Where do we go from here?

“Nopenhagen” and the long road to COP 16 Mexico, via a tiny island in the South Pacific.

COP 15, the much-awaited climate change conference of December 2009 that many of us hoped would result in definitive outcomes and binding agreements on carbon emissions, has been left in the dust and ashes of last year. The rallying cry “Let's turn Copenhagen into Hopenhagen” turned into an ignominious “Nopenhagen” as we watched the summit draw to a close.

Clearly, nothing has changed in the 17 years since the first ever environment conference, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where 12-year-old Severn Suzuki delivered her moving speech. Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t seen it yet.

Nothing changed after the Bali conference of December 2007, where the Bali Roadmap emerged in the final hours of the conference, after the entire process was nearly derailed.

But wait, it’s not over till it’s over. Although these events may not have delivered on their promise, they have surely achieved something at least as important: an exponential growth in global awareness of the reality and immediacy of climate change.

And because the New Year has just barely begun, hope is reborn, optimism – and let’s not forget the chocolate – with so many more people now on board the Climate Change bandwagon than ever before. With awareness comes the desire for change. Or it should, and therefore it will.

When will change happen? Well, if you believe time is linear, it could take a while. But if you believe time is merely a construct of the human mind, which essentially it is, then it could happen right away. Tonight. Yesterday. Because we are surely approaching critical mass. Once we reach the tipping point, it is done. Change will have happened. Just like that.

So now, there’s COP 16, slated for November 29 to December 10, 2010 in Mexico. The thing is, we’ve already seen how ineffective these climate change mega-conferences are. So what’s the point?

Though the critics are loud and vocal about the enormous environmental costs of holding conferences, with thousands of delegates flying in from all over the world, to venues that are heated or chilled and always brightly lit, to my mind these are justified costs at this time in the game. Decisions like these are momentous and can hardly be discussed and finalized over Skype or a conference call; getting the contenders together in one place for eyeball-to-eyeball encounters is essential. Most often, it is on the sidelines of these conferences where the real breakthroughs occur. So the giant carbon footprint generated might be justified after all. To compensate, we can all go meat-free for a month. Or two. Or five.

There are, of course, the skeptics who believe global warming is not a manmade condition and is going to happen anyway as part of a larger Earth-cycle pattern, and they proceed to quote Bryson and then fistfights ensue.

There are the die-hard environmentalists, who believe that if we don’t change our wicked ways polar bears and island nations will start to disappear in a matter of years.

In between, there is a growing multitude of us ordinary mortals who recognize that we are each responsible for being the change we want to see, because it’s time.

And it’s not just about people. Every other living species is paying the price for our abuse of the planet that supports us. A lone polar bear on a diminishing ice floe miles from land has become an icon for species on the brink. Weather patterns everywhere have gone nuts. And still, we look the other way.

Reduced to a very simplistic metaphor, we all know what happens after a night of extreme bingeing. We abuse our bodies and they revolt. Hangovers happen and headaches blind us, our system’s way of telling us to back off. It works somewhat like that with Mother Nature too. Our abuse gives her indigestion and headaches, and sometimes just gets her mad. Her way of telling us to stop with the deforestation, overfishing, strip mining, oil spills…

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed”. The truth in his words has already come to pass; we are now faced with the consequences of our greed.

I personally subscribe to a subset of the chaos theory, called the Butterfly Effect, which posits that the flapping of a single butterfly's wings in the Amazon could initiate a series of tiny atmospheric events that might set off a tornado in Tonga or a hurricane in Houston a month later.

In short, everything each one of us does has a ripple effect, with consequences that can impact everything and everyone else. We need to ditch the greed and relearn the concept of “how much is enough”. And we need to start respecting ourselves, each other and Nature, again.

Which brings me to tribal cultures, their native wisdom and respect for nature. If you haven’t watched it yet, try and catch the Travel Channel’s new six-part series, Meet the Natives. Five tribesmen from the remote South Pacific island of Tanna who have never left home before, visit the United States with a mission to bring the message of peace, love and harmony to the Big Chief (Obama).

Their innate respect for others and for nature shines through as they travel across the United States to experience the "tribal customs" of the American people. Their insights and observations are breathtakingly simple, honest and real; they have much to teach us.

For example, when they came across a homeless man in New York, they said, “He must have no one to love him.” They could not understand how anyone could be homeless; in Tanna, the entire community would gather together and build him a home!

They asked why we need money. On Tanna, they grow what they need.

The tribal chief’s observation on watching a California couple receiving Botox injections: “The sun rises and sets, and you can't stop the sun from setting. If it's 3 p.m. you can't make it 9 a.m. even if you want it to be. You can fix the skin outside, but the blood knows what time it is.” Now, is THAT native tribal wisdom, or what?! The blood knows what time it is. How simply and effectively put!

I think about how the world would change if the simple wisdom of these tribesmen from Tanna was available to the COP 16 in Mexico. Someday, we will all understand what they know in their bones. That money isn’t all that important, we need love to survive and be happy. We need to respect Nature, and go back to a simpler way of being. And most of all, we need to understand that we are all connected. We are all one.

+ Priya Tuli

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