Reflections from "the dear green place"
Tim Woodcock writes: As the dust settles on the recent COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, it is clear that this was not landmark event that many where hoping for. The Glasgow Climate Pact nudged humanity in the right direction, but it’s hard to characterize it as anything other than “too little, too late.” Sadly the talks in Glasgow will not earn the city a place in the history books as the location of game-changing agreements, as Rio and Paris had before it.
I have a special affection for Glasgow, nicknamed “the dear
green place,” having lived there for six years (studying at the University of
Glasgow for four years and then living there a couple of years beyond that; it’s
where I met my wife; and we still have a number of friends either in the city or
nearby). Beyond our academic classes, the circles that Katy and I moved in involved university chaplaincy groups,
the Quaker meeting, and various activist groups, and recently I spent an enjoyable
evening trawling through the news coverage and sundry forwarded emails and recommended blog
posts, all in an effort to understand what COP26 did and didn’t achieve. And certain names kept
coming up - people that I either knew personally, or knew of, from the Glasgow of 20-plus
years ago.
One of those names was Kathy Galloway, who documented the
event with some astute writing - both impressionistically capturing the energy of the proceedings and examining in a hard-headed way how the competing priorities of activists from around the world were handled.
Her reflections are in the form of a day-by-day blog following the two-week
period of conference. Galloway describes herself as a “writer, activist and
practical theologian” and she is a member of the Iona Community, an ecumenical Christian
community based on an island off the west of coast of Scotland around the historic
abbey, and with offices in Glasgow, the nearest major city. I recall being part
of a retreat she led 20-plus years ago about the subversive things that the Bible has to
say about money and wealth. In the intervening time Galloway, who is an
ordained minister, has worked mostly in the field of international development
and her take on the COP26 is largely through that lens.
She quotes Mohammed Adow of Power Shift Africa as saying that COP26 was “a triumph of diplomacy over real substance.” Adow goes on:
“The outcome here reflects a COP held in the rich world and the outcome contains the priorities of the rich world. We are leaving empty handed [on loss and damage] but morally stronger and hopeful that we can sustain the momentum in the coming year to deliver meaningful support which will allow the vulnerable to deal with the irreversible impacts of climate change created by the polluting world who are failing to take responsibility.”
Mixed in with the serious work of assessing what actually
was happened in Glasgow, Galloway makes some amusing observations, such as, “It
is a universal law of activism that the larger the march, the more time it will
take to begin moving.” Galloway’s general take is that the people who attended COP26,
whether in an official negotiating capacity or not, were “overwhelmingly people
of goodwill, whose primary and overriding purpose was to find, implement and
demonstrate what it means to think globally and act locally as we inch towards
carbon reduction and climate justice.” In the closing days, when the minutiae
of specific deals were being hammered out, our overdependence on fossil fuels
was called out and placed uncomfortably in the spotlight, and, in the American context, new pledges
to create a more robust infrastructure for electric cars seemed to emerge as a
way forward. And yet the final package of measures
was too timid; what came out of Glasgow will not make it possible to limit
warming temperatures to 1.5C; and inevitably the developing world will feel the brunt of this
squandered opportunity more acutely than the wealthier nations. Goodwill and
vague pledges are not action and, Galloway writes, “there is general agreement that this is a
weak deal, though how bad it is depends on where you view it from.”
Nonetheless Galloway ends her fourteen-day streak of blog
posts – that is, one for each day of the COP26 - with a dose of optimism. It is a
resolute poem of solidarity by Tom Leonard, a beloved Glaswegian poet with a highly political
edge, who died three years ago. Here it is:
Being a Human Being
not to be complicit
not to accept everyone else is silent it must be alright
not to keep one’s mouth shut to hold onto one’s job
not to accept public language as cover and decoy
not to put friends and family before the rest of the world
not to say I am wrong when you know the government is wrong
not to be just a bought behaviour pattern
to accept the moment and fact of choice
I am a human being
and I exist
a human being
and a citizen of the world
responsible to that world
-- and responsible for that world
Comments
Post a Comment