Earth Year: A Call to Clarity of Hands and Hearts, Dr. Robert Zuber

2 Apr
Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba as seen by the International Space Station.

From NASA

The holy men say we are entering a period of clarity. Rigoberta Menchu

The greatest privilege is to live well in flourishing lands. Hamza Yusuf

Virtue can only flourish among equals.  Mary Wollstonecraft

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it. Rebecca Solnit

If beautiful lilies bloom in ugly waters, you too can blossom in ugly situations. Matshona Dhliwayo

Peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference. Nelson Mandela

Around the globe, people from all walks of life are holding their breath in the hope that a flurry of activity at all levels of policy and human community will be sufficient to reverse what is commonly known at the UN as the “triple” planetary threats from climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution (especially plastics pollution).  

The UN has seen its own frenetic activity as leaderships tries to both make up for precious lost time while encouraging member states to take more political risks and step-up ambitions to find more robust and cooperative measures to address threats which clearly are not inclined to wait for us to make the change we need to make in order to secure a future for our children, especially those children residing in the most climate-vulnerable regions.

The UN has certainly created numerous spaces for member state deliberations on virtually all aspects and dimensions related to the “triple threat,” including implications for human health (mental, physical and nutritional), for international peace and security, and for more inclusive processes which not only heed the voices of women, youth and indigenous people but which actually seek to incorporate their learning and insights into policy decision making.    

Some of these processes, as many of you recognize, take the form of large, carbon-intensive events which create some consensus-driven movement but generally lacking in practical implementation of pledges which fully mirror their rhetorical origins.   Case in point is the fund for “loss and damage” agreed to at COP 27 in Egypt, an important step which has yet to generate the remedial funding which the most climate affected states had anticipated (and still anticipate).  Diplomats also agreed recently on elements of a treaty to impose structures of governance on ocean areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ), a theoretically important framework to mitigate at least some of the “wild west” mentality which has encouraged massive ocean dumping and deep-sea mining and has also precipitated a decline in ocean species as waters warm and the remains of our collective overconsumption now reach the furthest ocean depths. The recently concluded UN Water Conference resulted in over 600 pledges (albeit voluntary) to strengthen “trans-boundary water cooperation, promote universal sanitation and explore security and other implications of severe access challenges regarding this most precious of resources.  The General Assembly for its part passed a unanimous resolution (sponsored by Vanuatu and others) seeking clarity from the International Court of Justice regarding the legal obligations of states whose production and consumption patterns, as noted during the week by UNEP director Inger Andersen, now serve to threaten the very existence of other states.   Even the Security Council got into the act recently as Mozambique chaired an Arria Formula discussion on protecting water-related infrastructure.  But despite what (to us at least) seems like an obvious linkage between a dangerously warming climate and prospects for armed conflict, several Council members past and present remain unconvinced that climate concerns should be folded into the Council’s peace and security mandate.

This bevy of activity (we didn’t even mention the biodiversity conference in Montreal or the Forum on Forests) is welcome but can also obscure the fact that most of these commitments are voluntary, are unenforceable or constitute some subtle form of “greenwashing” which leads people beyond UN confines to think that more is happening to forestall disaster than is actually the case. Having been around the UN for what seems like forever, we understand well that in large multi-lateral spaces facilitated by the UN, spaces filled with diplomats representing national positions and increasingly insisting on elusive consensus, progress is likely to be slow, perhaps too slow given crises weighing down human community like a bad case of COPD.  It certainly seems as such to the growing number of youth environmental activists who, despite their energies and practical commitments across the globe, still struggle for their place at the policy table to help ensure progress that is more than textual and rhetorical.  Indeed, as one youth activist noted during the days of the UN Water Conference, holding these large eco-events in expensive UN cities literally ensures that many of the people who wish to present testimony regarding the effects of and responses to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss in their communities – testimony unmediated by diplomats and NGOs like me – will continue to experience great difficulty in doing so.

While some turn red at the suggestion that the UN isn’t doing enough on a range of environmental challenges, the troubling consensus of senior UN leadership (and many of the rest of us) reveals a serious disconnect between what is needed, what is being proposed in response, and the risks that member states – including some of the world’s largest polluters – are willing to take in order to preserve healthy options for succeeding generations.  And because states in the main are not doing enough despite some claims to the contrary in UN conference rooms, the rest of us are thereby encouraged to not do enough also.  Indeed, to our minds at least, the mass of discouragement experienced about the state of the world by many is another unfortunate consequence of rhetoric that is not matched by concrete policy support for the actions at community level, actions which ultimately have the most to do with whether or not the current “triple threat” becomes what Costa Rica referred to recently as a full-on “death sentence.”

Thankfully, there are many communities and individuals from all walks of life who have refused to have the potential for abundant living by their families and communities sidetracked by misleading policy utterances including those from senior officials which are insufficiently hopeful or mindful  of the vast and increasing web of environmentally healing measures proliferating worldwide.  From habitat restoration and community composting to organic agriculture, bee-keeping and tree planting on a massive scale in countries like Pakistan and across the Sahel, people of all ages and cultures are seeking a new clarity, refusing to be distracted by either doom and gloom or passive indifference.  They have not given up on prospects for a world which can genuinely flourish for many more people, a world which remains plausible despite the circulating metrics from competent researchers associated with insects decline, plastics inundation and sea level rise.  

The UN, for all its contributions and deliberations, is not really in the “flourishing business;” indeed it is at its best a place which provides a policy platform to support and enable work which needs to take place elsewhere. But we know how easy it is to get distracted by the glamour of UN conferences or discouraged by the sometimes-dismal reports emanating from UN sources which such conferences often do too little to address.  We must remind ourselves that what both glamour and doom have in common is that they are poor recruiters for hopeful, virtuous, collaborative activity at community level which can do much to rebalance our world of sometimes gross inequalities, a world which we have been told much too often has reached or even exceeded survival “tipping points.”   

In this momentous year for the earth and our presence within it, we must not allow ourselves to be deterred by the eminence and capacity of our large institutional frameworks and spokespersons nor allow ourselves to retreat into smaller circles of life in an attempt to protect what is closest to us from the “ugly” storms looming over an uncertain horizon. We cannot survive the storms by ourselves, but the truth is that neither can they be survived without us.  In this Earth Year, we all need to urgently recalibrate the sustainability of our own lives; but perhaps even more importantly we need to help ensure that millions more people now situated firmly on the sidelines of climate action are encouraged and supported to lend hands and hearts to prospects for planetary abundance, such that more and more of us and other life forms might “live well in flourishing lands” on a planet we are running out of time to truly love. 

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Innovation for a Sustainable Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar

Editor’s Note: This post is a lightly edited version of the second presentation I made to students at Georgia Tech University earlier this month. Delays in posting were attributable to several things, one of which is the relentless policy challenges in technology, in peace and security, and related matters which I am having to work harder and harder just to keep up. Still the opportunity to address younger audiences — to share and reflect and even to apologize — is one which I value highly and never take for granted.

I want to begin this afternoon by referencing an MIT study from 1972 which was updated in 2021.  There is much to fear regarding the conclusions of this study and its three proposed scenarios, primarily its contention that the global community is headed for a systemic collapse by 2040 if we cannot change our current course and, more specifically, the way in which we as a species choose to innovate in all its dimensions.  

Of the three scenarios outlined for 2040, two are relatively hopeful but the third is the one deemed most likely — the problematic “business as usual” scenario where the innovation we need to forestall disaster is still buried under an avalanche of AI and other tech “advances”  designed primarily to be monetized, benefitting some at the likely expense of the many.

So, let’s talk a bit about innovation today, something about which all of you are learning to be proficient in this place.  From my own limited vantage point, there are three basic types of innovation we need to consider:   Making new things, adapting existing things and adjusting our own priorities as a species.  I will return to the first of these towards the end. 

Regarding innovation as adaptation, the notion of dual use is built into our contemporary understandings, most prominently perhaps in areas of defense and weapons technology where much of that research and development has eventual implications for the consumer sector as well.  But such implications are only rarely adapted to context and are only occasionally designed to help real people in the real world live in a manner that protects their future as well as enriches their present.  The impetus driving these adaptations is too often what someone wants to sell rather than on some irresistible clamor from prospective consumers.  How many of you, for instance, stay awake at night pining for self-driving cars or cruise ships with an amusement park on the top deck?

We increasingly recognize the importance of reuse to sustainable lifestyles, resisting the temptation to merely toss things into landfills when we have finished with them.  As such the kind of innovation we need now is also about finding new uses for the things already in our midst, uses which can be both life-affirming and take us well beyond what the enclosed instructions of our consumption seem to encourage.

It is here that I want to introduce innovation in the form of a “hack,” that is, striving to adapt alternative uses for the things around us beyond conventional application and, in some instances, beyond wastefulness as well.   In preparing for this talk, I spent some time on YouTube researching some of the many hacks that the clever among us have come up with.  Some of the hundreds of examples include:

  • Making a broom out of plastic bottles
  • Opening beer bottles with an opener made of folded paper (my personal favorite)
  • Using a collapsed balloon to make a  cell phone case
  • Putting lemons in a microwave to get more of the juice when you squeeze
  • Making bibs for babies out of plastic bags (babies don’t mind)

These are simple transactions that don’t move the` needle much. But the mentality associated with  this type of innovation is important, cultivating the habit of seeing what we can do with things aside from merely turning them into rubbish.  I spent the last evening in the Georgia mountains with Dr. Thomas and decided to bring back all my recycling to deposit in the bins here at Tech. Granted, my action doesn’t do much for the world in and of itself but it does reinforce habits of both hands and heart, including mindfulness directed towards trying to give our world a few more hopeful options, about lending my support to something that all of you should soon be expert in – extending the life of the items that our mostly privileged lives routinely use.

Moving on to priorities adjustment, as the MIT study suggests, our behavior in the main is unfortunately not innovating sufficiently to avoid widespread systemic collapse by 2040. We are still too indifferent to the suffering of others, we start too many armed conflicts on too little evidence, we prioritize our own “needs” in competition with others, and we continue to destroy the carrying capacity of the environment beyond its ability to repair.  We talk about lofty things in places like the UN but with too-little confidence that the quality of our innovation will match the volume of our rhetoric.  At the same time, we permit ourselves to be deceived by credentials and claims of expertise – not only credentials that don’t often generate impact that is sustainable, but even those credentials-holders who manage to stifle as much hopeful innovation as they enable.

This begs the question which some of you in this room are actually in this room to try and answer.  How do we innovate for sustainability?  And how do we measure and communicate that impact?  The answer to these questions is not just about what we are “doing” or the impressiveness of our LinkedIn page, but what difference it makes, what difference we wish to make, and to whom we wish to make it.   

We live in a time when branding is a de facto substitute for impact. In this moment of our history, if you can convince others that you are on the right track, and they are willing to invest resources based on that judgment, it doesn’t really matter at one level whether you are on the right track or not. If you get more social media attention than the one sitting next to you, you can claim impact no matter how ephemeral such affirmation might be.  Indeed, the confusion over position or wealth and its alleged ability to move the pile on our collective survival  is compounded by our seemingly endless confusion over exactly who the influencers are and what precisely is being influenced.

It seems clearly dangerous to our prospects for 2040 to promote any further such linkages between position, money, brand and impact.  Branding and status often drive investment, but neither necessarily implies impact that is both sustainable and scalable. And sometimes when funders or investors insist on “outcomes,” they are insisting on something that is abstract or inappropriate to the needs of constituents, let alone to the current needs of our threatened world.

For me, there are two rules related to impact no matter how delusional and out-of-touch they might seem on the surface:  The first rule is that what we support or enable will always be greater than what we do ourselves.  And the second is that in this enormously complex, competitive and at times corrupt world, a healthy regard for the skills of others, skills to be honored but also cultivated, is key to ensuring that “business as usual” might soon not be so “usual.”. What we can do ourselves is but a tiny fraction of what needs to be done in this threatened world. What we enable in others based on a healthy regard for their own innovation potential can set off a chain reaction of sustainable progress that we desperately need.

This sounds more like a passion for ministry than a passion for acquisition, but it is really about ensuring your own personal values are integrated into what and how you innovate, ensuring as best you are able that what you help to create or recreate makes a healthier planet and not only – or even primarily — a healthier stock price.

So let’s return now to the issue of innovation as “making new things.” 

For those of us who work in tech-informed policy, whether through the UN or NGOs (we try to do both) there are issues that come up routinely for us, including in our work to examine impacts and opportunities of what has become a veritable “wild west” of technological development:

  • How does the direction of technological development get younger and more inclusive by gender, race and culture? 
  • How do we inspire innovation without increasing the economic and social gaps which already divide people and stoke conflict? Where are the pressure points related to innovation and access?
  • How can we regulate technology without killing innovation?  Is it even possible?  Given regulatory absence there is an ethical void which leads to the potential for corruption in the sector, corruption not so much related to bribery and other classic manifestations of misuse but about innovation which is intended only for the benefit of the few, innovation which mostly serves to magnify rather than shrink gaps of access and inclusion.
  • How do we ensure attention to “what can go wrong” in a time when  technology appears to be running significantly ahead of efforts to impose some ethical standards to guide its introductions?  In this context, I am reminded of a radio host who asked an AI expert about prospects for government control in the technology sector.  The expert paused, then laughed, and then said “I think that horse has already left the barn.”  If true, those of us in policy are left to work on a few identifiable excesses but have lost touch with the pace of what is now coming into view off and online, and coming with little regard for how the genies might be returned to their bottles, if needed, once they have been released.   

UN working groups do address access and inclusion questions, as well as what it calls “malicious uses” of the internet as it seeks to create voluntary norms for technological assessments. But it is still not clear whose job it is to assess the impacts of technology before it is unleashed on an unsuspecting public.  What are the effects of so much mediated reality and how do we call attention to the dangers without stifling the entrepreneurial creativity that our world also needs? We must all contribute more towards addressing these concerns and dilemmas while there is still time and room to do so.

Back to the MIT prediction now. Where are you likely to be if and when these computer-generated prophecies come to pass?

I will surely be dead in 2040.  You all will be middle-aged, also mid-career if you decide to go that route.  Many of you will have children of your own, children who may have some legitimate fears but perhaps also many questions about why we didn’t change course when it was clear that course correction was an urgent necessity. At the moment, we still have options going forward, but if the MIT folks are correct, business as usual is going to mean a good deal of unpleasantness for you and everyone you care about. And when that time comes, if that time comes, your response options will likely be severely constrained regardless of your academic degrees or financial resources.

Innovation has a key role to play in forestalling disaster, but innovation which exists beyond technology itself and certainly beyond its relentless and rapid monetization.  We need more innovation which is context specific, adaptable to scale, committed to new uses, and which does not obscure the importance of growth in the personal realm, of becoming more like the people we have the potential to be, people who can move beyond business as usual and embrace the tasks and responsibilities of business as unusual. There is a lot of talent in this room.   There is a lot of anxiety in this room as well. Time for all of us to get busy and stay busy to ensure that “business as usual” doesn’t back us into corners we will eventually find it almost possible to escape.   

The hard lesson in all of this is to be careful what you innovate.  Be mindful of what you innovate.  We in the educational and policy realms are barely staying connected to all that has come and all that is to come as technology now seems to be driving humanity, perhaps eventually off a cliff, if we cannot together find ways to retain control of the steering wheel. 

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Servant Leadership, Systems Thinking and Sustainable Development: A Hopeful Trio, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Mar

Editor’s Note: This past week, at the end of 2 months away from New York, I was honored once again to address students at the Scheller School of Business at Georgia Tech University. Courses offered by our close colleague, Dr. Robert Thomas, cover issues related to Servant Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship and have attracted a large following of students who seem to be seeking ways to utilize skills and privilege to expand their options in the service of a planet and its people under considerable strain. This is a lightly edited version of my Servant Leadership presentation. The Social Entrepreneurship piece will soon follow.

Today, this weary road-warrior will attempt to blend three objectives together.   First the beneficial implications of Servant Leadership which I value highly.

Second the objective of this week’s lessons which is the benefit of Systems Thinking which I also value highly, though not without caveats.

And the third to discern implications of all of this for fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals which, at least some of you may recognize, is a focal point for this week of activities here at Georgia Tech. It is certainly a focal point for much of our work in New York as well.

First up, why servant leadership?  I and a small group of colleagues are in the process of writing a book grounded in large measure on inights from the Inner Economy model lovingly developed by Dr. Lisa Berkley in California, a model which among other benefits assists us to explore the feelings, values, connections and inspirations that many of us in this world overlook but which make us who we are, help define who we might become and influence how we can better use our skills and talents to make a better future for the world.  At the UN, our phase for this is “better policy requires better people” people who see more deeply, hold the mirror up to themselves as well as others, and invest in the wellbeing of colleagues across the political spectrum as well as their own.  It’s about leadership which is committed to raising all the boats in the harbor not simply the largest and most expensive. It is also about the realization that none of the problems – some grave – that we now face are ultimately unsolvable without a commitment to deeper connection and a more comprehensive and supportive engagement with the skills and aspirations of others. As a general rule, we need to risk more closeness while committing to vigorous shaking of the asset tree in our diverse communities and then making better use of what falls from it.

What we seek here is not only about a more honest relationship with ourselves, but also about a more robust and open claim on connection with others, with those we know and those we don’t know yet.  One of the motivations for my own involvement in the aforementioned book project is the recognition by psychologists and neuro-biologists, and certainly but by folks in other walks of life, that we have collectively done grave damage to what is in fact our hard wiring for connection.  Despite a bevy of social media tools, we have become, on the whole, more cynical and suspicious than is either empirically-justified or generally good for us.  We have swapped out broad circles of connection and replaced it with performative and materially focused gestures.  People who wouldn’t dream of making eye ontact in a café willingly pose in front of camera possibly to be seen by thousands.  People increasingly would, to quote the great Wendell Berry, rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  The movements represented by Inner Economy and Servant Leadership remind us in part of the fundamental value of human connection, of not only having neighbors on farms and in offices but doing more to help their various contributions and labors have the impact that our stressed-out world needs them to have.

So now, what does “systems thinking” contribute to these ends?

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into constituent and independent parts.  Systems thinking also involves a sensitivity to the circular nature of the world we live in; an awareness of the role of both local cultures and global structures in creating the conditions we experience; a recognition that there are powerful laws of nature and economy operating on us that we are largely unaware of; a realization that there are consequences to our actions that we are oblivious to. Systems thinking helps strike a better balance between how the various elements of life fit together and the small acts and insights that help define our contexts and ensure an improvement of the fit. 

Systems thinking is also an aid to increasing our sensitivity to how patterns shift over time, patterns that operate within us and outside us, most beyond the events of the moment.  I am trained a bit in counseling and there is a tendency here for the one being counseled to focus on the life events which both provoked their narrative and allegedly proved that narrative as well.  But any such narrative is inevitably more complex, more inter-connected than articulated.  And despite our desire at time to hold it in place, our narratives continue to evolve as we also continue to evolve.  As I reminded a successful friend of mine, “we were not always this way.”  You will not always be the way you are now.  Regardless of how hard you try not to change, how much you might want to maintain your habits, preferences and “explanations” for both, the constant drip of life ensures that our outer and inner economies will at least in some key ways be transformed, not only in wrinkles but in disappointments and loss, in satisfaction and success.  And all of that is integrated into a human system which in our cases has already experienced much and which is connected to far more than we generally recognize.  

Finally, systems thinking enhances our ability to examine skillfully what at the UN we call the “root causes” of events and issues, causes which are often considerably more complex than what we are able or willing to acknowledge.  Again with reference to counseling, we hear a lot of the “someone done me wrong narrative” that ostensibly forms the basis for the pain and drama that motivated the person to seek counseling in the first place.  But of course the story is always more complex.  Yes, we have been done wrong, sometimes gravely  But we have likely also done wrong.  We have enabled bad behavior.  We have held our tongue when speaking out was warranted.  We have stood by when intervention would have been the more virtuous path.  And we have accepted systems of education, business, politics and even religion that could be so much more than they are, so much more engaging and hopeful if only we would commit to make them so.

The problems we face in policy are most often chronic and systemic, rather than a one-off.  This is true as well in our personal lives.  But our problems also have a context that is evolving, one that is constantly incorporating new experiences and new reactions, one that includes habits forming but also habits dissolving, one which urges us to ask different questions, better questions, including of yourself, than you might have been willing to ask before.

Perhaps I am making too much of this, but this last point seems particularly important.  Most of us are terrible at asking questions.   When we ask, it is only rarely without agendas, rarely drawing people out, rarely open-ended.  Many of our questions take the form of accusations.  Someone is suspicious of something or other.  Someone is trying to “catch” us in something.  Back in the days of transactional analysis, there was this game which so many of us play and which was defined as “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”  This is how we roll now.  Catching people in one half-truth or another is the goal rather than helping them to explore or grow.   

Given this, we collectively tend to recoil at being asked questions, seeing questions as a threat or an intrusion or a source of judgment – justified or not — rather than an opportunity to connect, to broaden our thoughts and other engagements with the world. Indeed, one could make the case (and I would make it here) is that the way we ask and respond to questions is a strong indicator of the state of our social world and, more specifically, the state of ourselves.

Finally we come to the Sustainable Development Goals which is more or less systems-thinking-on-steroids for sustainability.  This is SDG week here at Tech and the SDGs offer some important insights into how servant leadership and systems thinking interconnect.  On the plus side, we are reminded that Sustainable Development Goals and targets are interrelated, that progress on racial justice or women’s rights or green energy access has direct implications for food security, smarter cities, ocean health or the creation of more peaceful societies.  When we discriminate, when we fail to acknowledge the degree to which our prejudices keep too many on the sidelines as we attempt to solve the problems which will directly impact your future, problems which are related, which affect all and which must be solved by all. Our prejudices and other limitations jeopardize fulfillment of the SDG promises we have made and, more importantly, the promises that you who will soon come to full fruition in this crazy world will require.   We owe you this, we owe you all of it, including a strong and impactful role for each of you who desire it in helping the rest of us ensure that promises made are promises kept.

But as important as this is, it leaves out an important dimension, that of context and localization.  Yes, we want people in general to be guaranteed access to education, to fresh water, to cities that are healthy and functional, to governance and justice systems that at the very least attempts to be fair.  But like other people we also want to ensure water access for our own families and neighbors, we also want better transportation which serves our own neighborhoods, we also want education for our own children which prepares them to live in the world to come and not only the world that was.

All of these desires and aspirations have specific contexts and all of this requires energies and strategies which are tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of real people in real places. Rethinking transportation options takes a different form in Bangkok than in Atlanta.   Water access means something different in Miami than in the Sahel.   And contexts can shift, sometimes dramatically.   Los Angeles this winter had torrential rain and sleet storms with feet of snow on mountains visible from local beaches after years of drought.  Little stays the same except, unfortunately, the way in which we address changes, the levels of determination and fairness that we apply in the struggle to ensure more equitable access to sustainable resources. 

There is a lesson here for Servant Leadership as well.   Yes, we want leaders who are concerned about our well-being beyond our workplace functions.  And yes we appreciate policies that help make our labors more effective and humane.  But we need service provision that to some degree responds to context.  Persons with disabilities often need different forms and levels of service than so-called “normal” people.  Immigrants often need different forms of support than residents.  Children and the elderly often require sustained care beyond what those of us in this lecture room generally require.   It is the job of sustainable development policy to as we say “leave no-one behind.”  But the needs of aspirations of people are not a function of some computer-generated abstractions.   They all reside somewhere specific.  They all have a metaphorical address and we must do better at delivering to those addresses.

So this to me is the great challenge of servant leadership which embraces systems thinking and contributes to sustainable development.   We must better train ourselves to see the connections between projects and people, between issues and outcomes.  And we need to get better at being honest about the things that can go wrong when we attempt to lead or make policy based on sometimes-willfully incomplete assessments, such as when we release new technology to market before we have properly interrogated its potential for harm.   But we also need leadership which moves beyond algorithms and other abstractions to the system which exists around us and within us, a system which we both create and carry with us, a system which needs to remain humane and reassuring, a system which has inflicted pain and had pain inflicted on it, a system currently characterized by too many disconnects and half-fulfilled, decontextualized promises.

Because you are who are you and because you are in a place such as Georgia Tech, you will likely always have options in life.  But you will also face your cross-roads, some of your own making, where even the most provileged and self-directed of you will need a hand to help you out of some metaphorical ditch.  One key to the fulfillment of the SDGs is to integrate more of those hands into our institutions and policy chambers, to reflect over and over on the responsibilities of leadership to enable a world of sustainable connection and shared development. It is often said at the UN that we are running out of time to fix the world.  Servant leadership reminds us that we are also running out of time to fix ourselves.

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Monster Mash: A Call for Reconnection in Policy and Community, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Feb
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed - Scooby-Doo Image (21166023) - Fanpop

Monsters Unleashed – Fanpopfanpop.com

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom. George Orwell

My biggest fear is of some kind of dystopian future where we’re advanced in every way except in our humanity.  Bryce Dallas Howard

The tortures mankind devises for its amusement will surely render the devil redundant. Reed King

You always get your kicks pointing out defects?” retorted The Drippy Man. Jeff Phillips

We may be monsters, but we are each other’s monsters. L. Grey

Their lies are shrouded in beauty, attractive and believable to the average person. Jessica Scurlock

She was lucky enough to know little enough to fear nothing more than wasps, the dark, and the darker figments of her imagination. Angela Panayotopulos

No one wants to die, said Becka. But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.  Margaret Atwood

For some time now, I’ve been intrigued, at times perplexed, at other times even disgusted at the degree to which dystopian thinking and imagery has influenced – surely infected as well – our social and political life.

What moved me to start writing on this topic and stop procrastinating over it was an image on my twitter feed this past Sunday morning, one of many posts in the post-Musk era full of monstrous venom directed at others, of violence in all its diverse manifestations, of lies and manipulations which represent, among other things, a down-payment on a world of fear and unaddressed longing, of political impotence and resource scarcity, that seem set to bring us down to levels that those who study the human condition have long recognized (and feared) our capacity to descend.

The image I refer to was of a classroom-style space in which sat a group of Russian children wearing masks and listening to a middle-aged woman speak on the topic of war.  These children were perhaps of middle school age, still not so far from those days of being fearful of the dark, of imagining all sorts of monsters under their sleeping places.  Not so far from needing the reassurance and stability of older persons that there really aren’t monsters under the bed, that it is OK to sleep secure in the knowledge that we erstwhile adults are doing all that we can to ensure a brighter, less fearful future for their still young lives.

Such reassurance was not exactly what was communicated through this particular post.  What was “shared” was the view that “War is victory. War is love. War is friend. War is the future of the world”.

Well, if war is the future of the world, then these young lives are doomed to intersect with violence and deprivation which make the monsters under their beds seem like Sesame Street characters in comparison.  If war is not the future of the world, and there are still plenty of us determined to make this so, then this “sharing” takes its place among the most monstrous lies that could be perpetuated on young minds, minds which are able to imagine the carnage to come but can do little or nothing at this point in their lives to divert its impacts.

Lest we insert my post into some dynamic of now-rampant superpower confrontation wherein the evildoers are conspiring to “educate” their own next generation, we don’t have to look far within our own contexts for those monsters we choose over and over to feed instead of tame.  In my own country, the media is saturated with trailers for films and other accessible video that feature more shootings and explosions in a sixty-second commercial than any child needs to see in a lifetime.  We have proven ourselves ready to believe anything about the world (or each other) that we feel could strengthen our hand while we enthusiastically project into the universe the evil that we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves.  We set up schools to reinforce white privilege and glorify figures such as Adolf Hitler, run by people who are otherwise categorically opposed to the “indoctrination” of schools.  We use the machinery of politics to divide and deny, and we use the language of religion to win assent from people who don’t seem to recognize (or perhaps care) that their economic and spiritual pockets have yet again been picked.

The characteristics of societies given over to dystopian worldviews are more common than we might otherwise think, people who have come to expect so little of others or themselves, people who have accommodated themselves  to levels of violence and inequity which undermine prospects for caring and reconciled communities, people who believe fervently in the presence of monsters lurking in their sleeping spaces but who have also largely scorned  the rhetorical reassurances of those in authority who themselves have too-often failed the more important test of reassuring actions.

It is commonplace in social commentary to reflect on our “advances” as a civilization, clever as we surely are, but less to acknowledge the degree to which many of these advances create new obstacles to access by most of the world’s peoples, obstacles which take many forms and which are more often protected than challenged, sometimes at the tip of a firearm.   In my own country, but not my country alone, we continue to innovate in ways that both solve problems and create new ones without careful scrutiny of the gaps which our innovations are more likely to widen, the gaps which serve the interests of some but stoke the grievances of many, the genies which we so willingly let out of their bottles with not a clue in the world as to how to get them back in should that be required.

It is difficult for me at times to grasp what precisely we are up to as a species, why we find so much comfort in what are demonstrably our more troubling human impulses, why we insist on turning difference into occasions for hatred, why we take umbrage at the things others do and the ideas they hold without investing a single moment trying to understand the common complexities of people, their fears and loathings, their opinions and failings, their aspirations and dreams.   I don’t know that I have ever lived through a time when people presumed to know more about their political, cultural or religious adversaries based on assumptions, caricatures, stereotypes – none of which could stand at face value the test of evidence generated from direct, human interaction. We have literally become adept at creating monsters with little or no corroboration regarding what exactly people have done (or thought, or believed) to warrant this unseemly designation.

Last week, I indulged a “538” podcast with Robert Waldinger, a Harvard professor who has been chronicling – and lamenting – the gradual but consistent demise of human connection which has had – and is having —  grave impacts on our politics, our religious faith, even our personal health.  Waldinger describes a society of increasingly isolated and lonely individuals, people who report having few friends of any quality, fewer and fewer trusting bonds, fewer too of the complex human connections that can contextualize our overly muscular, abstracted and increasingly digitally-enabled  condemnations of others we do not know, have little interest in knowing, and to whom we seem content to posit  as existential threats rather than as life and health-saving ties that bind. 

Clearly we have decided in too many instances, as the great Wendell Berry once noted, that we would prefer to own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  Consumption, acquisition, doubling down on the “beautiful” words that obfuscate more than illuminate and that we simply “need to believe,” getting our “kicks” by condemning all that we fail to understand, projecting evil into the world that we haven’t yet had the courage to confront within ourselves.   These lines are hardly inevitable, but they are trending in directions that may well at some point make monsters of us all.

As one strategy for getting beyond my deep procrastination regarding this piece, I listened to a rendering of “Monster Mash,” a fun tune from long ago that got many in its day off the couch, away from the television, and on to the dance floor.   It was a “graveyard smash,” we were told, so much so that even corpses were ostensibly inspired to leave the cemetery for an evening and join the fun.  I fear that the next version of Monster Mash will be less about playful music and more about words which foment hatred and mistrust, words which signify our generalized intent, if that Russian woman prophesies correctly, to put “others” in their graves rather than invite them out for some genuine human interaction on a dance floor, real or metaphorical.  

More and more, some quite powerful thinkers are coming around to the view that our nations are only as healthy as the bonds which connect us to one another.  This is important work that has the potential to contextualize our policy, improve our personal and social health, and overcome the abstractions that serve only to increase populations of monsters, real and imagined.

For the sake of ourselves and the sake of our world, let’s reconnect.

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Global Action’s 2022 in Review: Hard Times for UN Engagement, Harder Times for the Planet

22 Jan

The page has turned on yet another year, one which saw challenges to democracy and international law, but which also saw more urgent (if not always wise) engagements in multilateral forums as a multitude of threats bore down on policymakers with a force which was both painful to behold and hard to ignore – threats of biodiversity loss and mass deforestation; threats of famine in several global regions and of arms trafficking in many of those; threats of violent storms and oceans struggling more each year to sustain the life of coastal populations; threats from depleted soils which can no longer accommodate an insatiable desire for the corn and grains which feed the animals whose consumption fuels a good chunk of our current climate emergency.

But in some ways the greatest threat of all is related to signs now abounding of the diminution of our basic human capacity, the hardening of our hearts and shrinking of our commitment to accompaniment, our quick-trigger judgments and even conspiracies that we more willingly double down on than change, triggers which have led over and over again to overt violence, which have certainly shrunk the space for negotiation, let alone understanding, and which make it harder and harder to, as the Adele tune would have it, “go easy” on us when easy is called for.

We know from our own lives how threats to safety or financial security – real and imagined — can unlock some of the worst in our species.  As the bills pile up, relationships fail to even approximate expectations, children succumb to fresh waves of disease and indifference, and employment options dwindle, an overall decline in civility and the will to accompany those facing greater hardship is perhaps understandable.   But our reactions to circumstance often serve only to diminish prospects for altering circumstance. To pull in and self-protect, to forget that what we imagine is “best for me,” is arguably not “best” at all, neither for “me” nor for the web of life without which we are left paddling upstream as the currents only grow in force, these unwelcome reactions are one of the benchmarks of our times.   

And we have surely done our share of such paddling over 23 years of existence, advocating without fully committing ourselves to process, dismissing without proposing more viable alternatives, cheering for what turned out in the end to be the “wrong” side of issues and conflicts, investing in the potentially transformational ideas of others only to find on more than one occasion that the entrepreneurial spirit we admired had transformed before our very eyes into yet one more self-interested, overly-branded, funder-obsessed initiative.

Yes, we have at times taken our eyes off the prize, invested in the work of others unwisely, offered assistance to those with no intention to “pay forward” let alone pay back, gone softer on ourselves and the UN than we might have and, at times, been harsher than warranted as well.  And as the threats we face multiply and intersect, we know that we need to do more but also better, to highlight and help connect the intersecting threads of policy which are hardly news to our thousands of followers but which turn out to be our signature (perhaps only) relevant skill.  We know after many long years that the dangling laces of both shoes need to be firmly tied if we are to strive towards global solutions with confidence and credibility.

Given the stubborn persistence of Covid in recent years, we had every reason to believe that our shoe-tying days might well be over.  Even minimal funds were hard to come by, compliance with state and federal directives was becoming more challenging, and interns were lacking in safe spaces (including and beyond my own guest room) where they could experience at least some aspects of the UN community as we and other NGOs limped through a two-year pandemic banishment from UN Headquarters. It would have been easy enough to throw in all the towels on the rack and find some other way to contribute to challenges now too deeply ingrained in us to ignore. 

As the worst of the pandemic abated and more or less full (though not always welcome) readmission to UN processes seemed immanent, we made several adjustments we needed to make in light of these priorities:  Retain a laser focus on the Security Council and related peace and security mechanisms, tied as always to the evolving development, gender, environmental and human rights triggers of armed conflict.  Continue to help local groups find their footing at the UN and, through expanded hospitality, make it possible for more people from a wider span of community interests to share their own concerns directly in UN spaces.  Use social media to keep thousands of people with a direct interest in what the UN does without direct access to UN processes a sense of what is happening beyond barely implemented resolutions and other policy promises, and suggest what more can be done to make and sustain relevant community-policy connections.  And think — think harder and more creatively with others about what the times we are living through require of each of us.

That’s all we can do for now. It’s perhaps no more than a drop in the bucket in this era of lurching crises, but it’s also felt good over this past year to be able, once again, to contribute in a manner which some appreciate despite our limitations of size and capacity.  Give people more than they expect and don’t delude them into thinking that challenges will be solved completely by virtue of whatever pretense we in the middle of global policy spaces are foolish enough to generate.

No one can predict the future, but we can predict that we will make use of whatever tools we can create and sustain to make the connections – among issues and among constituents – that offer the most viable path to the peaceful, sustainable planet we are running out of time to create. Having returned to business after a long and reflective sojourn, it is the least we can do.

Storm Tracker: A Christmas Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

24 Dec
Winter storm puts millions under alerts coast-to-coast as record-low ...

Mercury

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

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

So long awaited that its coming was a shock.  Mohsin Hamid

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

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

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

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

It is Christmas Eve morning in a deceptively-sunny New York.   Deceptive in that the temperature is 7 degrees F, the winds are howling through windows that leak more than a typical Congressional aide and that have so far resisted all my efforts to tape their edges. The heat now comes on and off and the ‘hot” water is tepid at best.

I am blessed.

Blessed because there is oatmeal and apple in the house. Blessed because we were able to track the impending blast from an unstable Arctic and had some time to prepare.  Blessed because I am not sitting in an airport after a long night of searching for food and explaining to increasingly unsettled children why they might not make it to grandma’s house after all.  Blessed because the leaks in my home, much like the leaks in my life, are much more likely to be plugged than those who will face another holiday in prison or trying to steal some rest in the far corner of an empty subway platform.

Blessed because I did not have to spend an icy night tending to a newborn child in a barn.

But as in years past, despite our endless predispositions to violence, our ever-hardening hearts and our well-practiced capacity to look away from the storms we well have the capacity to track, the newborn child comes as “light and dream;” as a reminder that the life we have built is not necessarily the life to which we are now called; that the storms which we face – and the storms we make – are still within our remedial range; that the promise of that birth is not just another “empty bowl” but rather as grace to as Stevie Nicks once wrote, to allow the “child in our hearts to rise above,” such that we might “handle the seasons” of our lives” with greater generosity and dignity, with a firm gratitude for blessings that can survive the cold and all the other storms with which we are currently afflicted, blessings as represented in that manger which we pretend to anticipate each and every Christmas year but which somehow still come to us as a shock.

As most of you know, we are still engaged on a regular basis at the United Nations, though this past year of access has made us wonder a bit about our value, real and perceived.  While change at the UN can be even more glacial than waiting for teenagers to vacate a single family bathroom, we have witnessed some shifts in attitude – a growing sense that a UN which has been too much about promises as “empty bowls,” anticipating storms with considerable skill but then playing politics with responses which do not take seriously the expectations of constituents, that UN is increasingly incarnating a practical recognition that forecasts must be accompanied by active preparations and, when needed, emergency accompaniment.  More and more, whether on biodiversity protection, poverty reduction in the Sahel, online hate speech or gang violence in Haiti, UN agencies and their leadership are genuinely starting to “fill the bowls” with tangibility, with something more than endless rhetorical aspiration, condemnations which have long-lost their impact, or emergency provisions from often-remarkably dedicated humanitarians mostly accessible only after some of the proverbial horses have already left the stable. 

Especially during this holy season, I often wonder what exactly is wrong with us, is wrong with me? Do we truly lament that “we cannot love enough?” And if so, what do we do about that?  What’s our plan to energize that skill? And what are the signposts indicating that we are making progress on perhaps this most essential of human attributes, signs that we are truly commited to caring beyond our current capacities, loving better despite ourselves, pushing harder to balance the world in lieu of some of our modest, even petty personal aspirations?

Those of you who regularly consume these posts (I feel for you) recognize the predisposition to equate loving with attentiveness and discernment.  Despite my own limitations, I remain firmly committed to the task both philosophical and practical set out by my graduate school mentor Maxine Greene who hopefully suggested that “we want ourselves to break through some of the crusts of convention, the distortions of fetishism, the sour tastes of narrow faith.” Such “crusts” and “distortions” simply have no place in institutions devoted to the care of human souls nor other aspects of the global public good in a time of intersecting crises.  Such “narrow faith” has no place in a season calling us to “fill the bowls” with goodness and mercy; calling us to resolutely discern the times and supercharge our attentiveness; calling us to eschew any and all forms of resignation and be the light that a shivering child in a manger gave us sanction to be.

The temperature outside has risen to 9 degrees.  The water in the sink is getting warmer.  The winds are still compromising what passes for apartment windows, but now more like a knife through hard cheese than soft butter.  And the baby in the barn is calling out to us once again to be that light unto the world, to be the dreamers who can flip our global storms into fresh and sustainable possibilities for future generations of humans and the species on which our very lives depend. 

We can do this.   Happy Christmas.

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Wait List: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

27 Nov

Wallup.net

Every waiting day makes your life a little less. Every lonely day makes you a little smaller. Every day you put off your life makes you less capable of living it. Ann Brashares

What does the anticipation feel like? The sensation of staring into the void, the awareness of an end’s impending arrival? Burning and being extinguished simultaneously?  Teo Yi Han

One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God. Oswald Chambers

Life can seem like a gloomy wait in the thick of black shadows. And still there are those who smile at the darkness, anticipating the beauty of an eventual sunrise.  Richelle E. Goodrich

“For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting. Haruki Murakami

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living. Voltaire

So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.  Gary Paulsen

Whatever happens, do not let waiting become procrastination.  Neeraj Agnihotri

Tides do what tides do–they turn.  Derek Landy

Here we are at the beginning of another Advent season, another opportunity to remind ourselves, as several thoughtful figures have recently sought to do, that we should not let the struggles of the present annul feelings of anticipation that the promise of a brighter, more equitable and peaceful future can somehow be realized.

Somehow.

As with other years, this season leading up to Christmas seems to be more about preparation than anticipation, making our lists and checking them twice rather than discerning the times and its sometimes-frightening messaging. Such times require more from those of us who would once again dare to welcome into our lives in a few short weeks a baby lying in a barn whose presence in our world still yearns to teach and guide more than we are collectively willing to be taught and led.

But this season is less about the manger per se than about that which we long for, that for which we wait.  As we peer into the vastness of both a large and awesome universe and of our own inner realities, as we search for fresh signs that life on this planet, however damaged and threatened at present, is truly worth preserving by each of us, we must also acknowledge that the promise of such a world has not sufficiently informed our judgments or guided our actions.  We live for the most part as though the reality we recognize today is the one we will encounter tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.  A virtual carbon copy, if you will, of the tasks and their schedules which largely make up our weeks and months, tasks which reflect habits of the heart of which we are scarcely aware and mostly loath to shift in any event.  

But the tides are, indeed, continuing to turn.  Whether we choose to be moved to response by that reality or not, the planet we inhabit continues to become busier, warmer, less biologically diverse.   Rights are being rolled back.  Institutions of governance and finance are proving themselves to be less effective, indeed less trustworthy, than we had hoped they might be, often claiming more in the way of “leadership” than they are actually providing. Collectively, we still seem keen on soiling our own beds, on snuffing out much of the life on earth that has made our own life possible and thus jeopardizing prospects for those we have brought into this world (and those they will choose to bring as well).

And what of our religious life at a moment when so much of the humility and awe of our erstwhile divinely inspired universe has degenerated into mean-spirited and petty reflections of communications from a “God” many of us simply don’t recognize; a deity which seems to be stuck in age-old patterns of advocating violence and revenge rather than kindness and service; a God who has apparently authorized people of deep (if not altogether unjustified) grievance to take to the streets with their deadly weapons and smote those who offend their own sense of righteousness, who are at least as quick as the rest of us to pass judgment on others but not on themselves, and who somehow have allowed themselves to believe that the baby in the manger whom we anticipate yet again this Advent  represents a call to vengeance rather than compassion, of rampant materialism rather than reconciliation, of goodness somehow better reflected in our pigmentation than in the works of our hands, hearts and souls.

Thankfully, for many of us still, this is not what we long for in this season. This is not what we wait for nor what we hope for. Some still long instead for that time when the manger chill becomes a season of warmth, when the healing of body and mind can help us cast out our demons of hatred and violence, when the multitudes can be fed in a world of plenty as intent on sharing as on consuming, when the rumbling sounds we have come to hear so often are from many feet walking along paths of justice and mercy rather than from climate-induced devastation or from rockets slamming into apartment complexes.

We have written of this before and wish it did not bear repeating, but we must remind our readers and ourselves that our assessments in life our largely a function of our expectations.  And we do acknowledge that our expectations of humans remain considerable, even as we probe the depth of our own unhelpful habits, even as we continue to search the night skies and our own souls hoping to find more inspiration for ourselves and others, the “more” which can better enable, yet alone ensure, a planet fit for our children, all our children. 

We do indeed expect more of ourselves and of others, and this in spite the debris which I and so many have scattered over a too-broad section of our lives  We also expect more of institutional and political officials who continue to insist on the spoils of “leadership” while habitually overpromising and under-delivering.  We also expect more of self-justifying religious leadership which seems to be making this spiritual thing up as they go along, dragging us into places more arrogant than humble, more judgmental than kind, faith which presumes much but which dodges much of the emotional content of this Advent season and those moments which convey dimensions of a deeper and more common human aspiration. 

And we understand that anticipation worthy of the name is not to be equated with passive waiting, certainly not the waiting to be confused with lethargy or procrastination, clearly not the waiting which brings us pain or simply condenses our lives into smaller and smaller spaces. Rather it is about living such that what we anticipate is already alive within us, already burning and consuming what stands in the way of the changes we have mostly waited too long to make, already encouraging us to align ourselves, our actions and faith, with those times which could well be just around the bend, those times which can finally bring to pass the full promise of the manger. 

There is much to learn in this Advent season, much to fix as well, in the world and in ourselves.  What I wish most for each of you, for myself also, is the waiting which transitions into anticipation and which further transitions into a deeper commitment to discernment and service.   The sun will surely shine over us after this long season of darkness.  We can live in these moments as though its rays have already begun to melt away the Advent chill.

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On Caring and Enabling: Navigating Crisis Response on a Post-Twitter Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

19 Nov

The goal is not to get something said but to get something heard.  Fred Craddock

We cannot feel good about an imaginary future when we are busy feeling bad about an actual present.  Daniel Gilbert

It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough.  Charles H. Spurgeon

We want our leaders to inspire us because we’ve been inspiring them for so long.

This last quotation from Vanessa Nakate, one of the leading youth representatives at COP 27 in Egypt, hit me in ways that most of the oft-compromised, policy speechmaking emanating from this climate COP (and previous COPs for that matter) has not. 

While preparing yet another Advent Letter and while assessing the value of our work and how it needs to change going forward given the possible end of twitter and some predictable disappointments from the latest (and now extended) UN climate change event in Egypt, the words of a compelling young advocate seeking from “leaders” what they should be providing to our youth as a matter of course is, to my mind at least, both jarring and dispiriting.   

For over 20 years, we at Global Action have chosen to tether ourselves to institutions which tend towards being long on activity and short on progress and the inspiration which progress engenders, institutions (and their talented people) which largely mean well but which fail to communicate the limits of their own efficacy; institutions which urge people to have confidence in state capacities which have proven largely insufficient given the magnitude of threats and challenges which now dominate our social and political landscape. In process and rhetoric, the emphasis seems to be on maintaining control of issues and their response narratives much more than most officials of these institutions would ever acknowledge.

Many of us know what it feels like to “mean well,” to grant ourselves some form of emotional participation trophy for efforts – good faith and not – to honor our promises and commitments to others.  In our own modest line of activity at the UN and beyond, such honoring has taken the form of both careful scrutiny and feedback which has attempted to be harsh when needed, complimentary when deserved, and mindful that the insight and skills of our policy competitors and even our adversaries are likely to be as indispensable to a healthy, secure, peaceful future as our own.

After years of engagement, we continue to believe that our own small-scale energies are mostly on the hopeful side of issues from climate change and capital punishment to weapons spending and the well-being of persons with disabilities.  And while we may have over-rated a bit the capacities of we humans to rise to difficult occasions, especially in cases where our status and income might be called into question, we have seen enough change over the years – much of it welcome — to know that the fact of change – if not its general direction – is inevitable.  Painful to navigate at times, raw material for a barrage of grievances often, but also potential never to be dismissed. 

Still, we who spend time in the endless gabfests of international policy have forgotten things which are perhaps not in our remit but are indispensable to the success of our efforts to address problems beyond operative paragraphs in resolutions that all governments (and even some civil society organizations) can accept in theory if subsequently ignore in practice. We especially forget that beyond the range of our policy bubbles, resolutions represent promises.  People anticipate, and have the right to anticipate, that our erstwhile “leaders” are fully committed to global well-being, and that the skilled diplomats who carry their messages and incarnate them in agreements are as committed to honoring public expectations in a timely manner as they are to honoring “political realities” or diplomatic consensus.  

We also seem to forget that the messes we have made in the world are unlikely to resolve themselves, that the sickening mold on our walls will only expand unless we take firm measures to remove it and then impede it from returning.  Such firmness in the policy realm requires commitments to both boldness and fairness, ensuring that crises are met with actions that can bring us back from the brink and can do so to the best of their ability without inflaming further the tensions currently tearing our grossly unequal world apart. 

Such a scenario is not outside the realm of possibility, even in this time of shrinking response options. But we need more – much more – from the people who hog the podium, negotiate tepid agreements beyond public view, accept outcomes which they know will not solve the problems to which they point, and dare to get inspiration from talented, energized youth advocates rather than providing more of it themselves. 

No, the ones who gobble up the speaking slots and then stand and accept the applause for their “leadership” should also be providing a larger share of the inspiration, encouraging the rest of us to do more, care more, and take more risks while promising to watch our collective back.  It should not be left to a group of diverse and determined teens to inspire leaders to do more to mitigate climate and other global threats, to take more tangible responsibility for the health and well-being of this next generation as they would take for those of that generation in their own households.

Nor is it unreasonable for me to wonder if after all these years of monitoring and organizing, of creating spaces of hospitality and access for people who could otherwise not afford to have their voices heard in UN policy spaces, if we haven’t also, at times inadvertently, enabled the perpetuation of some of what we say needs to be fixed. Enabled by showing up every day and tacitly (and at times explicitly) equating what the UN does with what the world now needs; emabled by sharing critiques that are little more than feathery blows against a system which has amply fortified itself against much stronger winds; enabled by failing at times to communicate the best of what we see at the UN in anticipation of its potential recurrence, or to hold up the worst of what we see in the hope that repairs can commence at the earliest possible moment.

I don’t want to be that sort of enabler any longer.  To the extent that I and my colleagues have been so, we should have had the sense to divert from that path long ago.  Of course, enabling itself can be (and often is) an act of love, one which commits to attentiveness beyond our comforts, which seeks to magnify the voices, capacities and skills of others, to help more and more people find places in the world where they can not only speak but be heard, and where possible, even be heeded.  This is the sort of enabling we wish to do, what we have long sought (and sometimes failed) to do, the sort of enabling which helps create and inspire more in the world of what we seek beyond the limits of our own mandates, energies and capacities for care.

The possible demise of twitter has sent many users, including within our own community of some 6800 followers, into a state of alarm. Some have already found an alternative platform in an effort to preserve a modicum of community engagement which an otherwise-flawed resource has for some time allowed them.  If twitter dissolves, a large portion of our own monitoring work will likely dissolve with it.  But we will continue to write, continue to engage our lists, continue to create spaces for hospitality and presence in and around multilateral settings, continue to enable others to take up their hopeful tasks in the world as our frustratingly constrained capacity for loving this planet and its diverse inhabitants permits. 

Reports this morning suggest that COP 27 might actually have endorsed creation of a fund for “loss and damage” directed towards the states and peoples suffering disproportionate impacts from climate threats. We greatly honor those who have advocated for this breakthrough while we wait to see if this fund can be sufficiently capitalized to address the fossil fuel-influenced loss and damage which continues to slowly, inexorably engulf our world and which too many of our policy compromises — including at COP 27 –seem as likely to inflame as to abate. Given this and going forward, twitter or no twitter, we all must do more and better to enable life-preserving outcomes.

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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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