Day 4 — COP17, Durban: Thursday, December 1, 2011
Things are heating up (ha ha!). The 48-member LDC (Least/Less Developed Nations) bloc and the 39-member AOSIS bloc are now calling for negotiations to start after January 1, 2012 for a firm and strong treaty with a target of 1.5 degrees Celsius or less, to be signed at COP 18, which has been very (in)conveniently located in Qatar, as we learned earlier in the week (the world had been led to believe it would take place in much more radical and open South Korea, which will now hold the pre-COP ministerial meetings in the fall of 2012 instead).
At the People’s Space today there was an all-day Ecosocialist Conference, with talks by Joel Kovel (author of The Enemy of Nature) and Terisa Turner, a professor at the University of Guelph in Canada was has written one of the best short analyses of what happened at Copenhagen, among others. Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s climate negotiator at Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010, told us: “Nature still lives in slavery…. We have to end this new kind of apartheid.” Joel Kovel made a case for Ecosocialism, distinguishing between “environmental politics” which locates nature outside humanity, and “ecological politics,” which locates us as part of nature within an ecological web. Ecosocialism starts from the latter insight. Young US activist Quincy Saul, who together with Joel Kovel has founded an organization called Ecosocialist Horizons, delivered an impassioned message that it’s not enough to hope, or do our best, but we need a “guarantee.” In the US context he said it’s cowardly to name the problem — capitalism –and then not have the courage to name the solution, ecosocialism. We need more than slogans, we need to act. We need to arm ourselves with the ideas and theory that will help us get to our goal.
In other words, iicat has a role to play.
Later in the day, at a FOEI session on “The Climate Crisis and the International Climate Negotiations: Moving Beyond Durban,” UK-based FOEI spokesperson Asad Rehman argued that we have to engage the UNFCCC – the question is how. Our job as part of civil society is to save people’s lives, to act as a front line. Contrasting the atmosphere of the People’s Space, where singing and dance have been constantly at play, he said of the COP: “It’s a dead space…. [We must make it] a contested space. We may not have the same power, but we can’t ignore them…. The Africa group is the most adamant group inside the COP. We need to expose the worst [countries], slow them down from doing the worst.” Indigenous Canadian activist Tom Goldtooth said the question is whether we can take back these negotiations. When a First Nations representative said in Copenhagen that Canada was racist, he was asked by the Canadian delegation to leave the negotiations, which he refused to do. But when he returned to Canada, the government cut certain funding to First Nations peoples up to fifty percent.
So there is a real debate here about acting inside the COP, trying to work within it to influence some of the parties to the negotiations, versus activism outside, either to delegitimate and destroy the COP altogether, or to bring pressure from civil society on the COP and the transnational corporations, and building the strong people’s movement that will be necessary to both stop emissions and build alternative ways of living. My position has always been that everything helps, and we should all do what we must wherever we think best, with no fixed, unchanging strategy. This is probably the view of most of the people here too on all sides of the debate.
Of the singing and dancing we have at almost every session as various groups file into the halls, Yvonne Yanez, of Ecuador’s celebrated Acción Ecológica, drew the lesson: “Unity makes strength. Celebration makes unity.”
John