Diary of a mothering worker. November 3, 2021.

Post 440.

WEARY CITIZENS are weathering a seemingly biblical combination of flood, locusts and plague. All, including the pandemic, are linked to climate change in some way. 

COP26, happening now in Glasgow, Scotland, might feel far away, but it connects directly to these realities at home.

This is the United Nations’ annual climate change conference and COP stands for Conference of Parties, which refers to the signatories of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1994 treaty which includes TT among its 197 parties. 

Activists of many kinds, from indigenous communities to vulnerable nations, use the conference as a chance to push governments beyond talk to action through marches, protests and building of massive citizen demand.

Climate-justice activists are continuing to call for reduced fossil dependence and carbon-dioxide emissions, conservation of forests and oceans, protection of biodiversity, and transformation of our global economy from one that relies on growth through excessive and environmentally harmful production and consumption. 

Farmers, fisherfolk, those in the tourist industry, those living in flood-prone areas, the poor and hungry, women, students and youth of another generation in our region are facing an “existential threat.” This is the one issue around which billions of us could rally because we depend on an Earth in balance for our very lives.

Governments, such as our own, which is why PM Rowley is there, are more concerned about money. Barbados’s PM Mia Mottley declared the Earth in a state of “code red,” warning of the decimation of islands such as Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and low-lying Barbados if global temperatures and, therefore, sea levels (from melting glaciers) continue to rise. She called their impact on the region a “dreaded death sentence.”

The money, described as climate finance, is to come from the richer nations responsible for the bulk of the greenhouse-gas emissions heating the planet and should help poorer nations to cut their own emissions and adapt to the losses from catastrophes predicted from global warming. 

Those bigger, wealthy countries have failed to contribute what they promised – US$100 billion a year from 2009-2020. They have also mainly promised to cut to zero net carbon emissions between 2050 and 2070; too little, too late. 

TT’s promise is to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions in three sectors by 15 per cent, and by 30 per cent in the transportation sector, by 2030. This is unambitious, at odds with activist hopes and the planet’s needs, but not much worse than those from governments elsewhere. 

Our own PM’s speech highlighted establishment of a solar renewable-energy project to provide 30 per cent of our power needs by 2030. Barbados plans to have 100 per cent of its energy consumption come from renewable sources by the same date. Barbados also plans to stop the sale of petrol and diesel by 2030, replacing them with electric power, biofuels and better mass transport. That’s ambitious. 

We are slowly phasing to electric vehicles and there is a policy for transitioning the workforce to a low-carbon economy, and investments in green hydrogen to provide feedstock for the petrochemical sector. There is also a state committee to increase oil revenue as well as explore carbon capture and sequestration of industry-generated carbon dioxide. 

Carbon sequestration is considered valuable because there is too much in our atmosphere, but there’s significant debate about this strategy. Some activists argue that it’s a technique for continuing to burn fossil fuels, not reduce overall use. As a polluter-based economy, it’s the State’s technical solution for the fix we are in. 

Following his speech, the PM is meeting with Shell and BP in London on development of the Manatee gas field, highlighting the irony of our fossil-fuel dependence, dire failure to imagine alternatives to a near-obsolete economic model, and committed drop into the CO2 bucket. 

Anyone interested in survival should be prepared to support what climate-justice activists continue to do. Question government plans. Demand transparency and participation. Present alternatives. Refuse to be fooled by policies on paper. Draw attention to endemic poor implementation. Protest. 

Challenge a leader who lambasts those refusing an aluminium smelter or seeking to preserve a coastline in Tobago or Toco. Those are exactly the moments that count on the ground, showing how little the government sees these as popular struggles to protect coastlines, air and water for our future generations. 

COP 26 reminds that there is one message for us. Before it’s too late, defend the planet at all costs, whether politicians like it or not.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 25, 2019.

Post 343.

Our current problems, from last week’s heatwave to this week’s flooding, are created by us – globally, regionally and nationally. Hurricanes and flooding are natural processes in our part of the hemisphere. Even with the expected increase in storms, it is poor land planning and development which really put us at risk.

The solution to this is public vigilance. We must pull ourselves together to insist on the information and power needed for our new reality. Citizens have to start developing an expertise on their watershed: where the rivers flow, how to prevent garbage clogging them, what settlements are planned, what inequalities exist, and how to reduce neighbourhood footprint. It’s like every community and local government needs an environmental impact assessment to operate from a plan.

I think of how no one cared when the mangroves were razed for Movietowne, but when the ocean washes over it all, we will act surprised. Or maybe, we can wake up and insist on changing what we can now.

I think of when activists stage sit-ins in the EMA to get social and environmental impact analyses, and people call them crazy. Every one of us should be insisting on those analyses for housing settlements and highways, for when the impacts hit us, does it help to hold our heads and bawl?

The area by Grand Bazaar flooded exactly as expected. If the engineers knew this, why didn’t we? Greenvale was always going to flood. Town and Country planners told the PM so when he was Minister of Housing, and he went ahead because regulatory agencies and people’s lives be damned.

There’s a reason why people used to build their houses on stilts through the Caroni plains. This should have been insisted on for all housing developments, and would have spared ordinary, hard-working people endless loss. It should be insisted on now.

The loss from floods is only part natural disaster, the other part is wholly man-made. It’s convenient when we can cut whichever hillside we want or fill in whatever watercourse or throw away a stove in the river or build our house where and however we choose. It’s agony when our folly comes back to us. We are being told to pay attention. Take responsibility.

Forget whether the Prime Minister wades through water in his boots, it’s not the political leadership we should be looking to for empathy and compensation. Rowley or whoever replaces him is irrelevant. Instead, we have to take ownership of the institutions and regulations meant to protect us.

We’ve been inattentive for too long because we can’t be bothered with rules or stopping corruption when it’s our friends or mobilizing across race and party. Institutions that tell us what we can and can’t do to land and watercourses are treated as an inconvenience to be ignored.

While the terrible devastation of people’s homes, cars and livelihoods grabs headlines and hearts, we have to use this moment to demand a different kind of news and public life even after rainy, and hurricane, season passes.

In her Tedx speech last year, Greta Thunberg makes the point that, though the climate is in crisis, we hardly hear anything about it in the press and from political and economic leaders.

If it mattered, if it was understood to be a war against all living species, our countries and our children, from a global economy driven by consumption, growth and fossil extraction, the solutions would dominate all our news.

They would dominate every political platform in every election with parties competing to convince voters they have the most commitment to the best plan for both preventing and addressing climate-related disasters. Will that happen? Only if we demand it.

What we need is a news cycle that doesn’t focus on the crisis, but on prevention and protection, making them the most important story of our time. Citizen oversight of land use planning, new housing specifications, the start of national recycling collection, a near ban on plastic or insistence on the polluter pays principle for importers and producers, a demand for clean, drinkable water as a public right, replanting of mangroves, and more. Our public institutions should be flooded by citizens wanting oversight and say over the plans and the books.

All of this is possible, making the man-made part of our crises preventable. If hope is what we think we need to weather this new normal, Thunberg says, “The one thing we need more than hope is action…once we start to act, hope is everywhere”.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. September 11, 2019.

Post 341.

The impact of devastation in the Bahamas gets more disturbing as the days wear on. I’ve moved from fear for our Caribbean neighbours while watching the storm crawl over the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama to horror and sadness at what’s left of people’s lives.

Hope lies in all the immediate assistance with supplies for survival, but reading back to Dominica, Barbuda and Puerto Rico suggests that recovery will take far longer than our attention may sustain.

This is one of the challenges of disaster recovery, despite road maps for long-term response. All the Caribbean countries decimated by hurricanes in the past three years have families who remain living under tarpaulin, areas with long-term loss of electricity, risks from water contamination, and aid dependence. Grenada recovered from Ivan in 2004, but sits in the Caribbean Sea just as vulnerable as it was then.

Whole economies are reduced to zero GDP virtually overnight. New lives are made on loss more endured than overcome, particularly for those unable to migrate. And, Caribbean nations are falling under unimaginably catastrophic storms one by one.

Even resilience systems may not sufficiently help in the face of unprecedented storm surges that do worse damage than category 5 winds. In some countries, there may be too few safe places for everyone to shelter, and even if more people survive because of better information, structural construction, evacuation and preparedness, where would they go when their homes and communities are destroyed?

At a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees, the viability of the region is questionable. The region will become increasingly unlivable, and more ungovernable as suffering fuels insecurity and crime.

This is partly what happened in Venezuela which experienced huge declines in rainfall which starved hydroelectric power generators, leading to industry and agriculture collapse, blackouts, malnutrition, insecurity and exodus by millions.

On the other hand, in our lifetimes, we can expect heavy rainfall in Trinidad to flood everything between the Northern and Central Ranges.

In the Caribbean, there are already increases in air and water temperatures, daily intensity of rainfall, droughts, hurricanes and rising sea levels. All are expected to become more severe with hurricane wind speeds alone projected to increase by 2-11 per cent and mean sea level rise projected to be up by 1.4 metres (Taylor and Clarke et al. 2018).

We will pass an increase of 1.5 degrees given that no world patterns of consuming fossil fuels and producing carbon dioxide have changed. TT, Guyana and Suriname’s dependence on oil and gas contributes to such projected demise.

After these hurricanes, we’ve scrambled to share immediate relief. Longer term, activists have been pushing for a better response to climate change’s distinct harms to women and children, the disabled, elderly and migrants, but there will be a time when some of our region’s islands will simply produce refugees. What is our plan for this reality?

It’s more than investing in micro-electric grids, home-based water filtration systems and resilient homes. There isn’t a single serious plan across the anglophone region for the kind of projected conditions that Bahamian Angelique Nixon, in Guyana’s Stabroek News, rightly calls “apocalypse now”: a terror which we hope will just pass us by at this time every year.

TT’s Vision 2030 reads like a fairytale, almost a pretence that none of this matters for housing settlements, agricultural planning, mangrove protection, carbon neutrality or governance. Looking for a realistic strategy regarding climate change across Caricom is just as worrying as the destruction of Dominica, Barbuda, Puerto Rico, and to a lesser extent Cuba and Jamaica, becomes heart-breaking.

Nonetheless, for immediate assistance, Angelique Nixon is co-ordinating “a Relief Drive for The Bahamas supporting three women-led grassroots organisations on the ground – Lend A Hand Bahamas (https://www.lendahandbahamas.org/ & Facebook #lendahand242), Equality Bahamas (Facebook @equality242), and Human Rights Bahamas (Facebook @gbhra242).

“The core organisers here in Trinidad are UWI Institute for Gender and Development Studies, Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Network of NGOs of TT for the Advancement of Women, and the Emancipation Support Committee TT.

“Please donate relief items, such as adult and baby hygiene products, including soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, female sanitary items, adult and baby diapers, women’s underwear, baby formula and food, cleansing wipes, and non-perishable foods, which can be dropped off at any of those organisations’ headquarters.” Contact her via Whatsapp at 868-732-3543.

Long-term, however, think of supporting schools with books and supplies in a year’s time when recovery is less on media’s radar, and by strengthening Caribbean outrage and action against this predicted future.

 

Diary of a mothering worker. January 1, 2019.

Post 315.

A new year brings renewed hope. Maybe we will talk to each other about these hopes, find ones we share and support each other in achieving them.

Maybe you woke up on the first day of the year hoping that your layoff will turn into stable and sufficient income. Maybe you thanked God for your health, and that of your children, in the hope that your lives are spared for one more day. Maybe you woke up as a refugee, hoping against both odds and national policy that you will get the papers to allow you to pursue a better life, anywhere but where you left. 

Maybe you’re hoping for the relationship you always wanted to have or to finally leave the partner you shouldn’t be with. Maybe it’s instead to get justice you deserve from the court system, and the compensation you’ve been waiting on. Maybe it’s just the hope that you’ll find a way out of your debts with dignity.

However ambitious, and hinged to a new business or a promotion or a big scholarship or a new baby or becoming free from addiction, or however meager, your hopes are there, breathing strength of purpose into you like air.  

I came across fifteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference. I’ve quoted it here because it was her last line, “change is coming, whether you like it or not”, that gave me hope, reminding me to aim higher than my own goals, and connect to the idea that we could be each other’s hope. 

This is especially important when such optimism is low, when the planet is under attack by capitalism and consumerism, and when this generation faces crises we’ve long nurtured, but never thought would come of age.

In her words:

“I’ve learned you are never too small to make a difference. And if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we could all do together if we really wanted to. But to do that, we have to speak clearly, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. You are not mature enough to tell it like is. Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few…

You say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes. Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself. We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people.”

I sat quietly on the last day of last year wondering what my hopes were. I realised I have to think about hope differently than I was doing, not as aspirations we define from within, but something we look to in others, something we are for others, something our decisions bring for each other.

If there is one thing that connects us, it is hope. I know you have a list, but imagine something greater, maybe it’s you that are the hope which gives us strength of purpose to change the way things are. Requiring nothing but solidarity and love, connecting to this in each other could be our real power.

 

 

Diary of a mothering worker. December 8, 2017.

Post 263.

I’m in Fiji for the Civicus World Assembly. Civil society organizations and activists from around the world have gathered to renew energy and redefine strategies for transforming injustice as experienced across the planet. Feminists from 350.org, Greenpeace Canada and the Pacific region are in conversation about the necessity of an energy transition to renewables, which must happen sooner rather than later, or a majority of species and people will suffer and die.

Hope may spring eternal, but data regarding climate change is grim. Within thirty years, all of us will know someone displaced by drought, hurricanes, rising sea levels, floods or conflicts that result from these.

I’m thinking of Dominica and Barbuda, and other Caribbean islands which, as close as next year, might produce climate refugees. And, I’m thinking of tiny, fossil dependent Trinidad and Tobago, not likely to change our oversized footprint whether for reasons of economic or ecological justice.

What’s the relevance of this discussion to us, not as potential small island state victims, but as small island state contributors to an oncoming crisis? “We must rise before the tides”, cautioned Brianna Fruean, Pacific Climate Warrior, but this seems impossible to achieve back at home where Shell and BP stalk gas fields like kings, and our PM prioritizes agreements in Houston over Paris in order to pay for our next dose of salts.

“Articulate the demand, even if it’s far away from being achieved”, responds May Boeve of 350.org, “Make policy makers do their job in solving these problems, but set the bar. Keep fighting”.

There are two fronts here. The first is the creation of alternatives – to plastic, to capitalism, to borders, to jails, to violence and to carbon dioxide production. We can also adopt green, de-growth, solidarity, commons and other sustainable approaches to wealth, work and wellbeing.

The second front is the challenge to the political and economic power reproducing a broken, unjust and immoral global economy. There are strategies such as compelling divestment of stocks and bonds from companies in the fossil fuel business, defense of public regulations, and taking environmental battles to the courts.

In a later panel, ex-CIVICUS Secretary Generals Miklos Marschall’s and Kumi Naidoo’s messages go further. We need radical hope, love, fury, imagination and solutions because when humanity faces big injustices, decent people have to stand up, say ‘no more’, and be prepared for civil disobedience against decisions that breed abandonment and anger by the billions.

Anyone who tells you that growth can get us out of the current ecological and, therefore, economic crisis hasn’t factored in the ecological or economic costs of extraction, consumption, pollution and species extinction, or must wake up.

The model is a necropolitics. It is killing us and our struggle must be to protect our children’s lives and future. “With our quivering voices we sing our children to sleep, unsure of what they will wake up to”, sings a young performer. What will we do when, increasingly, this becomes true?

Solutions and accountability trackers exist everywhere. They need commitment and collective civic pressure. For this reason, CIVICUS ended with a Declaration on Climate Induced Displacement in order to build a broad-based call for commitment to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius and acknowledge climate change’s unprecedented impact on migration, human rights, equality and self-determination.

In a fierce whisper, St. Lucian Kendel Hippolyte’s poetry reading from the previous day’s Commonwealth Writers’ Conversation comes to me:

“i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone.

She’d definitely been there the night before, i’d heard her

singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of

the oncoming rain.

…

i thought: she can’t be gone. If she is gone,

what is this place? With her gone, who am i?”

I’m listening, breathing in quietly. There’s still time. Back home in the Caribbean, I can still know who I am.

I am the power of the demand.