Action and Contemplation

Copenhagen, Denmark

December 11, 2009

Wednesday I spent the morning at Klimaforum.  It presents itself as “the people’s climate event,” and it is open for anyone to attend.

Klimaforum is to COP 15 as the Island of Misfit Toys is to Santa’s workshop.  Held in a sports center downtown, it is a collection of people who are here for COP 15 wandering around uncomfortably in a crowd of people they wouldn’t let into COP 15.  Everywhere you look there are yarmulkes, monk’s robes, headdresses, and burqas, attending lectures like “Indigenous Voices on Climate Change” and “Capitalism and the Climate Crisis: Radical Leftist Alternatives.”  It is an experience, certainly, just walking in the door.  But the people here are just as sincere and honest and vaguely frightened as those with UN badges.

My badge is on, but it continually disappears in my three-piece suit.  Only the UNFCCC lanyard shows, and my ensemble (the lanyard and the suit) causes people to frequently mistake me for an actual negotiator.  “Where is our deal?” they ask me.  They tell me all about their pet projects and panacean plans.  I listen attentively and patiently, not wanting to be rude and interrupt.  They plea with various degrees of passion in varying degrees of English, yet all of them want basically the same thing.  They want me to get things moving, they want me to get my nation to offer more ambitious reductions, they want me to understand the urgency of the situation.  But I’m just a nineteen year old kid dressed up for the big city.  How was I supposed to know that youth delegates here wear blue jeans and Converse?

Sometimes, I don’t even tell them, I just say I’ll bring it up with my delegation for discussion at next morning’s plenary.  That way they feel like the process still works.  It is dishonest, perhaps.  But I can’t stand to watch people’s faces fall when you explain to them that, not only do they have no real power, but they are so far away from the people who do that they actually cannot even recognize them as they walk down the hallway.  So I say that I respect what they have to say.  That’s true.  I say we will debate on the issue soon.  And that’s true.  And I say that our negotiators are working as hard as they can.  All I can do is hope that one’s true, too.  Then I shake their hands and bustle off as if I were on my way to some important meeting.  How do they not know?  How can they not tell?

At Klimaforum, I went to a presentation called  “Sacred Activism: mobilizing spiritual communities to fight climate change.”  On the panel of distinguished lecturers to address us that morning were representatives of every major world religion.  Each had ten minutes to speak.  Some said there is time to mobilize.  Some said we must be ready to deal with the crisis when it inevitably hits.  But the greatest speaker of the day by far was a frail and ancient Hindu holy man named Sant Balbir Singh Ji.  He spoke from a wheelchair with a stand to hold his microphone.  He was fasting until a just international agreement could be reached.  His face was gentle behind thick, black rimmed glasses and a grey-white moustache, framed by a perfectly bald head, an immensely fragile neck, and coarse orange robes.  His words came softly and slowly, rhythmically like the breathing of an immense ocean or the heartbeat of a mountain.  I wrote some of them down.  “Sacred activism,” he said, “is not loud.  Sacred activism does not include shouting slogans in the street.  Sacred activism does not involve confrontation, because confrontation leads to conflict, and conflict leads to the loss of all we fight for.  Sacred activism is like the martial arts.  One’s whole being must be silent and still.  And from that stillness, all proceeds.”  Stillness and quiet.  Contemplation.  “Contemplation is not the enemy of action.  Contemplation is action, and action is contemplation.”

It has been perhaps a week since I have sat in silent contemplation.  During that week, I have shouted slogans, I have instigated confrontations, I have filled my days completely.  And where has it gotten me?  Burned out, sitting in my hostel at 10:30 on a Friday night, writing, forcing myself into the contemplation which I have been fleeing.

Tonight I didn’t take the train straight back to bed.  I took a bus to Burger King and had my first bite of American food in more than a week.  And on the bus from the Bella center, an old Indian man came to sit next to me.  He looked a lot like Sant Balbir Singh Ji, and the two of them both looked like Mohandas Gandhi.  Same glasses, same moustache, but different people.  This man sitting next to me was a real power in COP15, one of India’s climate negotiators.  He and his colleagues sat unpresupposingly in the back of the bus to town hall.  “We don’t know what happened to the cars,” he told me quietly, so quietly I could barely hear him over the growl of the tires.  “This is an adventure.”

So we talked about Texas and we talked about India, we talked about University and we talked about Government.  But mostly we talked about the treaty.  He said it was going slowly.  But he said it was going.  I told him my hopes, told him my generation was counting on this, told him the urgency of the situation.  He sat quietly and nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  “We are doing as best we can.”

And he got off the bus in front of a nice hotel and I stayed on in quiet contemplation all the way to the restaurant.  Because I recognized the look he had given me in response to my concerns.  It was the look of a nineteen year old kid in a three piece suit, wondering how he got mistaken for someone with the power to make change.