a place called earth

So, another round of climate change negotiations have come and gone. Once again, the fractures dividing the different corners of our world were the starting point for negotiations - fractures defined by geography, history and the sizes of countries' respective economies. And, once again, these divisions have effectively paralysed our global community's best efforts to find a solution to climate change.

This little video (though over-simplifying the problem), provides a brief summary of the history of these negotiations.

As the video points out, a tendency to put what is 'best' for our respective nations before what is 'best' for all causes us to turn against one another, to pit our own successes against others' failures, to spend more time and energy finger pointing, and naming and shaming, than trying to find honest, workable solutions. And so, in the wake of another round of negotiations, we find ourselves exactly where we started: unable to find a common basis for sharing responsibility for our future and for working together to improve it - while in the meantime the condition of our planet continues to deteriorate.

This time around, victory did come for some in the form of an ambiguous reference to compensation for those who are most affected by, and contributed least to, the effects of climate change. But I can't help but feel such an 'outcome' just detracts attention from the underlying problem: nobody is willing to significantly cut the actual emissions they are producing. Attempts to buy one's way to maintain current levels of consumption, to find more 'efficient' ways to use the same volumes of energy, to argue that history completely exempts one from the need to act responsibly represents at best piecemeal attempts, and at worst lame excuses, to avoid taking the action necessary to address the challenges before us.

The video briefly touches on a history plagued with inequality and injustice, leading to the sharp divisions we see around us. So accustomed have we become to them that they now define reality, and prevent us from consciously accepting that climate change is a global problem. But our shared history, however unjust, need not determine our shared future. Granted, we built this world on an uneven playing field of exploitation and carelessness. But we can ask ourselves how we want to go about rebuilding it - lest history repeat itself.

I find it ironic that the very root of the problem - that actions on one side of the world can affect those on the other side - is also the very proof that we're living in one world, with one ecosystem, and that we are its collective beneficiaries. All this seems to suggest that it's not really the climate that's broken - it's us.

This takes me to another interesting short film I watched recently, which describes the 'overview effect.' The term describes the sensation that some astronauts have experienced when seeing the world from afar in space. Thrust out of the make-believe borders that have come to define reality here on earth, they are able to witness the oneness of our planet from a whole new perspective. In the film, some of these astronauts describe how this experience helped them to truly appreciate that borders are manmade, that divisions are fictitious. Hearing them describe this, we feel their attraction to the beauty of a united earth. These ideas bring to mind a writing from the Baha'i Faith that reminds us of the earth's oneness.

...The surface of the earth is one native land. Every one can live in any spot on the terrestrial globe. Therefore all the world is man's birthplace. These boundaries and outlets have been devised by man. In the creation, such boundaries and outlets were not assigned.

It is worth noting that some of the assumptions the video, below, makes about changing behaviour - and ultimately the world - are overly simplistic, attributing a little too much catalytic power to the 'overview effect' without really addressing what motivates change in individual hearts, nor what role the structures of our societies must play to contribute to such change. Nevertheless, the vision of oneness it articulates is both profound and beautiful.

Changing behaviour certainly is a key factor in tackling climate change at both the individual and national level. What would it take for each one of us to accept that the world is one, and to act accordingly?

We also need to ask deeper questions about what motivates humanity, and particularly leaders, to act in the ways portrayed in the first video on climate change negotiations. Every country rightly wants to prosper, yet under the current model of development guiding humanity, less emissions means less production, means less development - and therein lies problem.

The fundamental question we should be asking then is what is the nature of true development. From a policy perspective, this implies going beyond providing incentives for individuals to use solar panels or to ride their bicycles to work. We need to ask what the deterioration of our environment implies about the nature of our economies and growth models, which depend on endless consumption, fuelled by endless production from our factories. In this model, decreasing production spells crisis: less jobs, less revenue - for both individuals and the nation. But when the economic model is destroying the earth, is that not a good time to question it?

There is no doubt that every country has the right to prosper, and that the world would be a better place if these levels of prosperity were more equal. Those that were exploited in the past need to be provided the space to work for their own prosperity. But humanity's past mistakes, no matter where they took place, and who benefited from them, should guide us to a more sustainable development path, for all.

For ultimately, this earth is our home. The place of places of meeting. If we want to salvage what's left of it, to build upon these ruins a new, sustainable pattern of life, sooner or later we won't have a choice but to acknowledge our oneness and to think and act as one. This desire to build the world anew, together, can only stem from a genuine realisation of our oneness - not just as one planet, but as one humanity, whose destinies are bound up together.

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.

- Baha'i writings