[FMAL-11] Seminar on Environmental Issues
The sun is rising in Geneva, my legs are sore from morning yoga, and spring is here; "the earth is like a child / that knows so many poems", Rilke says. Welcome to Fondue, and Maybe a Lake, written by your good old Bernard Soubry.
Hard to tell where the negotiations are going; perhaps out of sheer psychic necessity, they’ve all gone flat and featureless in my mind. The day gets divided up into note-taking chunks—the morning session, which will go long, and the evening session, which always goes long. And the night session, which we can’t fully cover but try to keep an eye on as we write up morning and evening. It doesn’t yet feel like there’s a step change from we’re just messing around to crap, gotta finish this before the evening plenary. That inflection point always shows up, though.
Just after lunch on Monday, I got asked to jump into a session of my Ph.D. supervisor's grad seminars on environmental issues—which is how you would have found me running around the venue at 14:25 to find a room, scribbling DO NOT DISTURB SIGNS on scraps of paper, trying to go to the bathroom one floor down but getting trapped in the stairway, which doesn’t open from inside. (I half-expected to find the skeletons of delegates past collapsed against the wall of the basement level.) Beyond the ludicrous idea that I’d be an “expert” in anything, I really enjoyed it: the students were smart, kind, intellectually feisty. We talked climate negotiations, the role of corporations in biodiversity, and what it’s like to report for this long on a thing this boring.
They asked really, really good questions, too. One of them went straight to what I would have asked, and therefore didn’t really want to have to answer—How can you reconcile, she asked, being objective in your reporting with the political views that you might have? To which there are two answers.
The first reason is that I have to, because I wouldn't get access otherwise. ENB is seen as a completely neutral reporting organization: we don’t editorialize, and even the small sections where we provide analysis or corridor rumours are couched in language that makes it impossible to know what we really think.
There are a number of rooms we wouldn’t get into if people didn’t trust us not to report on hissy fits or tense moments—the sensational stuff that makes for good copy, but bad reporting. And, in a way, that does fit my political goals, because part of my political goals is bringing some kind of transparency into these negotiations. I live in the hope that someday, perhaps, the people who have caused harm to the planet and its people are going to be judged for what they’ve done—and part of what they did was in these rooms. On that day, I want to make sure there’s a record. I want to hand it to the judge.
The other side of things, of course, is that I don’t line up my political beliefs with my job. In fact, I find it more and more difficult, depending on the meetings I go to. Sure, access and good records and transparency, on the one hand. But on the other—what will any of that matter, if good governance and global cooperation don’t actually prevail? Who cares if you wrote it all down on a dead planet?
Sometimes I pathologize why I like this job, think about the writer’s obsession to see everything and get to play a small part in it without actually being responsible for any of the consequences. Maybe that’s what I’m playing at being a reporter, I told them. Maybe what I’m doing isn’t enough. Maybe someday I’m still going to have to explain why so many species died or the Antarctic has warmed and I’ll say that my small part in it was writing it all down in neutral language. I wonder how I’ll feel about myself on that day.
And then I said, “Well, that was a bummer answer. Any other questions?” and took a sip of my tea.
Looking for the exit at the bottom of the stairs,
B