PLOV 6 - Floor Time
PLOV
Oh hi, reader. I am having a quiet morning; I am fourth on the note-taking list today, and only need to come in at eleven. I got up at seven. I ran at level thirteen. I lifted weights far below my normal capacity. I may take a brief post-breakfast nap before I go in. Welcome to PLOV, where we celebrate our colleagues' generous offer to go first so that we (well, me, Bernard Soubry) may sit in cotton bathrobes and watch the sky turn hazy.
Yesterday: the plenary is like the Book of Numbers, listing off names of agenda items one after the other. Important Marine Mammal Area. Threats due to Climate Change. Proposals for Modification of Taxonomy Systems. None of these get talked about in length, because the real conversations are happening in side-room working groups, which we're not covering. I wish I had a chance to go listen. No time, though.
The secret to producing the Bulletin is to find rhythm and follow it religiously. Take notes for half an hour. Pass off. Write up. Edit what's been written up. Write the webtext. Collate text. Edit once, another time on hard copy. If you're lucky, you can get all of these things done before everybody else has left the venue and security is looking at their watch and thumbing their nightstick.
A tension, then: as the person who is, technically, taking notes constantly and thus expected to know exactly what is going on, it is actually quite difficult to tell what's really going on. What is said in plenary sessions is not the debate from the working groups, or the hushed conversations in the back hallways that you sometimes catch if you go to the alternate, secret bathroom.
Being a good reporter means not reporting, much of the time. You have to break yourself out of the rhythm to go talk to strangers, or shut your laptop long enough for your friends to come tell you some gossip about the International Seabed Authority's spicy letter to the Convention. You have to make friends, which usually involves not typing.
A brief paean to Floor Time: sometimes, if you are very, very lucky, you do not have to take notes first, and you have written up everything you needed to write up, so you get Floor Time.
I never nap in venues. You'll never catch me in those photos that come out of COPs, people planking on uncomfortable couches, snoring in full view of the plenary webstream, drooling onto old conference room papers. That would be terrible and shameful. But floor time? Floor time is allowed. Floor time is great.
Floor time is when you find a room you can lock and some hard, unforgiving marble; you roll up your blazer into a little ball; you set a twenty-minute timer on your phone; and you just lie there, blazer under your head. Maybe you will sleep. Maybe you won't. You will, however, have successfully resisted the productivity drive the conference is forcing upon you.
If you are lucky, you will have floor time like I had yesterday, laying in the greenhouse-warm office with the low buzz of the plenary beside your ear. Soft squeaks of shoes on the polished marble floors.
Occasionally, someone walking by with their phone pressed to their ear, thinking they're alone, whispering something only you get to listen into through the paper-thin office walls. A speaker-garbled cry of delight off in the distance: the staff paramedic is on break by the big comfy chairs in the corner and is FaceTiming his three-year-old daughter. I love you, he says in Uzbek. I love you!
Most of the people negotiating here are, in fact, not negotiators. They are scientists. They like to go out with folks into swamps and deserts and into mountain ranges, and hike for hours, and set up hunting cams to see if the first Pallas' cat ever to walk in the region is going to swing by to sniff. They are, in fact, here to speak for small things and big things that they have decided needed to speak.
My mind had been wandering. I was hungry. I should have been on note-taking, but no, I was distracted by taking a picture of the guy taking a picture of me on his giant telephoto lens. So I missed when Bangladesh made an intervention on avian species, mentioned wanting to add something to Appendix Two 1 of the convention. I went up to him after, knelt down by the desk. Hi, I'm Bernard, I'm with ENB, I say. Sorry--I couldn't catch the name of the species, do you mind writing it down for the report?
He gets a little clouded look in his eye, sits up a bit straighter: hang on, he says. Let me show. Puts his hand in his pocket, presses his palm into mine. Look, he says. This is what we are protecting.
Thanks for all the small gifts, friends.
Bernard
PS: My inbox informs me that a bunch of you are writing to me! Thank you! What a wonder. I'm trying my best not to look at it all until I'm done--keep myself focused, and all. But know that every email preview I see warms my heart. Can't wait to read them on the plane back home.
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Meaning: to add to the protected species list, which is Appendix II to the CMS. ↩
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