On the other side of the sky

By Francesco Martone* – Special for Other News

Rome, dec 29 – It would be helpful – in fact, necessary – to read with a bifocal lens the outcome of the UN Conference on Climate Change that took place recently in Paris. This would allow us a closer look at a negotiating process that went on for years, and that spawned many other processes.

A pair of bifocals would help us de-code what happened in Paris and what the future will offer us. These lenses are made of other materials, you will never find them mentioned in studies of climatology, and you will not find them in the drawers of government leaders, businesspeople or non-governmental experts.

These lenses are makeshift, bound together by masking tape and a rubber band, and they allow us to see things in a completely different perspective. The time has come to make an effort to put ourselves on the other side – on the side of the Earth and its inhabitants.

Such a shift is partly justified by the urgency of admitting that we humans, as small as we are, generate dramatic upheavals in the ecological balance of life, and therefore it would be a good thing for us to lower our ecological footprint and carry a lighter rucksack.

Putting ourselves on the side of the sky – which is nowadays darkened by a thick suffocating cloud of smog and disturbed by extreme weather events and altered migratory cycles – means assuming the feminine perspective of a mother who is rapidly being consumed by an unhealthy obsession with never-ending growth.

A thoughtful and challenging study comes to mind in this regard. Entitled “Antarctica as a Cultural Critique: the Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change”, it was written by Professor Elena Glasberg of City University of New York.

Glasberg studied the “official” history of the exploration of Antarctica, produced mostly by men driven to conquer every inch of unknown land. She then proposed another viewpoint, which was to put ourselves on the side of the ice, and re-read the history of polar exploration using a gender lens. Perhaps it is appropriate that the Earth is considered our mother, and as a mother she is inextricably bound to our existence.

Paris was a much-awaited event, full of expectations and disappointments. The French capital was the setting for a clash between the mainstream narrative of climate change and the narrative which took shape outside in the streets, from the participation of people of all walks of life. They not only took to the streets to defy a ban, but helped to build another perspective of ecological and social justice.

The papers adopted in Paris have to be studied carefully. They tell us that in fact governments of all parts of the world believe that climate change is not a matter of human rights; that thousands of people whose very survival is at stake should not be considered as rights-holders.

These people live mostly in places that inspire our dreams of a pristine paradise, as painted by Paul Gauguin or portrayed in glossy travel brochures. They live in places like the Maldives or a myriad of other islands, splinters of rock, sand, coral and land in the Pacific Ocean. Thousands of people who are forced to migrate, without food or shelter, are considered only as items of accounting for private charity or aid agencies.

Those papers adopted in Paris testify to the sovereign interest of nations in securing a blank check to invent new tricks to postpone their doomsday date, when they will have to stop pumping oil and gas from the Earth.

At the negotiating table in Paris, a game was played on a computer keyboard – cutting and pasting words, adding or removing brackets. Outside of this editing feat, reality consists of suffering and pain, and nothing new or unexpected came out of the conference. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one could say. In fact, most countries had already placed their chips on the table, confirming whatever they intended to do to help limit global warming to three, two or one-and-a-half degrees.

These figures make the difference in a gambling game that skilled negotiators have sorted out with language that holds almost everything together. The result is an “aspirational” rather than a “transformational” goal. Instead of clear binding targets to keep temperature increase at 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, there were no commitments.

It will be up to the invisible hand of market to provide a solution. This is a hand that becomes perfectly visible when it sticks new prospecting and drilling derricks into the ice or on the seabed. Or when it destroys forest biodiversity to plant agro-fuels, or evicts communities whose only crime is the successful management of ecosystems from time immemorial.

This is what “net negative emissions” is all about. It is another trick to show that – apart from minor corrections – the route remans essentially the same, and continues to be mapped by the ideology of extractive capitalism.

Putting ourselves on the side of the sky today means taking a position and deciding to unveil the trick, overcoming the old rhetorics of a geographical North that exploits a colonized South. That North and that South do not exist anymore. What we have today are communities in the North and in the South that suffer the impact of climate change, that are violated in the quest for fossil fuels, and that try to practice alternatives.

It is not surprising that the parties in Paris failed to acknowledge that the only possible way out of our predicament is to induce an oil shock. To paraphrase Naomi Klein, we need to apply shock therapy that would envisage the end of fossil fuel prospecting and a rapid reduction of extraction and use.

In this regard, the figures speak for themselves: US$800 billion are spent every year on prospecting by oil companies, compared to the US$100 billion that has been pledged to support developing countries in their energy transition. Much of this money is in the form of loans or private funds from companies and financial institutions, and will help to reignite the spiral of debt in poor countries, both ecological and financial.

If we put ourselves on the side of the sky, if we want to stop being suffocated by pollution, and if we wish to avoid dangerous warming, we will have to keep 80 per cent of fossil fuel reserves in the ground. This is what science tells us, but politics make a selective use of science, so no decision has been taken on the matter in Paris, Nor was anything agreed on the moral obligation to compensate those who have suffered loss and damage caused by climate change.

Nevertheless, the official “narrative” promoted by the UN, governments, and some big NGOs tells us that Paris represents an initial success. They invite us to look at the glass as being half-full when it is already cracked and leaking. Hence, the bifocals I mentioned earlier help to decode and unveil, while at the same time focussing on the other side of the sky. And this is where a work in progress comes into play – women, peasants, workers, citizens, activists, pacifists, ecologists, communists and post-communists, indigenous peoples, small entrepreneurs, philosophers and artists.

This ecological “commune” seeks to reclaim ecological debt and struggle for climate justice by recognising the rights of nature and local communities.

This other side of the sky has declared a state of climate emergency in Paris, and built an agenda for the Earth. They have critiqued the current phase of extractive capitalism, and patriarchal power structures in an effort to build an authentically decolonized language and system.

So, our bifocals help us to look beyond the papers that were adopted at Paris. And that ‘beyond’ consists of us reclaiming our future on this Earth, from the bottom up. We will continue to weave networks and exchange knowledge, spinning a fabric of resistance. We will put our minds and bodies to save the sky and the Earth from the bulldozers and the oil drillers.


*Francesco Martone, is policy advisor for Forest Peoples Programme. He has been working on REDD+ and UNFCCC negotiations for the last six years in support of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum on Climate Change. He is now increasingly engaged with EU-based NGOs to work on European Union action on deforestation. A former senator in Italy, he has engaged in campaigns and international negotiations and processes on human rights, environment, development, peace for the last 25 years. He is a founding member of Greenpeace Italy, Board member of Green Cross Italia and juror of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.