounts devoid of any and all social accountabilities. 

It is hard in these “convergence” settings to find language forms which avoid the pitfalls of essentialist stereotyping, and which can effectively steer us away from the temptation to use money as dangling bait to attract status and power and not also to make change in societies now teetering on “brinks” of their own authoring. As such, we need reminders that our relationship to money remains largely uninterrogated, that we don’t actually represent many who we pretend to “speak for,” that the “faith” which drives many of us to search for inspiration and imagination beyond the usual suspects remains both largely “unhoused” and battered by circumstance; and is thus in need of reliable partnership including the provision of some of the reassurance we seek to “gift” to others.  We often embrace the imagination we are comfortable with, not the imagination which the world now requires, those “six impossible things” before breakfast which will never become incarnate until we have the courage to imagine them into existence.

The many and diverse events around the UN largely remind me on a daily basis that the world we love, the world that sustains the best and worst of us, the world that will continue on long after we have irretrievably soiled its blessings, that human world  is running out of time. The international day of older persons reminds me that I, too, am running out of time, time to discern and share with that shrinking number of folks who still care, at least a little bit, what I think, time to pursue the “magic” of inspiration and imagination wherever it can now be found, and then communicate it clearly and humbly to those many among us who, for one reason or another, are no longer inclined to take the bait.

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