[FMAL] 1 - An Introduction, and Welcome
Dear Reader--
In two weeks, I’ll be getting on an airplane to Geneva to report on the meetings of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity. During that time, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reporting team I’m with will produce daily reports of the negotiations, web coverage, a fully summary, and a twelve-hundred word analysis of the latest progress to preserve biodiversity and come up with a global framework to do so. But this email isn’t about that.
Hi! I’m Bernard Soubry, and welcome to Fondue, and Maybe A Lake, my pop-up letter named after the two things I know about Switzerland. This is your first email.
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When people ask me about my reporting job, I usually roll out the prerecorded message stored in my left hippocampus:
I work with this team called the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and we’re basically the record for all the UN’s environmental negotiations. When there’s a meeting like the climate COP - you heard about that in November, right? - it’s not just a thousand people in a single room; usually it’s six, seven rooms running parallel negotiations, which makes it basically impossible to see everything if you’re a small country.
So ENB shows up, and we’re in every room. We take notes in as many meetings as possible, and we condense them all into two pages at the end of the day, and we publish them that night. It’s like a newspaper, but for how bureaucrats are trying to save the Earth. Anyway, we write summaries, too, let me give you the address--
And then I give them the link, and they never ask again. Because, let’s face it, the reports that we write are incredibly useful only to a very specific subset of humans. Trust me, you do not want to read about the way Digital Sequencing Information debates have held back negotiations in the International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture because—oh, your head’s already rolled off your shoulders, there. Yup, probably not for you. I’m very proud of my reporting, and I trust what it does, but I know its limits.
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So this newsletter will be an attempt to see things from a broader angle. Let me take you along for a while. It will be springtime in Geneva. The ice will be melting off the Alps. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and both are signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity. I’ll be flying for the first time since 2019, since this whole thing happened to all of us. Things are going to be very weird.
Between bouts of reporting, I’ll try to write about all of this: how the UN works. The weirdness of hotel breakfasts and their relationship with the quality of negotiations. The gulf between the Indigenous activists calling for preservation of their homelands and the negotiators who just want to sign stuff and go home. There will be days off. I will probably go hiking in the Alps. I will investigate what running around Lake Geneva is like.
More than anything, I want this newsletter to be a million miles away from the 200-grit sandpaper writing voice that I have to use in my day-to-day job. Being in these spaces right now is… just about as strange as everything else in the world. So let's talk about that.
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There’s another, more selfish reason to write these little letters: I want my attention back. Reporting requires a lot of concentration--most meetings, you have to focus everything you have while you take notes and write them up, doing it live, editing fast, publishing now, and when you have a moment of reprieve your attention snaps back like a rubber band unhooking from a finger and just… lies limp. Reporting on COP25 two years ago, I found that I was either in this hyperfocused zone of translating the moment into the Most Relevant Thing, or… blankly staring at the socials wall. My thoughts were not my own.
Having a disciplined plan to write and shoot each day in addition to my brain’s other duties will hopefully nudge me towards a certain curiosity. Who are the people looking exhausted, staring at their phones outside the conference room? How do you do those photo-worthy huddles when you’ve got to keep a distance? What’s the best food we can dig up in Geneva at 10 PM, and where does it rate on a five-star scale? There’s downtime aplenty when we’re shut out of meetings or waiting for edits, and I’d rather be writing for you, dear reader, than coming up with a new Twitter parody account.
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That’s what you’re getting, then. Every day, for two weeks and a bit, a letter from me, designed to frame my days there and produce some Creative Thing. The rules—gotta have some rules—are as follows:
Publish every day.
Five hundred words or more.
One photograph.
After the 31st of March, I'll delete this mailing list. The newsletter will only exist as an archive of itself, in each of our inboxes. Just a nice, small, finite thing.
You can unsubscribe at any time. You can also send me an email by replying to the newsletter.
Until very soon,
B