Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Soren Kierkegaard
Ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships. Charles Eisenstein
History is humankind trying to get a grip. Kim Stanley Robinson
We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting. Charles Eisenstein
We cannot choose the times we live in, but we can choose the stories we tell and live by. Sally Gillespie
When we begin a deeper journey into earth care, sometimes we are struck by the breadth of ruin, even ugliness, that it is our challenge to recover and redeem. LL. Barkat
Birds start falling. Bees lie dying. Mary Flanagan
On Friday, as the excellent presidency of Germany nears its end, the Security Council took up the issue of “climate and security,” a thematic relationship which the Council is under more and more pressure to address, especially from its elected members. The manner in which it was addressed in this session, however, speaks volumes regarding both the policy strength of some delegations and the limitations of the Council in articulating a clear role for itself within our global system of response, one that encourages that all aspects of that system to function at maximum effectiveness.
The UN is, of course, primarily a negotiating platform, but as stated by Germany’s Foreign Minister Maas, some things are not negotiable and “we cannot negotiate with nature.” But while we cannot negotiate with our climate, we can clearly cause it damage and, by extension, cause grave damage to ourselves and other life forms. As Belgium made clear, this is no abstract matter but a crisis that both impacts and creates vulnerable people worldwide with “aggravated costs,” as Tunisia and Indonesia both noted, which will likely only increase at least in the near term.
There was broad recognition in this Council debate regarding what Belize referred to as the “indiscriminate consequences” of climate change, impacts (as underscored by Niger and others) that fall largely on regions, states and peoples already vulnerable to conflict and COVID-related threats. Such areas have generally contributed little to the climate crisis yet must live with the heat and the drought, the unpredictable rains and insect plagues that make an often- tenuous relationship to viability ever more so.
There were clear calls to action on Friday, especially from small island states who continue to watch nervously as their sea levels rise while large states continue their out-sized consumption and relentless production of greenhouse gases and other environmental pollutants. There were also calls for the Council to remain fully seized of the data on climate linkages and impacts, with many supporting the appointment of a special UN envoy on climate and conflict. But there is still concern in some quarters (including here) that the Council does not fully grasp the role it can play as an enabler of climate action underway in other parts of the UN system, not to mention in communities worldwide, keeping in mind the distinction between what the Council does itself and what actions it encourages in others. In our view, Council enabling – not controlling – effective climate action in diverse settings remains one key to our common survival.
But what of the specific climate-conflict nexus? There was consensus on this Friday that climate change does not “cause” violence per se, but rather “exposes existing vulnerabilities” to which we have not paid sufficient attention and, as noted by a Niger military official, places the often “tenuous balance” between regional groups under considerable strain. UN Assistant Secretary General Jenca, representing the Secretariat, underscored the degree to which climate threats expose “deep grievances” which often fester in societies and which can erupt in violence unless they are properly addressed.
While this debate added value in terms of basic nexus contours, it did not directly address (aside from comments on the role of peacekeepers) the impact of climate-related “grievances” on the security sector itself, those tasked with ground-level security functions in communities which, in a growing number of instances, are watching their livelihoods blown away by sandstorms or migrating to waters cool enough to sustain minimal oxygen levels. And where governments are either indifferent or lack a trusted presence, communities may well prefer to defend their interests and manage their difficult affairs on their own, interpreting government security as simply one more coercive element seeking to maintain “order” but not honor promises, adding another level of restriction to an already constrained existence, and this at the point of a gun.
In society after society, we have seen the impact of overly-stretched law enforcement, police which have been weaponized and politicized; police asked to perform security functions in tenuous situations far above their pay grade; police which have been encouraged by political leadership to focus on the coercive end of their mandate and not the conflict prevention and community-responsive elements; police who in many instances are barely required to grasp the letter of the law and even encouraged to ignore both the spirit of the law and abuses of that law committed by other officers.
And across the world those same police are now being sidelined and their reputations scarred by more coercive and unaccountable forces that have no interest in local communities aside from suppressing its dissent and misrepresenting the identity and intent of its protesters. From Cameroon to Portland, we have seen instances of unidentified agents who have increasingly become a tool of regimes seeking to maintain a repressive grip or impose one anew, forces asked to parachute into situations which may be antagonistic already but which their own coercive responses merely inflame.
Grievances at community level are deep now, as deep as I have ever seen them. Many people are angry, afraid, abused, finding themselves isolated in circumstances worse than anything previously conjured up in their nightmares. Those grievances in some instances apply as well to the security sector, to law enforcement tasked with maintaining “order” in situations where government officials have clearly not done their jobs, officials who are neither “getting a grip” on current threats nor interested in helping the rest of us to do so. In such a scenario, only authoritarians can possibly claim victory. The rest of us are left with a series of bad choices, including to arm ourselves to the teeth or hurl projectiles at “enemies” about whom we know little and care even less.
As St. Vincent and the Grenadines said Friday in the Security Council, “action is all that counts now.” But what is the action envisioned for often anti-democratic governments, edgy citizens and an over-stretched security sector? What “counts” now? One pathway is suggested by UN Police which is committed in principle to “the reform, restructuring and rebuilding of host-state police” and which measures this in more “representative, responsive and accountable policing that protect and serve the people.”
In this angry, authoritarian age these principles almost seem old school. But as we seek to “live forward” in treacherous times, it is important to reaffirm understandings shared from at least a segment of our past – that the “fight” we now seem so intent on waging cannot be resolved through fighting alone. It will be hard enough to restore some measure of trust in a security sector and its leaders that too often manufacture enemies in the public domain, that bury basic tenets of racial representation and accountability, and that allow under-trained, over-militarized forces to clutch state-of-the-art weapons they are much too willing to use. But we are compelled to try.
The climate healing that is so urgent now is directly related to equally-urgent healing in our communities, a healing premised on restoring the quality of our relationships to each other, but also to protecting the biodiversity struggling to survive, and to mitigating all of the social and personal “ugliness” which we have yet to “recover and redeem.” But we cannot do so, we may never do so, so long as these fissures exist between a public at its wits end and a security sector that cannot be certain, especially now, who or what it is protecting, whose interests it is actually serving.
We need to restore faith in each other and we need to do so without delay. For while we hurl tear gas and insults across artificial barriers, while we brandish heavy weapons that merely reinforce the resolve of other weapons-bearers, the social stresses inflamed by our sick climate continue to mount. Birds are falling; bees are dying; fish are abandoning their traditional habitats; islands are drowning; crops are failing.
At this painful time, when the stories we write and tell are much too dystopian and too little hopeful, we would do well to restore an UNPOL version of policing which many in the security sector thankfully still affirm: inclusive, accountable, responsive. But the bar of our collective inaction is too high, at least short term; and as Council members noted in passing and as confirmed at last week’s High Level Political Forum, frustrations and vulnerabilities stemming from our habitual climate negligence are likely to get worse.
This is the conflict-climate nexus that the Council needs to address: a degraded climate leading to food insecurity, displacement and inequality, but also to a legitimate and largely unaddressed impatience for dignity and change that now seems destined to pit diversely distraught communities against a security sector increasingly equipped for militarized responses and egged on by an aggressive breed of authoritarian leadership.
If we are ever to recover what we have ruined in our world and in ourselves, this is the time. If ever there was a “fight” that cannot be resolved through fighting, this is the one.
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