How to feed an activists soul

Posted on 01. Oct, 2009 by annac in United Kingdom

You may have noticed I didn’t write a blog yesterday. Frankly, I was majorly depressed.

Sitting in these stuffy UN rooms, listening to people argue away your future, is not good for the soul.

I honestly had nothing to say! The UK and the EU had still not come out and said anything worth commenting on. We’d seen very little progress as a whole, and I couldn’t bring myself to yet again write another blog imploring our representatives here to do something, anything, to move this process on. I felt disempowered, downbeat and if the truth be known, pretty close to wanting just to throw the towel in on all of this.

Today my spirits are lifted.

Why?

Because I did something about it.

I remembered that at the heart of this I am not a negotiator.

I’m an activist.

So I took action.

This morning we woke up to pouring rain. But even that was not enough to put us off getting out of the conference centre. As the delegates arrived the international youth were there, waiting to greet them with a group of drummers from the Philippines. We all had beautiful new ‘forests for our future’ t-shirts, along with banners and chants, asking them to protect forests and indigenous peoples rights as a vital part of the text on deforestation.

Then after a quick break it was back out in the pouring rain, to join with over a hundred women from all over Asia. We marched through Bangkok to the conference centre, to highlight how important the links between gender and climate change are. I am in a priviliged position that sitting at home in the UK I don’t actually think about gender that much. Though undoubtedly there is still an unbalance between the genders I don’t feel at a disadvantage everyday. In fact in the field I work I’m generally surrounded by women! You may also be interested to know, that Jan is one of only about 15% of lead negotiators who are female!

But here in Thailand, coming together with women. who already. everyday, face a struggle to be treated equally. And who are now already being disproportionately effected by climate change (women are often the key providers of food, water and fuel in households, climate change can make all these tasks much harder) really made me think. It was an amazing privilige to march through the streets of Bangkok with them and take our message to the UN: climate justice and gender justice are inextricably linked!

After a long morning of chanting, marching and lots of dancing (some involving synchronised twirling of pink umbrellas!!!) my spirits were well and truly lifted. True we didn’t change the world today, we didn’t force our negotiators to completely rewrite the text, we didn’t see nations around the world come out and commit to drastic emission reductions.

But we made our voices heard.

Action feeds my soul in a way nothing else does.

The ability of these negotiations to drain all the life out of me really got me thinking though. I wonder how these negotiations make our delegations feel. After all I’ve said it before, but at heart, I feel, many of these negotiators really care about these issues. They want to get a deal that solves the crisis we are in, they do care about our future. So to sit in these negotiations pretty much 24/7 and get so little achieved…

I wonder how that affects them?

I wonder how much a little bit of action would lift their mood?

I’m not talking about coming out in the pouring rain with us (though I’m sure some of them would love that too!). I’m talking about action in the negotiations. If we were to see some positive action here, if someone was to come out and lead, to step it up and create some forward momentum, I imagine that would really lift their spirits. With lifted spirits we might see some drive.

Once that happened we might really see some progress.

Inertia are inaction are good for no ones soul.

Tags: Action, Climate Justice, GCCA, Gender justice, Tck Tck Tck, UNFCCC, Women's March