At COP29 - the world climate conference
There is always hope. Why I went to COP29 with a whale....by Eden Arts Director Adrian.
I was so privileged to be invited to Baku with the WHALE project that we brought to Whitehaven and Redcar. The WHALE by the Belgian Captain Boomer Collective is a project that has been seen around the world, it challenges, it asks questions, ultimately it is as simple as placing a massive object in a place and saying what does this mean?
It has brought international acclaim and brought great artists together, in the UK it has appeared at GDIF and worked with Lemn Sissay as well as our own delivery in the north.
We have become great friends and collaborators with Captain Boomer, united in a belief that cultural provocations have a role to play, we don't provide answers, we ask questions. The WHALE serves as a big question mark. What does it mean? is it real? why is it here? is it an environmental project? is it art? if so, what does that add up to? The answer is all of those things. The WHALE is a cultural gathering point. It asks us to question everything.
This year we went to COP29 - invited by the FINS Initiative. We were on the biggest global stage.
My five takeaways from an extraordinary and life changing visit to COP29
Internationalism and collective working is our future
I was there from a small part of the UK, I live in Carlisle. When you come from a relatively small place you can feel disconnected from the big world and big notions such as climate change; we really shouldn't. Carlisle is just as much part of a bigger world as anywhere. Carlisle is just as much affected by something like climate change as anywhere. Climate change is about world management, the price of food, liveability, quality of life, all the things that matter to us.
We have a right to our voice and people want to hear us. I was part of an international group working in Baku, and in turn we engaged with people from all over the world with our work. Yet there I am, from Carlisle, where I might think I am detached and my voice doesn’t matter or I am too small. No-one made me feel that way at COP29, quite the opposite.
I met with people and talked to people from all over the world, we shook hands and looked each other in the eye and shared ideas, frustrations, joys and disappointments, everyone had a common desire to work together and rise above cynicism, to make our world a better place. This was an incredible joy to be around - as well as a frustration. The solution to it all is collective working and understanding.
There are big powers and we have big power
It is extraordinary to be in a place where governments are meeting and speaking, where major international business is attending and holding seminars and holding court. The realisation is that whatever their agenda is that they need us – otherwise what are all these seminars and displays about? Governments and major trade needs us as consumers of their ideas and products, and as consumers of both we have tremendous power that they will respond to, even if that is 'only' to achieve political popularity or to sell more goods.
We make what we think are micro decisions in our lives, and these seemingly small decisions add up to a big influence on both government and trade.
If you buy green or carbon reduction they shift their plans to producing green because they need us, we are not as powerless as we might think we are. They already know that they must do this (that is what they are at COP29 for), we must back them and encourage them. We have more power as consumers than we might think we do.
Culture has a big role to play
The project that I was involved in brought a steady stream of visitors that added up to many thousands, we were in the news and were the talk of the town (when I arrived my taxi driver didn’t want payment when he heard what I was doing there). We were told by serious players that we were having an impact, that we were being talked about in the conference, in the coffee rooms, in the corridors, in the lobbies.
We had visits from power players and representatives, MPs and negotiators from all over the world; and equally the ordinary people of Azerbaijan and international visitors came to see us, to see what we were doing, to engage with us in conversation about our work.
We didn’t need to shout at anyone. They came to us and we were part of the conversation of how we save our planet, and we did this through being creative, asking questions, not lecturing.
Art and culture is very powerful because we are visible and speak in ways that people can see and understand, and we ask questions. We create debate.
There is always hope
Stuck on the line between half full and half empty is one where we all can easily end up with big things like climate change or what the council or government are doing or whatever. It is such an incredibly difficult thing for us to think about and we can feel helpless - and if we are not careful that can lead to hopelessness – what can I do, I can do nothing?
But there is always hope, there has to be.
Our human species is extraordinary, and, as most of us know, when we put our minds to it we can achieve amazing things. Never give up hope; hopeless people don’t change things, they just accept their fate.
The fate of human life on the planet is the game (the planet will exist without us). Hope will spur us on to make those micro decisions and demands upon our governments and the corporate powers that they will hear and respond to.
Whales are part of the solution
What??!!
Whales nurture carbon sequestering phytoplankton that capture more carbon than all of the world’s forests that we rightly are concerned about. Phytoplankton are small organisms that produce oxygen and ‘eat’ (sequester) carbon in the oceans that cover 70% of the planet.
Whale poop sustains the phytoplankton blooms. More whales = more phytoplankton.
Literally, while we wonder about how to reduce our high levels of carbon one of the answers is to make the oceans more sustainable for the whales.
The great whale population (ie the big ones, but also the small ones) is decimated by our old ways where our forebears thought that they were a crop that would be endless and hunted them to extinction.
Blue Whales are the largest beasts on our planet and their numbers are down from 3m to just 10000. We have literally reduced the numbers of one of our key saviours to an extinction level while we are trying to think of clever new ways to deal with carbon reduction.
We can stop this by cleaning their place (getting rid of dead nets etc that they get caught in), protecting their breeding grounds, and developing systems and rules that suppress whale strikes where ships kill them accidentally (eg slow shipping lanes in whale dense areas - there are already speed limits in some shipping lanes, tech that spot them so the ships can avoid them etc).
Don’t take it from me, take it from the international monetary fund – whale protection is vital to our future. And who doesn’t like a whale?
I went to COP29 to learn and to give. The experience was extraordinary. We are all part of this world. There are no small places. We can do great things together. The world needs us to keep doing them. Cumbria is a part of the bigger picture.
International Monetary Fund article here:
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2019/12/natures-solution-to-climate-change-chami
