COP21: the View From Totnes
By rob hopkins 5th December 2015
A guest blog from Naresh Giangrande: I am not in Paris. I have been following events there in the mainstream and alt media and via Transition Network’s coverage, and our own internal Silent Skype feed. Over here, in the UK, it feels like madness to be negotiating the most important treaty in history amid planning for a new war. George Monbiot wrote a good article in the Guardian noticing the incongruence of the Tory government’s haste in war planning alongside their tepid engagement with COP21. I would say its even more. It’s distracting on a national scale. It is like we are staging the Hunger Games.
The COP process is being comprehensively shredded in some parts of the alternative media. And blandly reported (page 7, 2 paragraphs in The Metro) or ignored in others in favour of …. war. Who made a good speech in the House of Commons, (breathless excitement, intrigue!)?
I feel the COP21 process, amidst my own doing and work. I feel a strange and hard to identify anxiety. When i became aware of this anxiety I took the time to feel into it. This is what emerged:
Are we as a collective humanity prepared to come to an agreement that gives us a fighting chance of maintaining a functioning planet? And with this question, intense sadness and pain.
Knowing that it’s now or never, four years hence will be too late, if it isn’t already. More sadness and grief.
Knowing that whatever happens in Paris will determine the actions I take and how I will live during the rest of my life and will severely impact my children’s lives and successive generations. I can’t begin to engage with this one.
That this process is happening over there (would it feel better to be there and doing something??) and nothing much I can do here will make much of a difference at this point. A feeling of letting go and acceptance.
Those are some of the things I am feeling and aware of if I stop and listen.
I wonder whether those in Paris are taking the time, with all the meetings and events and excitement, to feel? I am wondering what it feels like being there beyond the excitement?