My COP (Day) Out

Me at the start of the protest in Kelvingrove Park, in my Greenpeace T-shirt my Mam bought me

Tipping Point

They did it. They finally did it. After all our waiting, and campaigning, and civil disobedience; after all the warnings from climate scientists all round the world, after all the floods, and the fires, and the ceaseless agitation of extremity… Our world leaders finally got together and did it.

They sold the world.

And I was there. Among the hundred thousand horde chanting and dancing; I was there in the city of the COP adding my voice to a mass of maddened activists demanding a change.

I was not there for the actual signing of the deal; but then, none of us were invited to that.

None of us were invited to the deal that still has us on track for 2.4 degrees of warming (and that’s if leaders keep to their commitments, which, historically, they have never done). This deal is essentially a death sentence for hundreds of millions of people. That’s what the science says, and in fact, if major tipping points like the Gulf stream are suddenly flipped, if key species go extinct, if entire densely populated countries become uninhabitable, if climate disruption leads to nuclear war, if another virus deadlier than covid is unleashed by our abuse of nature… the death toll could be in the billions over the next century.

None of us were there to agree to that.

We were outside instead, with samba drums, with flags, with placards, with whistles and pots and pans and hope, disagreeing with that as loudly as we possibly could.

And yet.

Driving for Change

It was an early start. Up at five in the morning to get ready by six, so I could be down to the station for seven. I’d not been able to sleep the night before, too excited anticipating the long and tiring day ahead (funny how sleep works, isn’t it?) - I still managed to make it to the bus on time, though.

Some of us getting ready for the bus

After meeting a few of my fellow activists, helping tape up some last-minute (but rather impressive) placards, discussing some of our favourite dystopian climate fiction (naturally), and waiting around conspicuously to see if the LBC news reporter would approach me for an interview (which proved optimistic I’m afraid), we all got into the coach to Glasgow.

Here we go!

A bus filled exclusively with activists, all mostly strangers to one another, has a funny atmosphere. Talk at a reasonable volume to the person beside you about anything remotely political, and you’ll soon see heads swivel from the seats in front, or be tapped from behind, and be offered an anecdote about how “the protests for that [insert political topic] were mental - six of us got arrested by the same police officer on the same horse”; or at the very least I’d be talking to my Mam, who made the trip with me, and would find people nodding in agreement with something I was saying. I even started doing this myself - when I spotted that the man on the row next to me was reading a book by Naomi Klein, I started a conversation with him about her writing. By the end of the journey, I had been offered about three different socialist newspapers, asked to join two different groups, and interviewed for someone’s dissertation project.

It makes sense that activists are like this.

Particularly climate activists - most are socialists, whose philosophy is based around the public sphere, around mutual spaces, sharing. The coach felt like a platform to exchange ideas, experiences, literature, and laughter. It was the alternative to the exploitative system we were all travelling to protest - the system based on the lie that humans are ‘selfish’ by nature. Activists, I think, disprove that notion by their very existence.

The Men Who Sold the World

“Nature provides all the food we eat, all the water we drink, and the oxygen we breathe. It gives us life. It is beautiful, but it is also fragile. I was reminded of this in July, when I went into space…”

I think this quote from Jeff Bezos, world’s richest man and former CEO of Amazon, summarises perfectly the inevitable hopelessness of COP26.

Given the monopolistic structure of Amazon, its attempts to sell every conceivable item in the world everywhere in the world, one is inclined to view Bezos’ opening sentence as one of pure envy. No matter how much of the planet his company packaged in smiley cardboard boxes, he still always had to answer to Nature, the ultimate provider.

If he could have his way, Bezos’ opening would have read: “Amazon provides all the food we eat, all the water we drink, and the oxygen we breathe. It gives us life.”

Jeff Bezos; billionaire, astronaut, planet-wrecker and speaker at COP26

Why was this man invited to speak at an international climate conference? This man, whose company was in the top 150 or 200 emitters in the world in 2018, who funded 68 members of Congress in that same year that voted against climate legislation 100% of the time - why was he chosen to speak?

Bezos doesn’t seem quite as out of place when you consider the other speakers invited. Representatives of Saudi Aramco, Shell, BP, China National Petroleum and ExxonMobil (all major oil companies who have largely caused the climate crisis and destroyed public debate and perception of it) were also allowed major influences on the proceedings.

The president of COP26, Alok Sharma, gave a speech to a room full of these rich people, during which he brought up Swampy. Swampy was an environmental activist famous for spending an entire week in self-built underground tunnels to block the construction of a new extension of the A30 road. He symbolised the power of individual activists who were determined enough to disrupt destructive developments, and is essentially the exact ideological opposite of any status-quo upholding businessman who cares about profits over the planet.

Swampy in his underground tunnel

And yet, Sharma had the nerve to claim that this room of bankers, fossil fuel financers, Amazon rainforest destroyers and venture capitalists, contained the new “Swampys of the world.”

But Swampy was, literally, ‘down to Earth’. Down inside the planet that Jeff Bezos claims only to have truly appreciated when he left it. Very few images represent the other-worldliness of the super-wealthy than their recent habit of touring the outer atmosphere, a privilege only reserved for them and their arbitrarily selected friends.

We all must live on this Earth, and nobody, however rich, can replace the resources of our great provider. The rich, heads high on the fumes of their own exploitative elevation, are determined to escape; but we who respect this ground will stay on this ground to fight for it.

Bogged Down

As if to forecast the dismal outcome of our efforts, when we arrived in Glasgow, Nature greeted us with rain.

More than used to this, we produced ponchos and raincoats and made our way to Kelvingrove Park, where thousands of people were already gathered, cheery under Extinction Rebellion umbrellas and pre-prepared gazebos.

It got rather rainy

My Mam and I didn’t get to interact with many of the tents and the individual groups. We had a whole hour, but most of that was spent queuing for the toilet. Given the sheer volume of people all gathered in the same spot, the park’s small toilet building proved difficult to access.

The main cause of the problem was the man in a high-vis jacket, guarding the men’s. It stood queueless, while the women’s queue wormed round beyond the entire concrete square the toilets were built in. Many women approached him from the winding, shuffling women’s queue, with appeals like “I’ve got to meet my group before the march starts” and the like, but he was having none of it.

The problem got worse, the queue got bigger, and time was running out. We thought we might end up missing the start of the march and have to run to catch up. Still, the guard upheld his gender binary separation, defiant in the face of mounting exasperation.

I don’t know what got to him in the end. Whatever it was, something tipped the toilet guardian over the edge, and he decided to just let whoever go wherever.

Almost immediately, the queue disappeared.

The reason I took you through that tour of the toilet situation in Kelvingrove Park is because there’s a metaphor in there somewhere about the arbitrariness of the status quo, and the possibility that, if those who put themselves in positions of authority are pressured enough, seemingly insurmountable problems can be solved, even at the last minute.

Toilet trip having proved more successful than the conference itself, we finally made our way into position in the group.

Since we were there at the last minute, we didn’t have too much time to choose a position. We ended up directly in front of a group called the YCL (or Young Communist League) - a militant-looking box formation of angry youth, chanting ‘I wanna be in that number, oh when the reds come marching in’. They sported matching red masks and waved red flags - but the real red flag was the four lines of police kettling them in.

Police and young communists, directly behind us

We pushed further into the group of Extinction Rebellion protesters in front of us, and were immediately thankful for that decision, as several more lines of police filed in to suppress the YCL.

Even more police for the YCL

For about forty minutes, we stood around in that state. Every now and again, the XR samba band would start banging a rhythm, but basically we just… waited. Sometimes, the whole group would start moving, and the air would fill with whoops and cheers and chants - and then we’d stop again, and stand still for quarter of an hour. It was tedious and anxiety-inducing.

Waiting around to start the march

There’s another metaphor there about the current pace of governmental climate action.

Whose Streets?

Once the protest actually got going, the atmosphere improved considerably.

Well, the emotional atmosphere anyway.

We marched and danced, cheered along the whole way by students leaning out of their bedroom windows, groups of protesters with their signs held high, and were even followed on our journey by a helicopter. Whether the chopper was media or police was hard to determine.

Spot the copter

Very few situations approach the feeling of interconnectedness that protests create. It’s not just that you are marching physically along the same route as a mass of other people (in this case 100,000 other people), chanting songs in sync with everyone around you, dancing to the same music as them; all of these things happen at music concerts and hikes.

Marching through the streets

At a protest, you’re not just walking towards the same final destination in reality (like a park or a monument). You’re walking symbolically, a collective unit of tens of thousands from all over the globe, to the same future. You are connected to the dreams, to the hearts and minds, of a mass of total strangers, all of you subsumed into one shared goal. Protesting is the best way to understand the potential power of a single idea, and to understand yourself as one integral part in a vast and varied human universe.

The point of the march where I could look back and see the most people; one hundred thousand were there altogether

We walked for a few hours, and then soon, too soon, we arrived at the physical end point of our journey. The coach was leaving Glasgow at 4:30pm, so we had to miss the rally of speakers and bundle in, exhausted. We didn’t mind the fact that we were missing the speakers: we had come to do our bit, and, contribution made, were ready to fall asleep on the coach on the way home.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

What does it mean to come home from a climate protest?

The question has been pestering me ceaselessly since I returned from my single day out at COP26.

Because how can we really return from our confrontation with the climate crisis? Is there a place we can go that isn’t yet affected? The science I’ve read says absolutely not; our entire planet has been unmistakably altered by the human species. There’s not a strip of land, not a particle in the air, not a square meter of the sea, that exists outside of a (mostly toxic) relationship with us humans. We live in the Anthropocene: a geological epoch defined by human activity.

There’s no escaping this. There’s no “coming home”. As I talked about in a previous blog, my mental health will always be impacted by my awareness of the planet’s slow murder - there is no “coming home” from that. That follows me, that is me; I cannot escape my own awareness.

I confront the climate crisis every day, because I live on this planet. Everybody else living here also confronts the climate crisis, because it is the state of the entire environment we call home. Not even the billionaires can escape for long. Jeff Bezos had to come back after his little space excursion.

My heart is in Glasgow, and my mind is in Tuvalu, which sinks further underwater every day. My home is on fire, and I am trapped here by leaders no more justified than the man guarding the gents’ at the park.

If we want to get out of this burning house, these leaders need to be challenged, to ultimately be disregarded. They are getting us all killed.

Protest is the extinguisher for the fire in our house.

We have a moral obligation, a right, and a desperate, survival-based need, to use it.

I fell asleep for maybe an hour on that coach on the way home, but I was dreaming for the whole day. I am still dreaming; there is a world of pure imagination in which all of us extinguish the flames, and I know so deeply that it is possible to strive towards this dream, for us to get close to it, that I cannot give it up. I know we can achieve this because I have met and marched with those sleepwalkers all guided by the same vision.

And after listening to a week of talks from our ‘world leaders’ in Glasgow, I know the true power of dreams. The leaders have their own: it is a dream that the world is actually fine, that neoliberalism won’t kill everyone, that they can continue dumping public properties into the private sphere and expecting their state to remain above water. They are sleepwalking towards a cliff edge, and dragging the rest of us along.

I know, of the two kinds of dreamers, which type I’d rather be.

Good COP Bad COP

I titled this blog ‘My COP (Day) Out’ because I wanted to say that’s what it feels like. It felt like a day out, and that feels like a cop-out.

What did I really do that day? I didn’t make headlines. I didn’t make a speech. I didn’t get arrested. I walked along an allocated street, with a group of a hundred thousand other people who wouldn’t have noticed my absence, as part of a march that was escorted along by the police. Is this enough?

What we need is radical, immediate change. Can we achieve that merely through big protest events like that one? Shouldn’t I, given the fierce urgency of now, be doing more?

The answer is yes. I should be. This is an emergency, and no emergency response team can afford to half-arse their rescue operation. It’s the biggest emergency our species has ever faced, and will lead to more suffering than has potentially ever occurred in the history of the entire universe. Given these stakes, I should always be doing more than I am. All of us need to do more. We’re still on course to planetary suicide. We are not doing enough.

We need to get arrested. We need to be seen and heard by the most powerful people in the world, inescapably and all the time. We need to build communities, spread the message, support others in need. We need to listen, and learn, we need to do all of this, and we need to do it with the greatest effort we can manage.

We need to win, because losing is the end.

But as much as I know this effort is what is needed, I know it is an ideal I cannot (and nobody can) live up to. We can never do enough.

All we can do is try.

I don’t really think my COP ‘day out’ was a cop-out. It would’ve been if that was the limit of my climate action. If I’d come home and thought of home as somehow separate from the issues I’d just protested. If I’d come home and thought ‘now I can rest. I’ve done my bit’; then it would’ve been a cop-out.

That’s not what happened, though, and I know it’s not what happened for my fellow activists. Already, there have been protests about the failure of COP26. We will keep going with this fight, and we will win major victories, and we likely will not stop for the rest of our lives.

I urge you to join us. Do what you can, and then do more.

We can’t rely on our leaders to do it for us.