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

Tuvalu Addresses COP 26

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: climate change, displacement, United Nations, youth

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WordPress: Pedagogy for an Ailing Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Oct

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. Ernest Hemingway

Much of what was said did not matter, and that much of what mattered could not be said. Katherine Boo

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong. François de La Rochefoucauld

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion. Edward Abbey

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Oscar Wilde

The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is. Nadine Gordimer

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Carl Sagan

In a week when UN diplomats struggled, as they often do, to speak words that truly matter, that can truly inspire and clarify – on climate change, on international justice, on the latest iteration of longstanding struggles for peace in the Sudan and Mali, on the need to protect educational opportunity from threats of conflict, on the role of technology (including in space) in enhancing our lagging sustainable development priorities – it was a series of compelling images that captured more of my own imagination, more of my own bandwidth as I try in my own small way to help guide our troubled path.

Among the many ways in which I seem to be no longer “fit for purpose,” is my own preoccupation with words, their meaning and impact. I have tried over several years to “write the truest sentences I know,” not confusing “truest” with “true,” but also not reducing words to their instrumental value, as a means to some unconfessed end or as a mere tool for building a personal brand, staking out political turf or inflaming constituent grievance. I have always believed in the value of what is becoming more and more of a dead art – the careful selection and arrangement of words can help both to clarify and inspire, that can remind people of the proper contexts for the “facts” we toss around with reckless abandon, but also provide the takeaways that leave a “taste” that lingers long after the initial presentation has concluded.

The UN, as most of you know, often drowns in words uttered by speakers whose need to “present” often far outstrips the pedagogical value of their presentations. Speakers are assembled, and often over-assembled based on position and entitlement. Those who are authorized to speak are given every opportunity to do so, regardless of how familiar,predictable or even uninspiring their words are likely to be. A few speakers do thankfully say things which linger, which clarify, which remind listeners that predictable statements of policy or token gestures of deference to academics or civil society leaders are not the same thing as thoughtful, mindful reflections on issues which are generally speaking more urgent and complex than our presentations imply.

The UN, like many other institutions, routinely struggles to “get its message out,” to connect with people in diverse circumstances who need more than provisions and peacekeepers. More than we often recognize in this multilateral space, people also need a clearer sense that leadership “gets it,” gets the urgency of things, gets that “we” spend too much time speaking to funding sources and “excellencies” and too little to constituents, gets that “we” waste too much time and energy honoring protocol, including by expressing endless gratitude to speakers for episodically-inspiring remarks that “we” actually didn’t pay any attention to, remarks that often sound more like the political version of “nagging” than like a serious exploration of fresh options for resolving conflict and solving stubborn global problems to replace our largely stale ones.

Surely we recognize that our endless parades of “speakers” is more about protocol than substance, more about ticking the boxes of national or institutional interest than of exercising a pedagogical responsibility beyond institutional walls. Surely we recognize that the worst way to influence anything is through endless speeches largely devoid of metaphor or of genuine invitations to co-create a better future. Surely we recognize that much of what is said within UN confines does not matter enough in pratical terms and that much of what could matter cannot easily or readily be said, in part because no one is “authorized” to speak those words.

This week as in times past, the UN has struggled with the still-growing problem of disinformation and misinformation, largely focused on a pandemic that some still deny but also with regard to climate change that may or may not move beyond the pious words of global leaders who will soon convene in Glasgow and who continue to hedge their political bets regarding actions that might actually galvanize response at the levels now required. On Friday, the UN held a side-event entitled “Empowering Civil Society in Strengthening Media and Information Literacy,” during which attention was given to the current “infodemic” wherein what were descreibed as “established facts” were being systematically ignored if not outright rejected. A panel of journalists from different global regions made helpful, if sobering points, including highlighting the dangers facing journalists in this disinformation age, as well as the mass quantities of energy required to debunk errors and misconceptions, especially as those errors move from elements of cognition to lynchpins of identity.

As one of many who has abundant respect for the statistical and other expertise which the UN has gathered around itself; as one of many who deem the protection of journalists and other info-contributors to be of the highest priority; I still wonder if what heads of state referred to in the Security Council this week as “toxic narratives” (Kenya) and “demons” (Tunisia) reference a larger problem, one characterized by convenient condemnations of the narratives of others coupled with an over-confidence that our own narratives are somehow beyond reproach or even self-executing.

I have deep confidence in science, but also understand its essentially evolving nature based on fresh evidence. I believe in facts, but also understand that facts have a context, and that both require attention if “truth” is ever to become a less elusive goal. I have deep confidence in the UN’s expertise, but do not assume the value of that expertise to every situation where it seeks to be applicable. I have a “hunger” to see the core values of the UN Charter enacted worldwide, including its “rule of law” aspects, but also understand the degree to which those values have been tread under foot by people, including people like me, who have misplaced at least part of the responsibility to narrow gaps between what we espouse and how we live.

The narrative that too many of us now seem to adopt, deliberately or not, regarding some alleged chasm between “truth tellers” and “liars,” is itself unempirical, even dangerous. It appears that, more and more, we are witnessing a struggle in part about the nature of truth itself but even more about those who authorize and promote it. In such a scenario, the hill we need to climb seem to be less about facts themselves and more about cultivating minds open and receptive to their full complexity, minds attached to people able to demonstrate attentiveness to context, curiosity, courage, even (can we actually propose this) humility.

How do we enable these traits of character in a time when ideas are more about social identity than attempts to understand our place in the universe, more about comforting delusions than about the courage to face up to the reality of things as they are and our collective responsibility to fix what is broken, to more deeply examine the complexities of the truths we espouse but incompletely understand, to embrace the contexts of the truths we promote without slipping into some careless relativism?

Maybe words are now becoming, in and of themselves insufficient to these tasks. I mentioned at the beginning the “compelling images” from this week, and I am so very grateful to the contributions of some of our twitter followers who continue to send thoughtful and at times powerful images of art that can help us to see more deeply than we might be inclined to otherwise. I equally honor those who share extraordinary images from space – not the space that some now pay millions to visit for an hour-long joyride, but the origin of extraordinary images supplied by sources from Hubble to backyard astronomers, images of galaxies pulling each other apart or being slowly consumed by black holes, images of gaseous clouds allegedly containing enough alcohol to make 400 trillion pints of beer, images that stretch our hearts and minds beyond the moment, beyond the conventional, beyond the petty and familiar, images that remind us of just how much can go wrong in this vast universe and how very fortunate we are on this relatively isolated blue ball for the opportunity to push back hard against the life-threatening damage we have clearly been doing to ourselves.

This bit of the truth of our times was underscored by an enormously clever video produced by the UN Development Program (click here for the video), one which depicts a dinosaur making its way down the center aisle to the UN rostrum to remind diplomats of the obvious — that “extinction is not a good thing” — referencing both our habitual climate stupidity and the asteroids that created the extinction event for those large lizards. The video does a fine job of reminding we humans that this particular extinction moment is something we are doing to ourselves. There is no space rock that we can credibly blame for our current climate predicament. As such it is past time, as the dinosaur-speaker notes, for we humans, especially those in positions of authority, to swiftly agree to stop making “excuses and start making changes,” to stare our complex realities in the face with firm and flexible resolve no matter how unsatisfying and unreassuring those realities are now likely to be.

There are times when I am so “old school” I’ve altogether forgotten where the school was in the first place. But I can still recognize the genius of this video – its blending of jarring and unforgettable images with words (not gratuitious speeches) to match. Clearly the changes we need to make, and urgently, are about correcting the mistakes we are currently disinclined to acknowledge, about changing habits of behavior we continue to justify instead. But it is also about recalibrating the false dichotomies that allow us the indulgence of positing a world constituted by truth-tellers (ourselves) and liars (those others).

It is ironic that the light from those those birthing and exploding stars, those galaxies expanding and contracting, those nebula which we can anthropomorphize from a vast difference, that light left some of those celestial bodies during the era of the last major extinction event on earth. We don’t know with any certainty what has happened to those bodies since light was released from them so long ago. But we do have a good sense of where we are headed if we don’t put our petty political ambitions, gratuitious narratives and lifeless speech making behind us, if we do not take the risks we need to right this planetary ship before it finally tips over, ensuring at a minimum that all aboard will drown.

As one who has trafficked in words for most of his life, I am aware of how impotent words can be, especially when they fail to represent the “truest” that I know. We do need to identify and counter the “toxic narratives” and other disinformation with the best truth at our disposal, but we need to do so by ensuring “truth” that is rigorous, humble, attentive to context and pedagogically sound, truth that can help us make a more reliable, more inclusive, less-polarizing case for the world we can still have.

Tags: extinction, pedagogy, truth-telling, United Nations

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Roaring 20s: The Voices we Need Now, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Oct

Next year’s words await another voice. T.S. Eliot

The loudest words are the ones we live. Mia Sheridan

If you can roar, roar for others. M.L. Shanahan

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Don DeLillo

Speech is the voice of the heart. Anna Quindlen

Their comfort isn’t worth your silence. Rudy Francisco

Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song. Vera Nazarian

Two things happened at the UN this week, both potentially quite positive and both related to each other at least in my mind, though perhaps only to my mind. First off, amidst all the appropriate hand-wringing about the decline of both biodiversity and human agricultural health, amidst the gloom in some quarters (including ours) that the upcoming COP 26 meeting in Glasgow will not result in firm commitments to the changes we are running out of time to make, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution affirming that “access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right.” With leadership from Costa Rica and other states, this resolution will soon be passed on to the UN General Assembly for final consideration, hopefully in time to create even more pressure on the Glasgow delegations to negotiate urgently and act boldly while action is still a remedial option.

And in New York, a group of 61 countries with Denmark and Costa Rica (again) in the lead, urged through the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly to end what was deemed the “silence” of civil society, referencing groups that through their lived experiences, diverse range of expertise and feet on the ground, “enrich and improve the relevance and outcomes of our work.” This statement called both for UNHQ access for NGOs and a stronger online component to allow those far from New York to keep abreast of what the UN is doing and not doing to address global needs. The statement also highlighted that while this silencing of NGO voices impedes engagements between delegations and diverse civil society backgrounds and expertise, it also sends a signal to abusive regimes that civil society involvement is no more than a marginal enterprise, and that attacks on human rights and environmental advocates, indigenous leadership, media professional and more can more easily be conducted absent UN rights scrutiny. This is especially jarring with respect to civil society leaders who choose to cooperate with the UN in implementing its own human rights and environmental priorities.

Those of you paying attention so far might well have ascertained the linkage that forms the basis of this post. But if not, please allow me to lay it out as best I can.

As welcome as the Human Rights Council resolution is in placing clean, healthy and sustainable environment squarely within the domain of the UN’s human rights pillar, questions of implementation stalk this resolution as they do most that emanate from this Council or the General Assembly to which it is tethered. Questions go beyond how we can possibly guarantee such a right to other fundamental questions of how we should best pursue this fresh obligation. Whose job is it to promote the kind of environment we increasingly do not now have, to enable the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment to the communities most in need, those who are most threatened by eco-predators, whose fields are most rapidly losing their productivity as floods and drought ravage and pollinators have long since fled the scene?

In our own work and through wonderful partners such as Green Map, we have long advocated a localized approach to mitigate the impacts of environmental deterioration and climate change and have done our small part to develop and disseminate tools that can help recover both a sense of place and the full, healthy recovery of those places, recovery led by those who know their spaces and its diverse inhabitants better than any outsider or algorithm possibly could, leaders with homegrown ideas about how to address threats, including from mining interestes and other eco-predators, which are less likely to make circumstances for themselves and their families even more challenging.

In this tech-charged and overly bureaucratized world we are fashioning for ourselves, it is relatively easy to romanticize local leadership. We have certainly done so, though many of our previous travels and connections have led us to the conclusion that this is not a wholly inappropriate exercise. People in these diverse settings may not always “know” what we know, but they certainly “know” differently, sometimes better, and what they know can be essential elements in both local environmental restoration and in building capacity to cope with shocks to come, shocks generally not of their own making but certainly the cause of their own suffering. It is this ability to convince local others that restoration is still possible and then to grow the number of hands and minds devoted to that restoration which ultimately gives me hope, indeed as much hope as welcome resolutions emanating from Geneva and New York, some of which have mostly gathered dust after the initial energy generated by their passage has worn off.

We know that there are many such people of commitment and energy, many caretakers of locally-led organizations that offer tangible hope to people who may well feel let down or under-served by people like me, people like me who so badly want to get back inside the UN that we may have forgotten what we are there to do. We can forget what privilege requires of us as we return to a setting where our own voices have always had an outsized volume, a “roar” which is too often about our organizational mandates and not often enough about enabling those who seek and deserve the opportunity to roar for themselves, not only to speak at our conferences and zoom meetings but to have that speech be meaningful, actionable, influential. We reference here voices that aren’t always required to be polite or driven by protocol, that are able to speak their accumulated truth firm in the knowledge that such is more than a mere exercise to gain status or funding, more than a one-off which moves an audience out of their comfort zones for a fleeting moment but which does not often enough result in real partnership based on the flow of ideas that better connect the norm-builders in our global centers with the people who, from their more local vantage point, don’t always experience those norms as amounting to enough.

Given the time left for us, and despite my profound gratitude for those seeking to enable our UNHQ return, I don’t know for sure that I will ever again set foot inside the UN. Our 20 months of remote online coverage has convinced me (and a few of our junior colleauges as well) that the UN has become akin to alien space, well branded, utterly state-centric, attracted to money and organizational heft like bees to honey, stubbornly holding on to antiquated fire codes while the world burns around it. We have long fought thse trends as we have reisisted what we have seen as the “voice over” disease, the tendency to roar over the aspirations of others, the tendency also to forget that as our speech is the voice of our hearts, so too is it the voice of the hearts of millions of others. These are the millions whose own path to progress remains akin to navigating heavy traffic, overcoming one obstacle after another, one burnt field or frightened child after another, one crisis that they are late to solve before another crosses their path. But these are also some of the voices of persistence, the persistent convinction that sustainable progress is possible, that lands laid low can regain their bounty, that damaged biological chains can recover their predictability, and that the guns which have stood as an almost insurmountable barrier to any sustainable relief can finally go silent.

In a policy world of voices muted or unheeded, ours has mostly had a volume disproportionate to the size of our lungs and the strength of our vocal chords. Given this, we have tried our darndest to let our lives drive our voice, to embed our values in our policy and organizational choices and less in our speeches. But we also recognize that the world has changed so much over 20 years. There are now so many voices in the queue waiting to roar, waiting for a chance to be heard, waiting to be taken with full seriousness. Perhaps more than any time in our professional lives, “next year’s words await another voice,” another voice which can convince and contextualize, which can cajole and correct, which can sing an energetic tune demanding the more harmonious relations which have largely eluded us during our own tenure. With whatever time we have left, and for the sake of a planet in multiple forms of distress, we will continue to do what we can to find and encourage those next voices.

Tags: climate change, human rights, United Nations, voices

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Speech Therapy: A Youth Lens on Urgent UN Discussions, Brady Sanders

17 Aug

Editor’s Note: A student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Brady spent part of the summer with GAPW on what turned out to be a completely virtual internship. While not what he had hoped for, and not what we hoped for him, Brady was a diligent follower of summer UN processes, asking good questions while not allowing the steep learning curve which the UN often presents to newcomers deter him from engaging with complex issues in the Security Council and, especially, in the ECOSOC High-Level Political Forum.

When signing up for an opportunity with GAPW at the end of May, I was very anxious at first, as I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I expected a lot of dialogue on subjects that I knew very little about, people talking too fast for me to understand – as New York has a reputation for being all hustle and bustle, and meetings consisting of solely legal or technical jargon that I would not know how to digest.
For the first few days, I was lost and thought everyone was repeating each other. So much was going on with the High-Level Political Forum — my very first UN engagement — that it was hard to keep all of the countries and their agendas straight, especially for someone who has no prior experiences with these countries. However, once I began to look in on more meetings and learned about some of the counties’ histories, the subtleties made more sense, and I could then fully digest what the delegations were discussing.
Of the meetings I attended, my favorite ones discussed climate change, hunger, and the crisis in Myanmar. While these topics are interesting to me in general, I feel like these were the best presentations: not only because of the material, but because of the speakers themselves. They rallied their respective audiences by talking with us instead of to us. For the food security sessions, Mr. David Beasley was by far the most compelling speaker. He was able to rally the room behind what he said because of his level of enthusiasm which most other speakers did not seem to have. Another speaker I enjoyed was a diplomat from Colombia who talked about her experiences with the cartels there. She brought in very personal details and accounts of how her life changed due to the violence from the drug trade. By being vulnerable like that, she was able to form an emotional connection with people in the meeting, which made what she had to say so much more impactful. In my opinion, finding speakers like this is singlehandedly the most important thing the UN can do to garner support from people in the wider world.
While there have been many things that I thought the UN did well, there are a few things I thought could have been improved upon. One of which is the UN’s stated goal for youth involvement. While the UN encourages youth involvement, they seem to talk more about this than acting on it. Sure, there were two days during my internship when youth leaders held meetings, but besides that, there was not much evidence of youth participation. Additionally, these meetings simply highlighted the work already done by young adults rather than a discussion with young adults about what they want to see done now, what they are eager to do now. So, to the UN, include more young adults in your discussions instead of just highlighting how we have been trying to change the world. This is our future at stake, so it would be proper if we had a more substantial influence on what happens to it going forward, the priorities that will shape the future.
To close, I want to talk about one more concern I have witnessed from the meetings. Delegations are, to put it frankly, moving too slowly. While I understand treaties and resolutions take time to complete, action must occur rapidly when our future is at risk. Climate change won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about the wording of resolutions. Rising hunger rates won’t slow because delegations need time to talk about wording. Terrorist organizations won’t slow their advances because delegations need time to talk about wording. If we want our future to be peaceful and equitable for all, we must demand that delegations work more swiftly to actively and practically address looming crises. Because on matters such as climate change we will soon pass a tipping point, and then no resolution will be able to stop what is now well in motion.

Tags: United Nations, youth

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Revise and Consent: Enabling a World of Change, Dr. Robert Zuber

18 Apr

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves. Margaret Atwood

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein

Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices. A.E. Samaan

We have learned primarily by tinkering. Curt Gabrielson

In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw. William Maxwell

If we don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish. Jeff VanderMeer

It is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic, that we know the world to be good. Vladimir Nabokov

Thanks to the confidence placed in me by a colleague, Barbara Adams, I recently published an article in a journal of development policy entitled “A Volatile Context: A Revisionist Lens on Good Governance.”

I’m not going to invite you to read the piece. It’s not dis-similar to the themes of this weekly post, but it is longer and surely more dense. It also reflects an assignment which I only accepted due to the editorial staff’s embrace of the “what if.” What would the world look like if our structures of governance were devoted to fostering care and equal access among constituents? What if governance were as competent and transparent as it often claims to be? What if governance were as concerned — in terms practical more than rhetorical — with the needs and aspirations of constituents as it is with its own protocols and power dynamics?

These and other, similar questions punctuated my piece, for better and worse. To be honest, I’m surprised it got published at all. In an age driven by data and branding, by professionals seeking control over smaller and smaller domains of human experience, speculative writing of the sort I indulge in has become a bit of a reach, and not an altogether welcome one. People in our governance and educational bureaucracies are rather preoccupied — and not without reason — with the accumulation and management of data, data that can establish trends and help ensure that, in the realm of policy and to the extent we are able, human and financial capital are directed towards the holes in security and justice that need to be filled and can be filled.

But it is clear in many places, including at the UN, that data of varying levels of sophistication and reliability does not always bring us closer to governance that is caring, responsive and trustworthy. Indeed, the pursuit of data can be its own endgame, accumulating “information” that in many instances is untethered to strategies to both unlock and incarnate its power to effect change; moreover, such data is often in flux as its gaps are only slowly recognized and fresh experiments are conducted that render the previous “truths” subject to a revised consent.

One of the smartest statements coming from youth climate activist Greta Thunberg was when she said, “don’t listen to me, listen to the science.” Yes, listen to the science, listen to those with data pertinent to the rendering of what are often dire predictions for our common future if we do not mange to revise our ways. But as Greta already knows, as any of us who ply our wares in the halls of global governance knows, such governance is as likely to render the power of science to something akin to a “petting zoo” as it is to unleash its full and furious influence over all our actions.

Simply put, we now know more than we do. Just this week, several good UN events underscored the degree to which having accurate data and incarnating relevant policy commitments are still at loose ends. We “know” that hording vaccines is ultimately detrimental to both the global economy and to the suppression of future variants — as noted this week in a special, high level event on “Vaccines for All” hosted by the president of the UN Economic and Social Council — and yet our commitment to equitable vaccine access remains well short of the need. We “know” as was stated often during an important UN event this week on “Financing for Development,” that a combination of debt burdens, limited investment access and illicit financial flows has made pandemic response and recovery a mere pipe dream, and yet our commitment to a revised, more inclusive financial system remains more the subject of speechmaking than practical application. We “know” as a civil society advocate from South Sudan testified in the Security Council this week that the wide availability of often-trafficked arms fuels so much of the violence and abuse in her country (and many others), and yet our addiction to the production and trade in deadly weapons shows little signs of abating. We “know” the many thousands in Yemen whose lives remain threatened after years of war by famine and economic collapse, and yet the Security Council remains largely impotent to end the violence let alone the impunity to which it has given rise. We “know” that we are unlikely given our current course to forestall the biology-altering consequences of a rapidly warming planet, but we continue to take more credit for our limited climate responses than to earnestly prepare to enact what the president of the UN General Assembly this week urged: “a greener and more equitable recovery that can keep our SDG commitments on track,” including and especially our lagging climate actions.

These disconnects between knowing and doing should not be laid at the feet of scientists, many of whom have no doubt had more than a few sleepless nights over these past months as emissions continue to rise and policymakers continue to defy reasonable, pandemic-related limitations in the name of disinformation or “freedom.” The same scientists who developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time and implemented health protocols to keep many more virus victims alive than was the case last spring — including no doubt many COVID-deniers — know that such measures alone won’t end the pandemic if large segments of the public remain uncooperative and revision-phobic, and they certainly won’t help us prepare for the pandemics sure to come as we continue to wantonly disrupt the planet’s biological safeguards.

It may be the case, as suggested above by Curt Gabrielson, that we learn primarily by “tinkering,” through small-scale revisions to what is known and seen, small-sale adjustments in what is given. But for the policy community such revisions at small scale are no longer suitable, if they ever were, as they don’t sufficiently address the diversity of threats facing our current world. They don’t sufficiently address the barriers that keep so many human skills — of youth, of cultural minorities, of women, of persons with disabilities — on the sidelines of policy deliberations and decisions. And they don’t address the deficits of trust which are themselves a legacy of promises deferred or ignored, assistance barely rendered, entitlements and privileges not shared or even acknowledged.

If we are not careful, if we are not sufficiently vigilant, the “bubble” that institutions like the UN are accused of operating within will morph into an “island” to which we in the policy community might well be exiled. Such exile would complicate positive change as it would cut off large swaths of the global community from a UN system which still connects, still convenes, still calls attention to looming threats and policy options — and often with considerable skill. But the threat of exile looms, primarily from constituencies who feel that they can no longer believe in us or in the words we speak, who display an eroded confidence in our ability to distinguish between what can be counted and what counts, to prioritize those responses that truly matter to human and planetary well-being.

In this regard, I worry most about any potential erosion among the youth, this large and diverse generation trying to organize their lives and dream their dreams under clouds of pandemic, climate change, weapons proliferation, and massive debt. Despite all the outreach the UN does to young people, do they –will they — find the UN sufficiently responsive, sufficiently committed to their future, sufficiently savvy on matters from technology access to policy inclusion? Will they find value in our answers to compelling crises let alone consent to at least some of the questions we are actually willing to ask? Will they find in their interactions with us evidence that the world is good and beautiful, and will they continue to feel that it is worth their time and energy to preserve that beauty and extend that goodness?

On this the jury is out. Among the formal events on the UN’s calendar this week was a side discussion, organized by the Youth4Disarmament initiative of the UN’s Office for Disarmament Affairs, which brought together diverse young people — including several of our colleagues — to examine that elusive “what if,” their dreams of a world that is fit for the aspirations and well-being of both this large generation and those who will come after. What if nuclear weapons were abolished? What if emissions could be brought firmly under control? What if the discrimination and incitement to violence highlighted by France and others this week could finally be stricken from the human register? What if our grand institutions — so often stuck in the mud of their own cultures and working methods — could be made to truly breathe again, breathe the air enveloping a human race which finally understands that care for the planet and solidarity with each other are practices, not premises?

At this “what if” event, the invitations to youth were sincere: to share stories from diverse contexts that need to be heard even if those stories (like many of my own) wouldn’t always pass the muster of fact-checkers; to envision (as High Representative Nakamitsu invited) what the world might actually look like if we spent less on weapons and more on people; to imagine as well (as Costa Rica’s Ambassador Chan advocated) a world “where “people no longer felt compelled to take up weapons in the first place,” where we were able to educate every child, where climate change impacts could be mitigated and even reversed? Can we envisage and then build a world where (as Pakistan noted) “power rivalries are disavowed,” where impacts from human selfishness are not a foregone conclusion, where injustices and atrocity crimes are no longer in mortal danger of endless repetition?

As the older speakers at this event noted, the policy and legal groundwork has been laid for such aspirations, including at the UN. But many traps have already been set in the form of crises we should have seen coming, crises that we failed to prevent in the first instance or forthrightly addressed in the second. There is still much for us to revise in our institutions and in ourselves, much in our own, sometimes “fraudulent” versions of personal and cultural history to clarify and confess, much in the stories of young people — especially those compelling “what ifs” — that can guide and inspire their practice but that must be better honored by the rest of us if they are ever to achieve their full flowering.

For better and worse, prospects for a more caring, trustworthy and visionary governance are still in old and worn hands like my own. We who are attached to such hands must undertake the revisions that history and circumstances now demand of us, revisions to our institutions and to ourselves, as we seek to deposit data and dreams into the anxious, younger hands of others.

Tags: climate change, revisions, United Nations, youth

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Voice Lessons: Ceding Space for Those Waiting Their Turn, Dr. Robert Zuber

11 Apr

I know you can’t live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. Harvey Milk

No voice is too soft when that voice speaks for others. Janna Cachola

Obviously these are some exceptional young people, but what they have in common is that they were ordinary people who cared. Morgan Carroll

You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they MUST protect them. Wangari Maathai

The people who are trying to be on our side have reduced us to a mere calculation. Sarah Kurchak

I was always taught that when you’re lucky enough to learn something or have some advantage you should share it. Areva Martin

It is not loving to impose our own grid onto others. Matt Perman

There have been a series of articles lately by journalists and academics expressing concern about the long-term affects of a pandemic that seems “determined” not to release us fully from its grip.

We know about the COVID “long haulers,” those unlucky individuals who have been unable to shake the effects of the virus months after their initial infections. But there are other “long haul” effects that we have only begun to assess, the economic, educational and psychological consequences that we have done our best to hold in abeyance, hoping for conditions that will allow our children back in school before they’ve forgotten what they’ve learned or lost touch with their dreams; conditions that will allow our small businesses to survive a year of numerous adaptations and little income; conditions that will allow some healing for those whose psyches have been battered over this past year by social isolation, fear of the loss of loved ones and incomes, and now concern about whether or not we have what it takes to successfully engage with people who seek to become for us, once again, more than a screen presence.

Clearly, we are not “out of the woods” and are unlikely to be so even after available vaccines have finally been evenly distributed and this particular pandemic has been finally brought under control. The sun will indeed rise post-COVID, but it will shine on a world that in many key aspects has lost its way, if not altogether lost its mind. Despite our own privilege and general good fortune, we wonder if some of those aspects don’t equally apply to ourselves.

It has been over 13 months now since we have set foot inside UN headquarters which, as most of you realize, is the setting for most of our work, the primary space where we have been “lucky enough” to learn some important things and then “using our advantage” to share what we think we’ve learned with others. Over these long months, we have missed the personal diplomatic interactions, the rapid movements between conference rooms and issues more connected than acknowledged, the endless coffee breaks to discuss what we’ve heard, what we’ve failed to hear, who impressed and failed to impress, what comes next (or should come next) for our advocacy and outreach, and even the surprise visitors to UN spaces who allow us to better direct our energies and modest assets in the service of interests those visitors help to refresh.

Throughout this long physical hiatus, one which shows no signs of abating, we have managed to keep track of UN processes almost exclusively through digital means. This past week, for instance, the United Nations and its excellent technical team managed a remarkable set of digital engagements, including a sober ceremony to mark the anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, important discussions in the Security Council on threats from landmines and the current crisis unfolding in Myanmar, and events celebrating the restoration of diplomatic engagements by the US, specifically on Climate and Security and on addressing the care of Palestinians through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

All of these activities – and many others where these came from — are important markers of a global system alternately hopeful and discouraging, a system which, in the case of the UN, is often more political than thoughtful, whose “genius” lies in crafting consensus among states more than in creating urgent remedies for those decimated by armed violence or facing long-term food insecurity from what might be irreversible climate change impacts. We who operate in UN contexts are sometimes surprised by something we should already know well: that while the UN has a firm stake in many issues it has limited power to resolve them; indeed that the resolution engine of the UN is largely about persuasion rather than coercion; and that the many skilled and caring diplomats assigned to UN headquarters are as beholden to the aspirations of their foreign ministries, for good or ill, as they are to UN Charter obligations.

Through the use of twitter and other dubious means, we have been able to follow the ups and downs of multilateralism, at least in part, and we have continue to share views within and well beyond the UN community on what should happen, what is not happening, and how we might better integrate our ethical and caring impulses into our policymaking going forward. I am quite sure that the UN doesn’t miss our physical presence, doesn’t miss our constant scrutiny of its promises and working methods, doesn’t miss our relentless concern that, especially in this time of COVID, branding has too often been allowed to crowd out substance and urgency in our policy deliberations.

The “zoomification” of policy has clearly been a boon to this sort of branding. While we continue to encourage digital events by our younger colleagues to help them define generational issues and concerns within pandemic-imposed limitations, we are also mindful of how much easier it is to organize events in digital spaces than to ensure their follow-through. While there is no shortage now of online images of diplomats and (mostly) large NGO leadership saying things which are perhaps meant to be profound but are often self-evident and self-referential, there is too little reason to believe that any of it matters as it should, to believe that the endless statements uttered by these leaders are actually tethered to real concerns in a broken world and reflect policy priorities they are fully determined to address.

This is the dilemma faced by our sector in this pandemic age. How do we navigate the spaces between image and substance, between the rhetorical branding of global problems that concretely and painfully impact the lives of constituents and the brand-building that allows us to fund salaries and our endless publications, creating strands of expertise that rarely reach and connect beyond the borders of our mission statements? And how do we ensure, in the name of constituency building, that we are not also constituency-gate keeping, that we are not also oblivious to the reality that people are much more than a “calculation” to substantiate our annual reports, that we recognize people who can only speak their truths to the extent that those of us with privilege and access speak in “soft voices,” and commit to sharing the microphone rather than endlessly grasping for it?

Our sector is fond of calling for change in the UN’s priorities and working methods, as well it should, but it often fails to address the need for reform within our own ranks. Moreover, for reasons that are only tangentially related to our organizational missions, our collective tendency has become to suggest only the changes that won’t ruffle feathers or threaten funding sources, only the changes that can be incorporated into bureaucracies that it is surely not our principle job to placate.

The damage exacerbated by this pandemic and related crises is experienced broadly by the global community, including within our own offices. More than a few of our colleagues are also depressed and hurting, are also burned out, are also angry and frustrated that the agencies and processes into which they have poured their live energy have been able to deliver only half a loaf when a full loaf was called for. And what of our colleagues with more direct engagement with the wounds and deprivations which characterize so many communities in this world? What do we in our relatively safe policy bubbles owe those journalists, mediators and humanitarian workers who have taken on the arduous and often dangerous task of reporting on our messes, cleaning up after our messes, or negotiating an end to messes that need not have occurred in the first place? What more do we need to do in our own spaces to bring hope to communities and those who serve them without “imposing our grid” on to lives where such impositions have historically been too frequent and where they simply don’t belong?

There is now a movement among some NGOs around UN headquarters, one which to our mind is not mindful enough of our complex debt to front-line advocates and constituents, a movement which has deployed the twitter hashtag #unmute through which it seeks to organize legitimate concerns regarding access and impact. To be sure, there are people around the world doing the work for real that we purport to be doing in principle, people under siege and threat, people doing their jobs while trying to protect their children and keep from languishing in prisons where guilt is largely fabricated and release is often serendipitous. To be sure as well, there are people around the world, some of whom we have been honored to meet over many years, who are literally models of resiliency and resourcefulness, extending hands of care and promises of empowerment well beyond the attention of UN conference rooms, beyond the reach of funding agencies and international NGOs, small and large.

Let’s be clear: We who function in and around UN spaces remain more privileged than muted. Our voices connect with policymakers beyond our size and volume, likely also beyond demonstrated impact. The doors to UN headquarters remain locked to us. The interactive life inside UN buildings is becoming something of a dim memory. But we are not muted. We have a say, we always have a say, even the smallest among us, even when we have nothing fresh to contribute, even through a flat screen in the middle of a stubborn pandemic which has otherwise exposed and compromised so much in us.

The key for us going forward in these treacherous times is not so much about branding but about sharing. How can we better help people affirm a hope that is based neither on wishful fantasy nor on some externally “imposed grid”, a hope which is grounded instead in a more generous reception for the truths they can convey, truths that can make our own work richer and more relevant to shifting circumstances? And how can we do our part to help “unmute” those whose voices truly demand more attention, those who have been hoping and waiting more patiently then perhaps they should for us to voluntarily mute ourselves, to make way for contributions we need and cannot replicate?

We have had the privilege to learn many things in this UN policy space. And we have enjoyed advantages of institutional access and respect, much of it unearned. As the pandemic continues its relentless eroding of our psychological health while enabling inequalities in so many forms, we will do what we can with what remains of our organizational capacity to help spread what others have come to know, the hopes they sustain and the skills they have accumulated, over our own policy deliberations. And to do so in their own voice.

Tags: NGOs, pandemic, United Nations, voices

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Spring Forward: Realizing Renewal Amidst the Gloom, Dr. Robert Zuber

4 Apr

Things are always better in the morning. Harper Lee

It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us. Daniel Abraham

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter. Rachel Carson

When this ultimate crisis comes… when there is no way out – that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope. Émile Durkheim

It is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Joseph Campbell

We become influencers, leaders and teachers in this world, by performing within ourselves the purging that we wish to see take place in others. C. JoyBell C.

Let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new. Anglican Book of Common Prayer

In the northern hemisphere, there are indications that, as obstinate and habituated as we have often demonstrated ourselves to be in both personal and institutional contexts, renewal is in the air. Flowers adorn parks and gardens. The songs of migrating birds enrich the spring cacophony. And our religious communities once again determine to maintain their relevance as the world groans under burdens of hunger, violence and virus while public institutions in too many instances encourage the mistrust and misinformation we need them so desperately to counter.

On this Easter Sunday, we in the Christian community have a special obligation to look ourselves in the mirror, to ask (as we would of all our institutions) if we are actually being faithful to both our founding spirit and the specific, concrete needs of our constituents; indeed if our institutions are able to “get over themselves,” rendering the services and promoting the hope and conduct which are in large part the point of having such institutions in the first place.

And when reforms are warranted (which they almost always are) such that our personal and institutional life can prevent more effectively and respond more efficiently, we must ask if we up to that task? Or do we take the path that we see so very often during personal counseling, individual leaders and their institutions willing to consider only the changes they are prepared to make, not the changes they need to make?

In addition, again with analogies to counseling settings, how many of us are actually willing to engage in the “purges” which we are quite certain are required for others? How many are committed, paraphrasing Christian scripture, to removing the log in our own eyes such that we can better see the specks in the eyes of others? How many of us are sufficiently committed to vigilance and renewal as doom threatens to break, yet again, “from the shell of our virtue?”

These are two of the impediments to a renewal that is more than rhetorical, that is more than a tepid commitment to close the gaps between expectation and performance, between the people we are capable of being and the people we have become too comfortable being. We are collectively too comfortable with acts of discrimination against the categorical other, too comfortable with lifestyles that imperil survival both current and prospective, too comfortable with institutions, even churches, that are wrapped so tightly within their bubbles, that continue to justify protocols and practices that have long lost their relevance, that have become as some of us used to sing during childhood, the “chewing gum which has lost its flavor on the bed post overnight.”

Part of renewal for our time must be about recovering those bursts of “flavor” when we metaphorically bite into a sacred or cherished pursuit; appreciating and sharing those bursts of color and fragrance as the blossoms of spring almost magically return to life and our sunrises signal yet another chance for us to grow and change; magnifying those acts of human courage and capacity which now sadly tend to manifest themselves mostly during times of crisis, when our backs are truly against the wall, when there is no more wiggle room for us, no more opportunity for a sane and rational dismissal of what our collective narcissism and indifference have literally brought to a boil.

We are in such a moment of boil now. Our human community has backed ourselves into places where we no longer have the room to maneuver we once imagined ourselves to have; where our self-deceptions about who are the good ones and who are the evil doers serves only to magnify evil and suffering; where our institutions mostly play at renewal, moving some of the pieces around but not changing the game in any significant way, not sufficiently reassuring those crying out for assistance that help is on the way, a “help” that is more predictable and which leads to peace, health and self-sufficiency, well beyond the stasis of mere survival.

We know we can do better. Even in protocol-saturated institutions such as the UN, we know that we can renew what is now holding us back. We can demonstrate with our time and treasure that we are determined to honor the trust that other still place in us, fulfill the expectations that we have led constituents to anticipate from us. We can pull some of the “weeds” that choke off some of what promised to be a verdant garden; eliminating more of the numerous unfulfilled financial pledges, both institutional and humanitarian; the misguided applications of consensus that constitute de-facto vetoes, the habit by some states of sponsoring resolutions that they have no intention of honoring; the actual vetoes and threats of veto by permanent Security Council members which have become tools of politics not of statecraft, tools which do not prevent mistakes in conflict response so much as inhibit conflict response itself.

There are times when it seems as though numerous states don’t actually want the UN to honor its many promises, don’t actually want it to take the leadership we rhetorically bestow upon it to anticipate and then prevent the tragedies that take such a huge toll in blood and treasure in our world. SG Guterres noted this week in an interview that “multilateralism has no teeth.” I won’t belabor the extent to which the SG has insufficiently pushed back against this longstanding reality, but I do know that metaphorical dental implants are at the ready if and when states and stakeholders decide to commence the procedure.

For those of us who delight in this Easter Sunday we should also acknowledge a responsibility beyond predictable family dinners, religious rituals, egg hunts and bonnets; a responsibility to incarnate the renewal which anchors the promise of this season, to manifest the hope in all our worldly undertakings, including in our institutions, that “things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new.”

If Jesus were once again to emerge from the tomb to which his body was once confined, scanning the current terrain of our flailing human commitments, he might face temptation yet again, this time to head back inside the cave, fire up the Neflix, and just forget about this whole renewal thing. Except that he knows us, knows the complexity of our hearts, knows what he had willingly gotten himself into from the dawn of time, knows as well what needs to happen in this current moment — what can with grace happen — such that the promise of renewal, indeed the fate of our species to which renewal is now tethered, can stand a reasonable chance.

We are quickly running out of time and space to turn the promise of renewal into a discernable reality, to raise up those many people and species which have been cast down, to infuse those institutions which have lost their way with fresh energy and care, to revitalize a global public which has grown so weary of coups, displacements, discrimination and deprivation, a public increasingly gloomy regarding the prospect of institutions that can truly help restore communities beyond the edges of their own bubbles. We can’t wait for recognition of some “ultimate crisis” in order to release our better selves into a world starved for relief and reassurance. Indeed, that “crisis” is likely already at hand.

The bursting buds in our northern parks and gardens remind us that renewal is possible, that color and life can return to even the most barren of personal and institutional landscapes. May this Easter serve up portions of energy and grace sufficient to keep on track the renewal our times so desperately require.

Tags: renewal, spring, United Nations

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Water Slide: Tackling our Freshwater Deficits, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar

I am haunted by waters. Norman Maclean

If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does. Margaret Atwood

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container. Wallace Stevens

Dip him in the river who loves water. William Blake

He liked the darkness, but this was oppressing. It almost flooded his being. Dean F. Wilson

Water, like love, is good at finding where it’s meant to be. Corinne Beenfield

By early light I am asleep in a nightmare about drowning in the Flood. Billy Collins

The UN had a good week in some key aspects, including an excellent Arria Formula event on threats to UN peacekeepers from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and a political declaration adopted by the General Assembly affirming the need for “Equitable Global Access to COVID-19 Vaccines” (click here) at a time when “vaccine nationalism” is only slowly giving way to a more generous – if also economically self-interested — disposition on vaccine distribution, including to those nations which have still to administer a single shot.

It was also a week when the UN assessed its commitment to ensuring freshwater access to the millions of people for whom such access is tenuous at best. On World Water Day, many sectors within the UN system paused to weigh responsibilities to the water and sanitation goals which are key both to sustainable development and to addressing the “conflict multiplier” which water increasingly represents as, in too many communities across the globe, access to safe water has become a luxury increasingly elusive to secure though ultimately more precious than silver or gold.

As the president of the UN Economic and Social Council, Ambassador Akram of Pakistan warned this week, at our current rate half the world’s population will likely suffer from severe water stress by the year 2050. This was perhaps our most cited comment (on Twitter) in the past week, a testament to the misery, displacement and potential conflict which diplomats and the larger policy community recognize is looming on our collective horizon if we cannot find the urgent means to ensure safe and equitable water access. We are reminded every day of the many people worldwide for whom mere hand-washing in the midst of a pandemic creates harsh water use choices, others for whom the dignity of adequate sanitation remains a distant dream. And as noted with regularity by our colleague in El Salvador, Marta Benavides, our response at policy level is often to talk too much and change too little. Water, despite what we wish to believe, is no longer “finding where it needs to be,” and we are yet doing too little to help restore lifegiving pathways.

Most of those who would read weekly missives such as this one don’t need to be reminded of the central role water plays in our contemporary world as the largest repositories of fresh water on our planet – the polar ice caps – continue to melt into the sea at unheard of rates, and as climate change imposes alternating jolts of flooding and drought on many millions of people living in poverty, undermining their food security and setting many on uncertain journeys to find places where this most basic of needs can be procured, albeit in unfamiliar and even hostile contexts.

In many of our so-called developed countries, water-related imagery often infuses our artistic and unconscious lives though, as a pragmatic resource, we have largely taken it for granted. While we occasionally recognize that vast differences in water quality exist in communities across a country like the US, we nevertheless anticipate that what flows from our taps remains both reliable and relatively safe, an entitlement of sorts for which there is simply no equivalent in war-torn or economically stressed communities. Indeed, we know here that the water we have available for our own sanitation purposes is generally (and often needlessly) higher in quality than any water available at all to families in communities habitually threatened by the twin killers of flooding and drought.

There are “solutions” of sort for countries and communities facing water scarcity but they are often complex. Moving water from where it is abundant to where it is lacking is a herculean task as is funding and installing technologies to desalinate sea water for coastal communities. But NGOs and state partners are making welcome progress in creating community-based solutions to elevate water abundance – including catchment capacity to ensure that water availability remains accessible. Lamentably, such solutions face obstacles from the shifting modalities of climate change to unregulated industries in our broken economies that raise the stakes such that water “caught” is often dangerous for personal use. In too many places, the “slide” of water, both of access and quality, continues unabated. A “dip in the river” in too many places is less a refreshing interlude and more an invitation to deadly disease.

Still, there is much that we in the “water entitled” world can do to sharpen our attentiveness to water-related concerns while contributing to a safe water environment for others. Part of this relates to, as already noted, our personal water uses: watering less, flushing less, fixing leaks, restricting uses of toxic fertilizer and other products that are likely to enter – and degrade – our water supply. One could add to this measures to mitigate the diverse impacts of climate change on our farms and ice caps – walking rather than driving to errands, shifting to green energy sources, doing more to restore watersheds or eliminate the river toxins that lead to ocean pollution (and fund those who lead on this work). Our water savings may not make a dent in other, drought-stricken areas of the world, but greater water-use consciousness can lead to support for policies and practices that offer some tangible hope for the drought-affected.

But another aspect of our responsibility is related to an issue that we are often loath to discuss in these parts – our patterns of consumption – specifically consumption related to water demand, the uses beyond our sight, beyond our attention, even beyond our comprehension. For those of you who have the time and interest, I urges you to click here for the website of Water Calculator which, along with sites such Foodnorthwest.org provides hard data on water usage and wastewater which accompanies the production of some of our most common consumer items. From automobiles and leather goods to beef production and avocados, the vast quantities of water needed to produce our personal transportation and the items we voraciously pull from the shelves of our local big-box stores, can be shocking.

One wonders: Would we willingly adjust our consumption patters if we knew that the leather shoes we have been coveting required an average of 3,626 gallons of water to produce? Would we be so quick to replace our bed sheets if we recognized that an average of 2,839 gallons of water were required to make them soft and attractive? Would we adjust our eating habits if we knew that it takes as much as 450 gallons of water to prepare one cow for the grilling of steaks or the sandwiches of “we have the meats” Arby’s? And would it matter if we were to grasp that so much of what we in the “developed” world now consume is produced in communities which themselves are often water insecure, products made by the hands of women and men who use more water at work than they and their communities might ever be able to access in their non-working hours? And, if they were able to access it, knowing that it might well have been made more toxic through runoff/effluence from the very facilities which pay their often-meager wages?

These loops represent ethical and even spiritual dilemmas both “haunting” and unsustainable. As many of you recognize, this is the season of Passover for Jews and Holy Week for Christians, a time to celebrate divine gifts but also to reclaim the responsibilities commensurate with those gifts. As one of my good colleagues put it, “No Sunday is sacred until we all have access to safe water and sanitation.” This is not an uncomplicated aspiration, to be sure, but it is an important one, and could well be a sacred one. Those of us who can choose to over-water our plants, luxuriate in our showers, and indulge in water-saturated consumption with impunity could stand to learn some new habits, habits which acknowledge our collective, growing water scarcity with grave implications for human health and global tension.

In a time when what relatively little fresh water remains threatens to be commodified, when this “global public good” is in danger of becoming one more resource to be controlled by wealthy individuals and states, we need to reset our water priorities at policy and personal levels without delay. If we fail to do so, our ability to prevent our conflicts, feed our populations and protect our people from pandemics and other diseases will become increasingly impaired. We are at a critical moment now regarding this most fundamental of resources. Any further slide in access and quality jeopardizes many and ultimately serves the interests of none.

Tags: consumption, Ethics, United Nations, water access, water quality

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Open House: Strategies for Blunting Xenophobia, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Mar

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public. Michael Eric Dyson

All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh. Whitney Otto

Instead of being blind to race, color blindness makes people blind to racism. Heather McGhee

Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough. Danielle Evans

We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. Thurgood Marshall

Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know? Chris Rock

Later today, I will be speaking on a panel, organized by my friends at LINGAP – Canada intended to give a platform to the voices of people from diverse cultures – in Edmonton and beyond – who suffer violence, injustice and discrimination on a regular basis, much of which is directed at Asian and indigenous communities and which is only now finding a place on the mainstream radar.

I generally decline invitations like this. I have had my “say” on matters of exclusion and discrimination many times over the years and I retain platforms such as this for those of you who still honor me with your reading. But it’s not my turn now, if it ever was. From our policy centers to our urban streets and rural pathways, the line of people waiting for a few moments at the global podium now stretches to the ends of the earth. As people like me are fond of saying, the problem we face is not levels of talent, but of opportunity. It is this latter privilege we still resist sharing, resist declaring, despite what we can amply chronicle about the former.

In the twilight years of my erstwhile “career,” I want to do my full part to link talent to opportunity in all global regions, to ensure that our emerging “global commons” is more than rhetorical, is more than a branding opportunity for groups like Global Action or a business opportunity for large corporate interests. People have a right to voices that matter, voices which influence, voices with impact. They don’t need me speaking for them and they don’t need oversized influencers packaging sound bites from the policy margins to service unrelated interests.

Indeed, the more we try to engage and promote it, the clearer it becomes that the agenda of ensuring inclusiveness remains among the most challenging on our collective plate. Our news feeds are filled to the brim with images of violence against people of Asian and African descent, violence which in many instances is the jarring manifestation of many years of covert discrimination, the ways in which what for a time was left to simmer in privatized settings has been released forcefully into the public domain. We now routinely see evidence of people wearing their xenophobia like a badge of honor, a badge woven deeply into souls rather than merely being pinned to outer garments.

Our personal and cultural bubbles have lost whatever measure of clarity and transparency they once might have had, substituting instead an opaqueness that allows our grievances to multiply like in some oversized petri dish until we are ready to burst out and confront the human objects of our scorn, indeed, the humans whom we have largely objectified and now turned into threatening caricatures of themselves, caricatures about which we feel the need to actually understand little. Indeed that is part of the discriminatory deal, isn’t it, turning complex human beings and their cultures into categories worthy not of respect but of suspicion, knowing just enough about people to “know” that they are essentially unworthy of dignity or respect.

This tendency to objectify and dishonor, certainly prevalent in the US, is not confined to any one political or ideological persuasion. A series of maps published recently chronicles the degree to which people have increasingly segregated their domiciles by political affiliation, choosing to live (and isolate themselves) in areas where most folks are tolerant (if not always accepting) of their political, cultural and religious viewpoints. At one level this approach is understandable, especially for families caught in the current cultural crossfire. Clearly it is not the “job” of children of “First Nations” Asian or African descent to solve the embedded racism and xenophobia that rear their ugly heads in manifold ways and which have resisted the best efforts of some remarkable figures over time to finally end their reign of terror. Nor is it their job to “take one for the team,” to absorb the epithets and bullying, the rejections and outright violence that we adults have not done nearly enough to prevent. From the standpoint of protecting children from the worst of our collective behavior, our thickening demographic bubbles make some sense.

But of course, the bubbles themselves don’t resolve the violence and discrimination, the objectifying and the demeaning. If inclusion is to mean anything more than rhetoric, it cannot be attained if people are not also willing to leave their corners of the ring and engage with others in the center. How do we create safer spaces for people to engage, to invest more in each other, to understand more about the “other” besides the ways in which they allegedly “threaten” our own, entitled ways of being?

Part of the answer clearly embodies a policy dynamic. I was pleased this week that at the UN, alongside excellent events on preserving water resources and the impact of climate disasters on agriculture, alongside as well the gender-focused inclusivity promoted at the Commission on the Status of Women, there were several events that highlighted the growing divides of race, religion and culture that continue to impact international peace and security. During thoughtful discussions that highlighted the toxic effects of racism, xenophobia and discrimination against Jews, Muslims and persons of African and Asian descent, it is becoming more and more apparent that diplomats worldwide are worried – as well they might be – about the many ways we seem to be tearing each other apart, rupturing what remains of human unity in ways that policy can only partially heal.

Among the highlights for me of the week’s discussions were concerns expressed by New Zealand’s Ambassador and others of the extent to which COVID-19 has helped “open fractures” wider and deeper than we have seen in some time. Indonesia warned against our sometimes “empty words” with regard to justice and tolerance. Pakistan noted during the Islamophobia event the importance of rejecting “distortions of our common humanity and their selfish motives.” At that same event, UN Secretary-General Guterres warned about our spreading “epidemic of mistrust and discrimination” mirroring the admonition of Niger’s Ambassador to “build bridges not burn them.” A Rabbi at this week’s event on anti-Semitism was particularly graphic in his warning to the online audience that “those who burn books would also burn human beings.”

But perhaps the finest presentation of the week on this topic was offered by the new US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Her remarks were personal, poignant, and challenging. She described the racism she has lived through as an “ignored cancer,” encouraging those impacted by it to “stare it down,” to do everything in your power not to “internalize” its messaging. She also pointed to a role for policy in efforts to minimize such messaging, noting that “we can’t always change peoples’ hearts, but “we can change the rules.”

Indeed, we must change the rules and then insist that those rules be followed. But as this UN week made clear, as my own experience confirms, we must never abandon the task of changing hearts, the hearts of the racists and anti-Semites, the hearts of those pumping out grievance and affixing them to alleged, objectified threats, and yes, our own hearts as well. Indeed, if we want better policies, policies that incorporate diverse voices and retain the trust of global constituencies, we who have regular access to policy processes must become better people ourselves. The wider public will never fully trust our treaties and resolutions unless they can also trust those who craft them. Opening safe space for other perspectives, other views, is one sure avenue to that trust.

And there is another dimension to this, one which some in the Edmonton community I will later address have taught me well – that the path to a genuine understanding of others across divides of culture, race and faith while long, is also rich. To reach the finish line, we must be willing to get close enough to touch complexity, to replace assumptions with realities, to dwell in the nuances of other lives long enough to understand that our own personal challenges are not so different than theirs, and that we too have ideas, prejudices, assumptions and behaviors that would be better off relinquished than reinforced.

At the same time, we would do well to remember that there are things that you can never know about people unless you have spent time in their homes, to see first hand how people organize their lives and care for their families, to get a sense of their priorities and how they invest their precious hours, to better understand the multiple influences that inspire and guide what they care about more and less.

In my life, I have been multiply blessed by often-remarkable and honorable people from many global regions, people of diverse backgrounds and interests who have opened their homes to me, who have honored me with their hospitality and complexity, who have helped ensure that their joys and burdens become part of the backdrop of my own work in the world. It is a gift I can never repay; indeed it is a gift that enlarges souls, expands minds, and makes hearts beat a little differently, and can do so for many others as it has done for me. As the UN diplomats themselves have attested, we can and must change the rules. But we should also encourage others (and maybe even ourselves) to take a few more risks and engage more deeply those experiences, those stories, those voices that can inspire the changes we are obligated to make in the world and in ourselves.

Tags: Culture, Racism, religion, United Nations, xenophobia

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Death Dancing: Choreographing a Mutually-Assured Future, Dr. Robert Zuber

14 Mar

If we didn’t move on, who could move in? William Sloane Coffin

Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of. Niccolò Ammaniti

This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice. José Saramago

And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing? Iris Murdoch

All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it always will be, the most dreadful sight in the world. Susan Cooper

One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. Charles M. Blow

There is a reprint of the Eichenberg engraving posted above which has been pinned on a bulletin board in my messy home office for over a quarter of a century.

I have it there not because I entirely resonate with Eichenberg’s sometimes jarringly dark worldview but because I do embrace what I understand to be his core message. For much of our history, indeed for too much of our present, a perverse message of “child care” which the engraving seeks to parody has held sway. In this piece, we see a group of older men of grisly countenance joined by children whom they are purported to protect surrounded by the weapons we who work in the security space know all too well — the missiles and tanks, the war planes, the automatic rifles — that have long been used to threaten and intimidate, an expensive blanket of weaponized “protection” more likely to raise anxiety through the metaphorical roof than offer reassurance.

The children in the engraving are not being comforted so much as being egged on by grotesque caricatures of “caring” adults. One child is getting a ride in a tank; another is fondling a missile; a third is taking target practice on a hanging human figure cheered on by one of the adults. Others are merely seen pointing guns at others in the room, each with an older “mentor” ensuring proper technique, reinforcing the notion that the activities in this room are “normal,” that the children should become as comfortable, even reassured, around this arsenal of death as the determined and mostly uniformed adults have come to be.

Of course, this “comfort,” passed on from generation to generation has a price. Indeed, at times a very high price. I was intrigued and saddened this week by a story I was tipped off to about the F-35 fighter jet program in the US, a program that, according to The Hill, is likely to fully cost out at $1.7 Trillion. Yes, with a T. It is a dangerous world indeed and military planners are surely losing sleep trying to manage conflict threats that our skilled negotiators and mediators have not yet figured out how to mitigate, let alone resolve. But this weapon with its record-setting price tag and uncertain strategic value represents flawed decision-making that might even give the Eichenberg figures pause.

At a time when a pandemic has stripped local economies of trillions of dollars; at at time when a warming climate threatens both our biodiversity and our agriculture; at a time when trust among peoples in each other and in their institutions of governance is waning; at a time when a bevy of new security threats and conflict triggers cannot be solved through conventional military applications no matter the cost or technological sophistication; there is an urgency — especially in these moments — to rethink our security investments, to do more than merely pass on our weapons-related addictions to another generation as we might pass on an old vehicle or pocket watch.

The UN is figuring out the multiple ways in which armed conflict and its weapons are both a cause and consequence of so much misery in our world. Thanks in part to the persistence of a string of smart, vocal, elected Security Council members, the implications for security from still-insufficiently addressed climate change have become more and more apparent. And in the week just passed, a US-organized debate on famine and food security in the Security Council as will as a Swiss-chaired report launch from the Open Ended Working Group on “developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security” reminded us once again of the multiplying dangers we now face — dangers for which our omnipresent weapons are still in some quarters, by some flawed logic, seen as a solution.

There was much good discussion in the food security debate, including from both India’s Ambassador and the World Food Programme’s ED David Beasley, who reminded delegations that humanitarian assistance, while essential, is not a solution to grave food insecurity; rather it is the resolution of armed conflict. This point was taken up as well by Council members such as Niger and Mexico which are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the trafficking in and the still-under-regulated trading in weapons. Moreover, all members seemed in sync with the simple point made by SG Guterres that “if you don’t feed people, you feed conflict.”

In another UN chamber, the cyber-report (and accompanying discussion) made several important points, including that “increasing connectivity and reliance on ICTs without accompanying measures to ensure ICT security can bring unintended risks, making societies more vulnerable to malicious ICT activities. While not named as such in the report, activities that should be mentioned under this rubric include the increasing ability of hackers to disrupt the functioning of all manner of civilian and military infrastructure including, as we saw earlier this year in the US, the safety and security of our most dangerous weapons.

Lamentably, some of the member states that ostensibly carry the flag for a more human security-centered approach, that are the most rhetorically engaged regarding our ever-evolving security responsibilities, continue to fuel conflict back-door through their abundant arms sales, their disproportionate emissions, their self-serving trade agreements, their reluctance to commit fully to multilateral agreements until it has been clearly determined that national interests are also served. Or at least those “national interests” as determined exclusively by national leadership. In this regard, we were sad to note, with OXFAM executive director Bucher, the number of states which mourn food insecurity but also make it more likely through their incessant acquisition of weapons. In this same vein, it was a bit jarring to hear the UK minister reject those states that, in his view, tend to see other human beings as “insignificant” while his government continues to sell weapons to most all who seek them, including to conflict-compromised Saudi Arabia.

While monitoring these discussion on the impacts of famine and malicious cyber actors on peace and security, we were reminded that one of the challenges that has eluded successful resolution for many years and which continues into the present is related to establishing the full costs of armed conflict. How do we “price out” misery in places like Yemen and South Sudan? How do we factor in costs related to trafficked and traded weapons let alone the damage they inflict on local education and agriculture? How do we calculate the costs of the fear that keeps people prisoners in their own homes or on the move in search of safer domiciles? How do we assess the costs from generations whose learning has been jeopardized or whose food and health deprivations are almost certain to require long-term care assuming their survival in the first place? And how do we factor the costs associated with depleted fish stocks and bee populations, of conflict-inducing discriminations of the basis of race, gender or culture, or of the increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity malfeasance that puts all of our civilian and military infrastructure at direct risk?

These are not hypothetical accounting issues. We are now modernizing nuclear weapons and planning to put some of our most deadly armaments in space under “dual use” cover, all at great expense in resources no longer available to to support vaccinations or habitat restoration, small farmers or safer, healthier schools. We are willing to spend trillions on a fighter plane with no obvious strategic advantage but balk at providing livable wages for workers or taking better care of the immigrant communities without which most “developed” economies would collapse. We want children in school but then tolerate the disincentives that lead many to leave school behind for dangerous jobs, for forced marriage, even for recruitment into armed groups.

And still our oceans fill with plastic, our children face depression from a loss of childhood, our communities live in fear of those who brandish trafficked weapons, our civilian and military infrastructure remains vulnerable to malicious attack, our children living in conflict zones face starvation, the consequences of which will linger even if food provisions ultimately arrive in time to keep their frail bodies alive.

This and more constitutes our own “dance of death,” movements (and choices) more complex than those engaged around Eichenberg’s militarized table, but which are more clearly recognizable in our own time. We know that weapons are not the solution to our endless political disagreements, our climate crisis, our biodiversity loss, our mass displacements, our pandemics now and to come, our increasingly vulnerable infrastructure. And yet we continue to make weapons of increasing sophistication, make them for recipients that don’t need them and probably shouldn’t have them, weapons that promise much more ruin than security, weapons which drain our national accounts for no clear human purpose. Our dance card continues to call for weapons. And so we build, and then build some more.

In this season of Lent for those of Christian persuasion, the stark rhythms of betrayal and loyalty, death and rebirth, are just some of the themes in play. Especially for those of us for whom the end is much closer than the beginning, death in this life is simply part of the deal, a deal which requires all of us to eventually “move on” such that others can “move in,,” such that others can take the lead and share their most creative impulses, can try their hand at solving the problems which generations before them left sitting on the table, can change the program such that we spend more time dancing for health and life and less time dancing for malice and indifference.

But their own dance card might well be too difficult to pull off unless we who are still here can choreograph the world as it is now to become less weaponized and intimidating, to abate our “urge to hurt” and demonstrate more empathy and understanding beyond our now pandemic-challenged rhetoric. The question for the international community is not whether we die, but whether or not we kill ourselves off through malfeasance or indifference, through grossly misplaced spending priorities and the failure to relinquish significant portions of national interest to solve life-or-death problems which, as the UN rightly notes on a regular basis, cannot be solved by any state alone.

Death may be inevitable. This current, complex iteration of our “deadly dance” need not be.

Tags: children, death, United Nations, Weapons

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