Why Anna? WHY? (or…Back to the UN. Part 1)

Posted on 05. Apr, 2010 by annac in United Kingdom

So here we are, back on adopt a negotiator!

In a few days I will head back to Bonn, back to another UN climate meeting and back to the tracker team. Bear with me, this blog may be a little longer than my usual. I guess with 4 months of time having passed there’s rather a lot to say!

A few weeks ago when the possibility of this trip happening came up I told a few of my friends. Lets just say their responses weren’t the most enthusiastic thing I’ve ever encountered…

My friends know me, they saw me last year, they experienced what the UN did to me, the way it made me feel. They just couldn’t understand why I would go back there. I re-read some of my blogs from Copenhagen the other day, if you were reading them too you may have an inkling of why they reacted like they did.

Copenhagen was hard, perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. Copenhagen took a toll on me only some will ever know, a toll I may only finally begin to realise with time

Copenhagen took a toll on the world we may only finally realise with time.

Coming out of Copenhagen with so little. Coming out of years of negotiations with an accord that bound no one to anything. Coming out of a year spent living a life with no stability, no time for anything else, no time for me or my family and friends. Coming out of all this with no deal, no fix for our screwed up world, was a little devastating to say the least. Devastating for me, devastating for many of the others who were following the process, but mostly devastating for our beautiful planet.

However, looking back, we did come out of Copenhagen with something.

I knew it at the time but I found it hard to put in to words. When I got back and people asked me about what had happened I often didn’t know what to say. But then Adam the UKYCC’s amazing filmmaker made this, and I realised he had managed to sum it up for me!

We came out of Copenhagen with a movement that I believe has the power change the world.

But without a doubt the movement was tired.

I was tired.

It has taken perhaps these last four months for me to truly get over it. To truly reconnect. At times I have felt like I’m doing nothing. Because I haven’t been running around the world, I haven’t been on my emails at 3 in the morning, I haven’t woken up everyday thinking, must write a blog today, and then gone to 10 meetings and had a million skype calls instead.

But I have done some things. I’ve found a stable full time job, I’ve moved into a flat, I’ve joined a choir, I’ve been to gigs, I’ve found time to reconnect with friends, I’ve spent rather a lot of time in the pub…

And you know 4 months later I’ve finally realised that that’s ok.

Because coming out of Copenhagen with so little gave us all the time to step back, take some time, and think…what now?

And over the last 4 months the movement has risen to this challenge, slowly and in small steps, but in my opinion thoughtfully and magnificently.

We have seen that huge meetings of world leaders are getting us nowhere, we have seen that we cannot expect others to do the work for us and we have seen that we do have the power to make a difference.10:10, 350′s get to work, and even UKYCC’s new team have all taken the emphasis off waiting for our politicians to change things and back onto us.

As a new decade starts we have taken it upon our selves to change the world.

And I have no doubt we will.

But we’re not going to change the world overnight, or even in a year (that’s why I keep refering to the decade!). Because to completely change the way we live our lives is a long-term task!

And it’s going to take courage.

To sustain this we need to be rested, calm and thoughtful. And we need to do it by doing the things that make us happy, by incorporating it with the things that make us feel alive. It is only by doing this that we will be able to sustain and grow over the length of time that it is going to take to do this.

So we will not just do it through politics and science. As the new decade starts all over the world people are coming together to change the world through doing what they love. Change the world through what it means to be alive, through music, dancing, art, sport, laughter, and so much more.

Therefore, as my friends reactions indicated, the question is why am I heading back to Bonn?

Why am I heading back to the place so devoid of these things, to the place where we leave our future in others hands, to the place I have described in the past as hurting my soul?

Put simply, because I can’t not! Because I believe in the need for big political change and to achieve this I believe the UN too needs to change the way they are doing things,

They need to remember why they are doing it. They need to remember what it means to be alive. They need to remember what stands to be gained and what could be lost by what they are putting in place. And they need to still be held to account for these things. The pressure of Copenhagen may be off but the negotiators at the UNFCCC still hold much of our future, and the future of our beautiful and amazing planet, in their hands.

Only in 2010 it is definitely not just in their hands

It’s in ours too.

So I will go back to Bonn to make sure that we can all take our future in our hands. To make sure we can all understand and have a say in decisions that will affect all our lives.

No decisions about us without us.

Because as a new decade starts our movement is ready to start making the changes we need to see. And amongst so many other things we will change the UN!

So on Wednesday I will head back to Bonn. But this time I will head there with music, with art and with laughter. I will head there calm and ready to change the world in my own way.

This world belongs to all of us.

We have a right to be at the UN as ourselves, fighting for our world and our future, in our own way.

We will show them what it truly means to change the world.

(P.S. in part 2 I promise to actually talk about the UNFCCC, what is happening in Bonn, why it’s important and what on earth has happened to the UK negotiating team…)

Tags: Bonn, climate change, Copnhagen, DECC, postcop15, UK, UNFCCC