[FMAL-20] One Last One
It’s been a hot second, friends! But let’s summon the energy to get off the couch—or at least, for me, Bernard Soubry, to do so—and have one last go at Fondue, and Maybe a Lake. This is your twentieth and (as far as I can tell, for now) final email.
I have been alternating between napping and doing laundry for the past day (with a brief contra dance interlude; sometimes you gotta), and writing this newsletter feels like being told you need to run one more lap after finishing the Barkley Marathons. But I’m acutely aware that I’d be leaving you hanging without a proper sign-off otherwise.
Leaving Geneva was the perfect little anticlimactic moment: waking up to near-freezing rain, stuffing the Brompton into my IKEA tyre bag when I realized it would be too cold and late for me to go swimming, stuffing a croissant into my mouth from the lobby cafeteria before hopping the train to an airport and a nine-hour flight. I was supposed to plan two lectures on that flight; instead, I watched three movies. (Dune: not that good?!) I used my noise-cancelling headphones to not exist in the world. I did not pay attention to very much.
It feels like the appropriate thing would be to have one long, final reflection on the Geneva Biodiversity Conference, but I’ve—in all honesty—been avoiding thinking about in the past few days because I needed to clean the apartment and get these lectures on their feet and take the trash out and deal with the state of my body (tired, unstretched) before any of that happened. Maybe the thoughts won’t really come until the next few weeks, when my butt muscles and my brain relax.
The main feeling will probably be this: I feel divided. On the one hand, this round of negotiations on the future of biodiversity governance went incredibly slowly and incrementally. The gains are so small it feels like it would take another newsletter to explain them to you: language on indicators that got nailed down, the number of brackets reducing across three or four texts. But that’s nothing when you take in the long view, that multilateral decision-making is inherently compromise and that the long arc of healing our relationship with the world isn’t controlled only by the UN. There is still world enough, and time.
On the other, I sat with a delegate from Chile and asked her about her takeaways from the conference, and she said, “well, we were better off about 30 years ago, when this started.” This whole process should have been locked up two years ago, and nothing has changed; the work is just as slow, just as governed by national greed, and no one seems likely to pull a way out. And I, writer that I am, will just sit in the back row while the natural conclusion happens and something less than what we need is cobbled together at the last minute, and the victory rings hollow through the newspapers.
Is it better to know about these things or to keep them out of mind? I can’t tell, but I’m coming back with the firm conviction that whatever I’m doing, it’s not enough. It is not enough to legislate the world’s failures from the writer’s desk, not if there is to be a world to show those who are going to come after me.
Which hardly gives you a sense of the state of global environmental governance, but then, it doesn’t feel like this newsletter has been much of that kind of report. So we go: onward, trying to understand, mostly shaped by waves of feeling, more and less blind to the world.
Until next time, then.
B
And just to say: I’m grateful to you, immensely grateful, whether you emailed me back or no, whether you read every email or just this one, and whether you cared at all that someone was writing this little thing. Every day that I was in Geneva, sitting in on meetings, complaining about plenary lengths, working out how many more times someone could say “dear chair, we are in your hands” before I vomited, I also had to think about writing these five hundred words and what damn picture I was going to put on there. When I got back to my hotel, and when I got up in the morning, I had to take the microplastic debris of my attention and form them into some great Pacific garbage patch of meaning.
I wrote 60 000 words for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin over fourteen days, many of them bad, some of them good. And despite working twelve- to fourteen-hour days, I wrote another 17 000 more for this newsletter. The quality of them isn’t so important as the fact that I wrote them, and was able to bend myself to that kind of discipline for twenty iterations. It wouldn’t have worked if I were just writing in a journal: I needed eyes on the other end. Thank you for being my eyes! I hope, really hope, that this is the beginning of something.
Post-postscript: As per my promise, I will be deleting this mailing list after sending out this email, so that this becomes a closed loop. If you’d like to be a part of any future mailing lists, shoot an email to bernard.soubry@gmail.com.