A tap-dancing penguin. Or so I discovered today.
If you haven’t already read, the UN is making strict cuts to entrants permitted from Tuesday until Friday – our NGO received only four secondary entry passes for these days. As there are seven of us from Rice, we’ve scheduled to attend the days that interest us most while taking others off to explore events in the city. I stayed away from the Bella Center today and hit the streets, hoping for a more pedestrian perspective on climate activism.
Klimaforum 09 describes itself as the global civil society counterpart to the official UN conference at the Bella Center. It provides everyone – regardless of credentials, government or NGO affiliation – access to important discussions concerning the global challenges presented by climate change. Held in a conference center behind the central train station of Copenhagen, Klimaforum draws an audience of mostly self-starting activists and “crunchy-granola” types from around the world, painting a much different picture than the ocean of designer-suit-clad attendees of the official negotiations.
Roque and I attended a Klimaforum talk called “REDD in Context: Brazil” given by three Brazilian NGO leaders involved with deforestation on the ground in South America. One of my favorite quotes was that REDD is flawed in that it “separates trees from social reality…trees are more than carbon, they are water, they are ecosystems…forests are life for the people that live in them and from them.” Another panelist warned against the “mercantilization of common goods” like forests. The three Brazilians were fairly anti-REDD, primarily citing issues with land titling, processes that would allow natural forests to be replaced with damaging monoculture plantations, that individual communities would not benefit, and that the offset market provides too much room for corruption and clever accounting.
The talk was suddenly interrupted by a herd of faux-fur women with painted faces. The man next to me asks if the COP15 hosts such spectacles, to which I laughingly reply “unfortunately, no.” The group of women, members of a feminist-environmental-activist South American performance group, commenced with a spectacle reminiscent of tribal dance, complete with anti-capitalist chants en español. “EMISSIONS DOWN! WOMEN’S RIGHTS UP!” They yelled. “THERE IS NO CLIMATE JUSTICE WITHOUT GENDER AND SOCIAL JUSTICE!”
One cannot walk into or out of the Bella Center without recalling that Climate Change has been, currently is, and will always be an activist issue. Huge networks have formed under various banners – 350, Climate Justice Action, Greenpeace – hoping to democratize the discussions taking place behind closed doors and to fight against “false solutions.” The artist-activist group called SevenMeters crafted grotesque sculptures of a ghastly skeletal being outside the Bella Center to represent the climate refugees of the world. Mounted at seven meters above the sculptures, blinking red lights represent the rise in sea-level if all the ice in Greenland melts. As I watched a girl dressed up as a penguin tap-dance inside the Klimaforum today in metaphorical enviro-lament, I couldn’t help but ask myself – to what end? What are these protests, sculptures, performances, and rallies contributing to Copenhagen except an increased demand for police force?
Don’t get me wrong, I am an activist. I think it is important to mobilize the public to be informed, politically involved, and passionate about crucial issues, and for them to pressure leaders to take substantive action when it is needed – like in Copenhagen. 350.org, behind Bill McKibben, has picked up quite a bit of steam within the negotiations, but I can’t help remain cynical. The critical disconnect between the dialogues on the street and the dialogues between delegations remains: urgent solidarity starkly juxtaposing apathetic self-interest. As the week progresses, I hope to gain a greater understanding of the connections, or potentially collaboration, between the actors outside and those inside the Bella Center. If the huge demonstration planned for tomorrow comes to fruition, perhaps I’ll get my answer.
My day ends in a half-Spanish, half-English philosophical conversation with a Cuban man selling Italian commedia del’arte masks at the market in Christiania – the pseudo-commune where over 200 climate activist arrests took place last night. Needless to say, today is calm, except our increasingly heated discussion of nuclear power, the unquestioned paradigm of overconsumption, and the natural short-sightedness of human decision-making. I realize that regardless of what the parties decide this week, these types of conversations will continue, penguins will keep tap-dancing, and the sit-ins will not stand. My generation did not experience the activism of Vietnam, but we did have the Battle of Seattle. Perhaps, as Naomi Klein says, Copenhagen will present an opportunity for political activists of my generation to mature their tactics, their message, and their results.