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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
The creation of policy is often a function of consensus: general agreement accepted by all members of a group. We see it at all levels of political and social engagement. In large international bodies, such as the United Nations, consensus is a method to provide some things to all interests, all things dissolved into an acceptable compromise. Recently, at the COP 27 climate meeting, days of discussion and multiple versions of texts grew into an agreement that was to be made public as a serious progression toward climate action. But, after all that, at the last minute, the agreement was undermined by the fossil fuels lobbyists, some 150 of them working the corridors, whispering their own alternatives, compromising the consensus until it was meaningless. If you want to hear an expression of the resultant frustration, listen to the You-tube recording of former US Vice President and ardent climate activist, Al Gore, at Davos last month, where he finally seemed to have lost all patience with the operative process and called for future agreements to be based on a supermajority of delegates rather than on unanimous agreement. Characterized as an “unhinged, irrational rant,” by the predictable financial and conservative press, Gore clearly had reached the limit of his frustration as results of the failure of the COP 27 conversations, undermined by vested, contradictory interests. That COP 28 is to be presided over by Sultan as-Jaber, the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, seemed the final insult.
There is no question that consensus has served much policy progress, but as the general agreement is diluted and subverted and prolonged, its efficacy now seems in question. As with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Environmental, Societal, and Governance standards for investments and corporate behavior, and now, even COP, the international dialogue between the parties, thus compromised, the consensus plan for climate response across all fronts seems transformed into its antonyms: disagreement, dissension, opposition, and denial. One wonders if even a super-majority would be able to overcome such powerful regressive force and the status quo must inevitably prevail. That Al Gore became “unhinged” by that realization after two decades of advocacy may be well understood as another “existential cry for help.”
What to do? Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has described the inter-governmental process as “blah-blah-blah,” has opted for another way: during Davos she was arrested picketing a coal mine, an exemplary source of acid-emitting energy, located in nearby Germany. For her, and for many other climate advocates, direct action is the alternative. Too often, such statements are equally ignored and forgotten, dramatic and symbolic, yes, but lost in the changing news cycle.
Collective action presents an alternative: from the bottom-up, and from the inside-out. Is it naïve to suggest that collective values can overcome narrow interests? Is it possible to change from within through action in response to circumstance that finds meaning and impact individually and communally through social invention? If we look carefully, we can see around us everywhere the positive impact of quiet movements that coalesce around evident, shared needs, enabling strategies that become initiatives and proposals, grants and appropriations, ordinances and laws, that are derived from necessity, promoted as solutions, and contributing de facto as meaningful consensus-driven solutions to pertinent problems, direct answers to direct questions. This is, in fact, policy in action, executed from incipience to implementation, from collective idea to community reality, that benefits many, and radiates beyond, as transformative action for all.
It happens all the time. It’s happening now. Can it be seen as an evolved, truly democratic plan for a future of our own making? As RESCUE; R for renewal; E for environment; S for society; C for collaboration; U for understanding; and E for engagement.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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