Originally posted on Environmental Politics blog, 21 November 2021
I’ve been glued to the radio this fortnight, as news item after news item has covered COP26 and the climate crisis in a way that the media in general has failed to do for decades. But there was one – seemingly unrelated – report which really stopped me in my tracks. It played two clips of birdsong, from the same patch of land in the UK; the first recorded in the 1990s, the second in 2020s. The difference, which reflected the shift in land use towards more intensive farming, was stark, and harrowing. I am becoming increasingly familiar with this feeling; it is a sense of terrible loss that I can’t quite grasp – nor want to.
As I peered out of my kitchen window hoping for the reassuring presence of some sparrows, the news reader returned to coverage of COP26, and it occurred to me that amidst this vast flurry of negotiations the non-human delegation seems strangely absent. I don’t mean a lack of butterflies in the blue zone (although wouldn’t that be wonderful?), but rather, in everything I’ve seen of how COP26 is being projected to the world, from the rhetoric to the décor, non-human lives are given little more than a passing nod. Which seems odd for a gathering aimed explicitly at tackling climate change ‘together for our planet’.
A sixth mass extinction is underway, and accelerating. This unfathomable loss of life is inextricably linked to the climate crisis; both because the warming increases extinctions, and because the loss of ecosystems results in increased warming. The early COP26 deal to end deforestation was a welcome recognition of this, but it grasped it in an entirely anthropocentric way; a pledge to save forests because our (human) survival depends on them, rather than because all the wondrous lifeforms within them deserve to live, too.
None of this is surprising; COP26 has already been exposed as one of the most exclusionary COPs there has ever been, and is thus constrained by a myopic worldview, namely, the techno-industrial-growth-progress mantra that has dominated so-called ‘developed’ nations for centuries. This is a worldview which only takes account of non-human life forms only insomuch as they are ‘resources’ to ‘exploit’ (or – at a stretch – ‘providers’ of ‘services’). The relegation of other species as being inferior to humans also goes hand in hand with the denigration of other humans on the basis of their race, sex, gender, and ability (in other words, not white, male, and able-bodied). Fundamentally, this violent and exclusionary logic is what has enabled capitalism to tear through the fabric of social and ecological life so rapaciously and with virtually no remorse.
But other worldviews are available. There are cultures and societies which revere non-human life, and understand the fundamental reciprocity between all living things. Many such views are represented by the indigenous communities who have been so consistently squeezed out of COP26, if indeed they managed to get there in the first place. As Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui, president of the Huni Kui People’s Federation of the Brazilian Amazon, told The Guardian, “We have ancestral connections to the environment and Mother Earth. These are spiritual spaces that we would never negotiate or offset for money”. Theirs is a politics of humility, which – as recent research on why we haven’t bent the global emissions curve highlights – is sorely missing from efforts to address the climate and ecological crises, and a key reason for their failures.
It is telling that the very optics of COP26 do little to foster a sense of humans as participants in larger living systems. The logo and centre piece of COP26 is an image of the earth as if seen from space; a giant globe hangs above delegates in the main conference centre, presumably meant as a reminder of what is at stake.
While it is popular to assume that such projections of the planet – from the famous ‘Blue Marble’ photo onwards – help to inspire humans to take better care of their one, fragile home, my sense is that it does the opposite. The anthropologist Tim Ingold is insightful here, suggesting that the ubiquitous “globe” outlook – one in which humans appear on the outside looking in – is actually a perspective that expels humanity from the lifeworld: “Far from reintegrating human society into the world of nature”, Ingold says, the idea of a solid globe “marks their final separation” (2000, 155). Rather than the environment surrounding us, it appears that it is us who have surrounded it; from such a perspective, humility is difficult.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the billionaire Jeff Bezos, a man who epitomizes an anthropocentric ‘growth-progress’ mantra and who has one of the world’s largest carbon footprints, chose to recount his experience of seeing of the earth from space in his speech to COP26 delegates. Meanwhile, a New York Times Climate Hub COP26 side event last week, which had a refreshingly diverse panel of speakers, did not decorate its stage with a lonely globe but instead adorned it with plant foliage that dwarfed the speakers and audience, creating a vision of an abundant lifeworld that we are nestled within, but which we stand to lose – and are losing.
The governments of rich nations could learn a lot from the more humble perspectives of some indigenous groups and smaller nations, which offer a sense of being in the environment rather than a force upon it. Bolivia, for example, passed its own Law of the Rights of Mother Earth more than a decade ago, and the country’s delegation blasted COP26’s draft text, saying “This text assumes that nature is only in service of people’s needs, but nature has an intrinsic value. It is sacred. That must be reflected.” These moments are rare. COP26 seems to stifle any hint of the spiritual or emotional bonds that humans have with one another and with the non-human world, cloaked as it is in the maths and physics (and money) of it all. When emotions do surface, it is an exception that proves the rule.
And yet these feelings of care and grief can be powerful motivators of change. The philosopher Albert Camus once wrote that there “there is no love of life without despair of life”, and I wonder if the reverse is also true. COP26 is entrenched in a worldview which eschews despair and love in favour of an anthropocentric techno-optimism. As Ruth Miller, member of the Curyung tribe and climate justice director of the Alaska-based Native Movement says, “We’re here offering sustainable solutions to the rest of the world that require an ideological shift, not a green industry built on colonialism and repression.” That shift, from anthropocentrism to a politics of humility grounded in love and despair is unlikely to materialise in these final days of COP26, but there is hope that in the hearts and minds of millions of onlookers and the climate movements of recent years, it has already begun.
References
Ingold, T., 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Psychology Press.
Suggested further reading
Country B, Wright S, Suchet-Pearson S, et al. (2016) Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space. Progress in Human Geography. 40(4):455-475.
Saville, S. 2020. Towards humble geographies. Area; 53:97–105. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12664
Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go On a European World Tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society,2(1), 20-34.
Anna Pigott 