The striking horse-sea-serpents that surround the base dripped with ice:
In Paris they like their parks immaculate:
I find this rather cheesy and evasive (the impacts are portrayed as a child’s nightmare), but it’s interesting to see how our world leaders see themselves. As reassurers of children?
Eran and I greeted the summit in different cities at the London and Paris demonstrations. I was only able to join the start of the London rally and march before catching the Eurostar home but the event looked vocal and well attended. About 50,000 people marched, making it the biggest climate protest in the UK so far, but the number is still short of a mass movement. Seeing everyone dressed in blue gave a sense of togetherness and lifted the gathering out of the ordinary. Thank you to Emma and others reading this who marched – it’s a beautiful thing to act at this moment. My walk back to King’s Cross took me down Oxford Street, which was closed to traffic I presume for the march route. The street was utterly packed with Christmas shoppers and outside Selfridges machines puffed polystyrene ‘snow’ over passers by. The pure strangeness of walking from a crowd of climate change protesters into hoards of consumers and being greeted by fake snow almost makes me forget how sad this is. Earlier that day in Hyde Park I watched a small boy very seriously reading his handmade sign, ‘No more toys from China’. Presumably he wrote the words but his face did not show it at that moment.
In Paris the demonstration was more modest. About a thousand met for a flash mob, clattering saucepans and other noisy objects; you can see a few in Eran’s photo. Parisians were also encouraged to wear colours, but given the choice of orange, white and black, guess what most of the crowd chose...
In the run up to Copenhagen the Guardian has published this comparison of different nations’ contributions to climate change from which I’ve learnt that the per capita carbon emissions in the UK are 9.3 tonnes compared with 6.4 tonnes in France. The main reason for this difference is that France gets 80% of its energy from nuclear power, though possibly local food habits and the popularity of holidays inside the ‘Hexagon’ help marginally. The figure is heartening to me because there’s no significant difference in quality of life between the two countries. Neither lack for luxury. Francophiles and Anglophiles could argue this both ways but really the differences are trivial (the French do have very excellent bread and fresh vegetables, but personally I find this hard to weigh against the watery tea and lack of good cheddar). The statistics show that it would be possible to cut UK emissions by a third without any pain or loss at all by shifting energy generation away from fossil fuels.*
As well as useful information these national figures offer dubious entertainment – it’s very tempting to search out the bad guys. Most obviously, the USA’s 19.9 tonnes per capita annual emissions are quite shocking. But even the USA could point to worse culprits: they’re drinking oil in Bahrain (41 tonnes), Qatar (70.6 tonnes) and UAE (38.5 tonnes), and who can say what’s going on in the Virgin Islands (150 tonnes). Some of the discrepancies are caused by population size so it’s useful – and chilling – to remember that British has the 8th highest total carbon emissions of all countries (France is 16th).
The figures aren’t helpful if they're a temptation to evade individual responsibility by pointing to other nations or thinking in relative rather than absolute terms about emissions. We know that the earth can sustain no more than 1 tonne of annual carbon emissions from each of us.** But national statistics are helpful in giving some indication of whether a nation’s actions match their words during the rhetoric storm we can expect from Copenhagen.***
* Many environmentalists would argue that the French merely displace the problem since nuclear power creates its own dangerous pollution. There’s a very useful assessment of the UK energy situation in Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air.
** George Marshall’s Carbon Detox is still my favourite guide to reaching this target.
*** If you’re in the UK, don’t forget the march in London on Saturday December 5th, from 12 noon to call for strong action against climate change at the UN meeting. (I have to be in the UK that week so will be there. Please do get in touch if you’d like to join me; I will have my British mobile.)
Living in a foreign country gets me thinking about words. A few days ago I saw Marilyn Robinson’s novel Home in a bookshop, translated as Chez Nous. In French it’s customary to use this phrase, ‘at ours’ or ‘at x’s’, to mean home. You can also use the word for house, la maison, but there isn’t an exact translation for ‘home’. Hebrew also doesn’t have a word for ‘home’ in the English sense. You just use the word for ‘house’/‘building’. Robinson’s heart-breaking and perfectly written novel conveys some of the emotions, beliefs and memories with which we layer the word ‘home’. For me ‘our place’ has none of those (though perhaps it might for a native French speaker). I’m willing to call our current flat ‘ours’, but it isn’t ‘home’.
The word ‘ecology’ has its root in the Greek word for ‘home’, oikos. This means we could translate ‘ecology’ as something like home-saying, or maybe home-knowing. I love this word. It’s slightly painful to see oikos also co-opted into ‘economy’, but that’s another matter. Eco-critics and greens in general often object to the word ‘environment’ because it means something that surrounds us and prefer ‘ecology’ for suggesting connection and shared being between ourselves and the natural world. I find it tempting to describe myself as an ‘ecologist’ rather than an ‘environmentalist’ for this reason, but to do so might be a bit pretentious and deceptive, as though I were pretending to be a scientist. Here in France there’s no problem: all greens are called écologistes.
So here’s a thought from French post-modernist Jean-François Lyotard, who argues that ecology is ‘not an environment at all, but a relation with something that is inscribed at the origin in all minds… ‘ecology’ means the discourse of the secluded, of the thing that has not become public, that has not become communicational, that has not become systematic, and that can never become any of these things. This presupposes that there is a relation of language with the logos, which is not centred on optimal performance and which is not obsessed by it, but which is preoccupied, in the full sense of ‘pre-occupied’, with listening to and seeking for what is secluded, oikeion. This discourse is called ‘literature’, ‘art’, or ‘writing’ in general.’
