Wednesday 10 November 2021

Taking care of our things

One of my childhood friends was known for supreme diligence when attending to his belongings. It provided a basis for our bullying and teasing. He became something of a loner in later life. After all, which child puts away his toys after play? Who puts sweetie wrappers in the bin?

As a teen, he wore only crisp, clean clothing and was mercilessly jeered when one day he was witnessed ironing his underwear. By contrast, the rest of us wore unwashed jeans for months and months, until they stank and could basically stand on their own.

“Take care of your things, like David (not his real name),” my mother would tell the five of us.

For some strange reason, this childhood memory returned to me while I was being driven around the perimeter of the UWI Campus in St Augustine two weekends ago.

These days, I would typically be zooming past the area bemasked, dodging potholes, pedestrians, and distracted drivers. But on this day, en route to Macoya Market (where an ugly patch job at the entrance is not good enough), I was being driven by my wife. So, I had time to look around. It broke my heart to witness the condition of the campus buildings.

There were rusty, old galvanise sheets on one of the older buildings and moss and grime on the walls of the newer ones. Yes, the fields were mown, and the internal roadways seemed to be in relatively good shape. But the buildings appeared to have been neglected in their pandemic emptiness.

It occurred to me, during this outing, that the wider human condition in this COVID-19 era presents the requirement of taking better care of our things. My wife used the engineering term “built environment” when I stumbled with the distinction between all the “things” that needed care at this time.

If the pandemic has established one important life lesson, it is that the compartments we usually construct for human, natural and ‘built’ environments are a misguided illusion. Environmental scientists, for example, look critically at the dynamics at play when built infrastructure interacts with nature, and generate consequential impacts on the wellbeing of human populations. This is in fact the climate change story.

There is a concern, for instance, about the impact of built spaces on biological diversity and its implications for human wellness, both physical and mental. Leave a pothole long enough in the middle of the road and witness its impact on the quality of driving and other citizen behaviour.

In Aranguez, the taxi drivers are buying cement and fixing the potholes themselves. This brings more value to community life than the preservation of shocks and suspension systems. But it does not take the ministry of works off the hook. Its atrocious lethargy and neglect, in tandem with local government inaction and the recklessness of WASA, are among the more significant slurs on our humanity.

It should also bother us greatly that some communities are burning tyres on the road. This is not easily dismissible as mere partisan activism. Nobody really earns any points.

The wider metaphor of negligence is also encapsulated in the pandemic response. That political gain could have been envisaged in the promotion of COVID-denial, subversion of pandemic measures and now, vaccine hesitancy signals a willingness to engage in acts of reckless vandalism in the absence of a duty of care.

The reality is that we generally do not have the best record when it comes to taking care of our things. It’s expressed in our attitude toward “maintenance” of the built environment, but also in our predisposition when it comes to nature and to people.

For example, last week’s assault on pets and wild animals, the ill, and the elderly painted a worst-case scenario. It’s now a huge farce to hear of “zero tolerance” on the unlawful and reckless use of fireworks and “scratch-bombs.”

Here I have been decrying the defence of “tradition” and calling for a wholesale ban on everything from bamboo-busting to the use of “scratch-bombs” to the deployment of unregulated fireworks. All of these things – from care for our built environment to respect for other humans – are interrelated.

Today, we are faced with a pandemic which requires we proceed with care and caution. I am not seeing us, as a collective, doing very well on this score. True, the climate change conversation finds the world short on thoughtfulness. But we, in T&T, are simply not taking care of our things, including ourselves.

 

Wednesday 3 November 2021

The climate survival game

If both the climate crisis and the pandemic have taught us one thing it is that we are mistaken if we believe, as Barbados PM Mia Mottley put it, that “national solutions can solve global problems.”

In other words, the best advice is to avoid self-delusion, after having conceded that there indeed exists an existential threat to our survival as a sovereign small island state. We cannot do this alone. A long view of history would speak of the decimation, through a variety of different circumstances, of grand empires occupying infinitely larger geographical spaces than ours.

Unfortunately, there are those who walk among us who don’t share such a belief. They emerge from the swamp of ignorance from time to time. This pandemic period is one example. But climate change scepticism is of more durable vintage and at the core is a lack of belief in science.

I have seen, for instance, social media challenges to the value of a T&T presence in Glasgow alongside key AOSIS and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) allies on the grounds of some kind of retreat from domestic reality.

Such doubt also exists in the pregnant silence of opinion-leaders fresh from campaigns of COVID denial, resistance to pandemic measures and tacit promotion of vaccine hesitancy. To them, climate change scepticism is not that remote a concept.

We would also do well to recognise unequal international status, whatever our grandiose self-assessment. The fact is, at the root of much of the discussions and negotiations in Glasgow today, are the disproportionate levels of victimisation involving the wealthy and powerful, as opposed to the small and the under-resourced.

These important differentials lie at the heart of some important but highly problematic instruments designed by the global community to mitigate further damage and deterioration in areas such as the Caribbean.

For example, access to climate financing is now linked, since the Paris Agreement of 2015, to nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to fighting climate change. Following a programme of serious work, an indicative version of this has been prepared by T&T and others for the current conference.

The G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rome ahead of Monday’s COP26 inaugural session however side-stepped key issues including a clear deadline for net zero carbon emissions, and basically agreed (having previously failed to do so) to raise US$100 billion to help fund mitigation efforts in countries such as ours. PM Mottley thinks this is far less than what is required or even possible.

The problem is continued delays in prompt action belie the fact that the processes of nature set in train, now undeniably through human activity, are already considered to be irreversible. The urgent goal of capping the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5% over current levels in order to “stay alive” is an increasingly unreachable target.

The existence of an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) however indicates acceptance of the fact that we cannot do this on our own, and that there are fellow travellers in whom there exist key commonalities.

As co-author of a Caribbean journalism handbook on “the climate crisis”, I have also been warned of the “alarmist” impact of employment of the word “crisis.” Well, dear friends, if climate change does not constitute an unfolding crisis for countries that are small, surrounded by the ocean, and still engaged in finding feet of their own in the development process, then what is?

T&T/Jamaica scientist Dr Rebekah Shirley has offered a menu of subjects for consideration by the AOSIS community. On the front burner, she proposes, ought to be political efforts to prioritise negotiations on adaptation, loss, and damage; commitments for blended forms of adaptation finance; and consensus on a carbon market mechanism.

Countries such as ours also have a vested interest in moving the developed world from elaborately expressed commitment to action. However, there were mixed reviews out of Rome regarding the prospects for realisation of such goals. This made the working sessions in Glasgow far more worthy of attention than the impressive speeches.

My friend and ACM science advisor, Steve Maximay, often advises against deployment of the “we go dead” approach. But the science may well conclude that as small island states faltering in our aspirations for true sovereignty, extinction is actually not a figuratively remote scenario.

Art's higher purpose - our several conversations

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