Patrick Schröder:is the international adviser at the China Association for NGO Cooperation where he supports coordination and international cooperation of the China Civil Climate Action Network (CCAN). He holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from Victoria University of Wellington. His position is supported by the German Centre for International Migration and Development (CIM) to facilitate German-Chinese cooperation on climate change and civil society.
As climate change becomes an increasingly urgent problem that needs to be addressed through global cooperation, China – the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and, at the same time, largest manufacturer of renewable energy equipment – is attracting attention greater than ever before.
The global community is wants to understand what is happening in China in terms of climate change mitigation, energy policies, low carbon urban development and other activities. The public is particularly curious to learn about the role of Chinese civil society and environmental NGOs’ engagement in China’s low-carbon development pathway. This publication provides a brief overview of several important ways in which Chinese environmental groups are working to address climate change issues – both at home and internationally. It also explains the developing relationship between the Chinese government and NGO actions, how Chinese environmental NGOs are fi nding their way into global civil society, and their participation in global civil society debates on climate change. It also forecasts what can be expected from Chinese NGOs in the field of climate change in the years to come. Although China’s NGO climate change movement and civil society will have neither the strength nor the tools to solve the world’s climate change problem alone, it will be impossible to solve it without their participation and contribution.
Report can be downloaded at http://www.eu-china.net/web/cms/upload/pdf/materialien/2011_11_11-schroeder-climate-change-activism-China_11-11-07.pdf
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Earth Insights: Environmental Governance and Rio+20
Earth Insights: Environmental Governance and Rio+20
MHC Student Dana Drugmand wrote an excellent update on the Earth Summit, summarizing recent Rio speakers at MHC and interviewing professor and student (that's me!).
In June of 1992, tens of thousands of people, including 172 states, over 2,400 representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 8,000 delegates and 9,000 members of the press gathered in Rio de Janiero, Brazil for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Rio Earth Summit, as it is informally known, was the largest environmental conference in history and the largest formal gathering of heads of state. Sustainable development had emerged onto the mainstream global agenda, with resulting documents “The Rio Declaration” and “Agenda 21” outlining principles and an action blueprint for achieving sustainable development. Additional outcomes of the conference included a “Set of Forest Principles,” the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was a landmark event in the history of environmental protection.
MHC Student Dana Drugmand wrote an excellent update on the Earth Summit, summarizing recent Rio speakers at MHC and interviewing professor and student (that's me!).
In June of 1992, tens of thousands of people, including 172 states, over 2,400 representatives of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 8,000 delegates and 9,000 members of the press gathered in Rio de Janiero, Brazil for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The Rio Earth Summit, as it is informally known, was the largest environmental conference in history and the largest formal gathering of heads of state. Sustainable development had emerged onto the mainstream global agenda, with resulting documents “The Rio Declaration” and “Agenda 21” outlining principles and an action blueprint for achieving sustainable development. Additional outcomes of the conference included a “Set of Forest Principles,” the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was a landmark event in the history of environmental protection.
What has happened since then? The state of the environment has not gotten much better. Environmental degradation has actually gotten worse. Biodiversity loss is accelerating. We are now losing species at 1,000 times the natural rate. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one out of every eight bird species, one out of four mammal species, and one out of three amphibians are threatened with extinction. Half of the world’s forests are now gone. Overfishing has resulted in the decline of 90 percent of the oceans’ large fish species. Atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise. These problems do not exist in isolation; there are related social issues. Billions still live in poverty, chronic hunger affects nearly one billion people worldwide, and the gap between the rich and the poor has widened.
The political enthusiasm for tackling environmental and developmental challenges that was on display at Rio in 1992 has eroded over the years. “I could definitely see the growing distrust toward international negotiations,” said Yiting Wang ’12, an Environmental Studies major who has been involved in the international environmental process through programs abroad and in environmental policy. James Gustave Speth, former dean at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and founder of the World Resources Institute, has called global environmental governance “an experiment that has largely failed.” Despite a proliferation of conferences, negotiations, and treaties over the last 20 years related to environmental matters, commitments to following through on actions have been absent.
Clearly there has been an implementation gap. It is relatively easy for a head of state to agree to abide by a certain environmental regulation, but actually enforcing the policy is another matter. This suggests a lack of effective monitoring strategies. Another reason for the implementation gap is that greater priority tends to be given to pursuing trade and economic interests. “The current economic situation also has a lot to do with the delivery of these promises,” Wang said. Finally, there is an overall lack of political will. The U.S. has not demonstrated much leadership in the international environmental arena, refusing to sign the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kyoto Protocol. There has been increasing recognition that the global environmental governance system is fragmented and has not been entirely effective.
Reassessing this institutional framework will be one of the major discussions taking place at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) in June 2012. The conference, to be held once again in Rio de Janiero, marks the 20th anniversary of the first Rio Earth Summit. The main objective of “Rio+20,” according to the 2012 UNCSD official website, is “to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.” The two major themes of UNCSD are 1) a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and 2) the institutional framework for sustainable development. The latter theme entails evaluating the current environmental governance organizations and institutions and discussing options for reform. One proposal is to create a “world environment organization,” a new UN super-organization for dealing with environmental matters.
Earlier this month, on Oct. 6, Jacob Scherr, Director of Global Strategy and Advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), gave a lecture on Mount Holyoke’s campus called “The Race to Rio+20.” Scherr identified the challenges we are presently faced with. After recapping some of the pressures on the planet, he expressed the notion that humans are pushing up against planetary boundaries. Thus, as Scherr put it, “we are running out of time.” He acknowledged the lack of strong leadership by governments and the prevailing skepticism about the international process. Yet, he did highlight some opportunities presented by Rio+20, such as the potential for social media to reach and engage billions of people like never before. He also outlined a list of “potential deliverables,” or smaller-scale targets that could be discussed at the conference, such as eliminating inefficient incandescent light bulbs and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.
According to Environmental Studies professor Catherine Corson, “the most important issue that Rio needs to address is consumption in the global North, particularly the United States.” Corson, who specializes in global environmental governance, is currently teaching an Environmental Studies seminar, “Science and Power in Environmental Governance,” that focuses on Rio+20 and the long road that has led to it. She wants students to know about Rio+20, which, she said, “is anticipated to be the decade’s most high profile environmental event.”
Why is Rio+20 so significant? “Like the 1992 Rio summit,” Corson explained, “the ideas, power relations and institutional mechanisms that emerge from it will have a tremendous impact on future international environmental policy and practice, as well as on our lives more generally. Your generation will shape, through events like this and related policies, how we, as a global community, address issues like consumption, waste, environmental degradation and increasing inequality.”
Yiting Wang said she is hopeful for Rio+20 to turn into the Earth Summit of our generation. “It offers some hope and opportunities to review the pitfalls of the past 40 years of international environmental governance, reset the agenda and allow new actors to emerge.” One of these new types of actors is youth. Wang has served as International Youth Coordinator for the China Youth Climate Action Network (CYCAN) and has attended climate change conferences in Copenhagen and Cancun. She has already attended some of the preparatory meetings for Rio+20 and intends to follow through with her participation next year at the actual conference in Rio. “Increasingly, these international negotiations have been a platform for the youth movement to make a presence, solicit resources and expand influence through both direct political action and civic diplomacy,” Wang said. “This is also why I personally still continue to involve myself in the process, despite all other frustrations.”
Anticipation for the Rio+20 conference is already building here on campus. Students who are possibly interested in attending the event should talk to Wang or Corson, as they are looking to organize a “Mount Holyoke delegation. The Miller-Worley Center for the Environment is also sponsoring several lectures as part of its theme on international environmental governance. The next lecture is coming up on November 10 and will feature James Gustave Speth.
“The Shu Dog That Barks at the Sun”: Our Language and Our Reconciliation with Nature
By Yiting Wang: Series of my "environmental studies manifesto: ES and me"
Language is a double-edged sword that both empowers and disempowers humans, with regard to human-environment interactions. Where it empowers, it gives humans identity, sense of belonging, and means to free ourselves from our inner world that cannot be said. Where it disempowers, humans use certain identities, narratives and concepts to separate humans from humans and the animated living world.
Perhaps the most liberating and anthropocentric tool, language enables humans to “make claims” about ourselves and our surroundings. Narrative is the primary use of language to construct social norms that holds together a community. These narrations people carry on generations after generations are also fundamentally shaped by our relationship with our land. And by naming the physical locations and subjects, we make stamps and declare the evidence of material reality. Our reality. Leslie Marmon Silko tells the story-telling format from a Native American Pueblo eye, “one that embraces the whole of creation and the whole of history of time (p.49)” In communities where stories of the Creation survive, stories are also told to give directions and ground members of the community for both internal purposes and social conduct. Just like the West Apaches, as anthropologist Keith Basso unveiled, who “negotiate images of understandings of the land” – into stories that “stalk” people. These claims of reality, through naming of places on which stories “naturally” occur, constitute the moral world of the West Apaches. That moral system prescribes checks-and-balances not only to the social world, but also to the society-nature interactions.
Humans’ particular way of claiming of who we are reminds me of human’s use of language from a Chinese perspective. Chinese idioms, mostly famously the ones composed of only four Chinese characters, do not conform to modern Chinese grammatical structure and syntax. They are highly compact and synthetic in that the meaning the whole idiom goes beyond those of the four characters combined – “the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.” Each idiom has a story, mostly a historical event or a myth, that derives from ancient literature. It usually entails a moral lesson. We treat them as our cultural treasury and learn them throughout the 10-year mandatory primary education. For example the idiom“蜀犬吠日(shu quan fei ri),” it tells the story originated from the Tang Dynasty more than a
thousand years of ago of a dog from the Sichuan region, where I come from, who would bark at the Sun whenever it comes out. Seldom do people living in the Sichuan basin see the Sun because of the topography and climate. The Sichuan people thus carry the stereotype of living in their isolated but fertile heaven. It is also used to describe people, often disapprovingly, who are too easily panicked at something normal due to their isolation.
(Picture left:Credit LISA MINOT)
Humans use language to not only make claims to ourselves or even ridicule ourselves so our offspring will no follow suit. We also use sometimes very powerful narratives to claim biophysical spaces and resources we are made to believe we belong to. Apt to be the master of our language, humans also use it to disempower our fellow species, living and nonliving on planet Earth. In her essay “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid told the less narrated side of the Christopher Columbus’s heroic and groundbreaking “discoveries.” It serves as an example of great scale in which one man, replete with self-placed superiority and “sense of wonder,” placed names onto thousands of physical and living objects in the “New World” as if they never have names or any history before him. They were “new” only to him and his shipmates. Negotiations over “property rights” – a western invention – have often sparked fierce, if not violent, conflicts among different groups of actors carrying different identities and discourses to justify who truly owns and belongs. And too often, we find out in the end the long-existing primary caretakers of the land are ousted and replaced by “efficient,” entrepreneurial and technocratic entities, in the name of progress, modernity and development. Those who are disempowered are forced to conform to a constructed new norm or standard. In the end we hear very polarized narratives of who owns what and who can best use the land, which denotes completely different policies, if necessary at all. The Amazonian forest region is one thus example where government, corporations, big industrial rangers and the indigenous have heavily contested the ownership and usage of the land, resulting in the exploitation of both the forests and already marginalized populations. Living organisims have the tendency to overdo themselves with the same means they make the world around do for them. “The result is a spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction,” says Hogan, and social destruction of segments of the global society, as I would add. The conversion of forest land into cattle range was driven partly by the government incentives, encouraged by global financial institutions who champions liberalizing the markets, to make “productive” use of the land, which in the end resulted in speculation of land at the expense of small-holder farmers.
All the same, we can reclaim the same human intellect that has crafted the sensorial expression of ourselves as language to reconnect with the Creation. Language is a tool of knowing the world and ourselves. As David Abram points out, we learn language by basic mimicking – it is physical, intuitive and “bodily.” We need to bring forth our animal nature, echoes Frances Moore Lappé, to heal ourselves and our broken relationship with the land. “What we are searching for is a language that heals this relationship, one that takes the side of the amazing and fragile life on our life-giving earth,” says Linda Hogan in her account of “A Different Yields: A Spiritual History of the Living World.”
There could be in every human being’s inner self a desire to heal the wound. And today’s worlds are in urgent need of true healers. Nevertheless, by solely mimicking the shamans in Southeast Asia, says Abram, is only to treat the symptoms without awareness to the broader physical and ecological environment. “For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it.” To be a healer, or a true magician, one first needs to understand the intricate relationship we have with nature and call on fellow species to respond to their respective inner calling. However, what arouses human sensual experiences, emotions and expressions are what we treat as “external” stimuli. To understand that the “external” is only part of the big Creation and the whole history, we will be able to internalize and reclaim respect for ourselves. Because only when we begin truly listening to and loving ourselves, can we appreciate and protect other parts that constitute the whole.
In reflecting on the thoughtful analyses and writing this paper, my understanding of the path I have chosen also renewed. I have always understood that I do not mainly express my passion for the environment through writing. After all, written words have many limitations despite their higher position in Western culture. What I have learned out of these readings and the study of political ecology is the ability to discern the power-laden messages, directives, confrontations imbedded in stories people tell that have largely shaped human landscapes and have been driven by evolving ideologies and ethics. At the end of my undergraduate study as an environmental studies major, I have finally found a set of tools that will allow me to see the world through languages and other representations, and re-create narratives that speak the language of our Creation and an honest self.
Here, let me end by returning to my version of the barking dog story. The visiting poet who coined the phase in a way used a euphemism to belittle the local people’s animal behavior. Yet in the locals’ accounts, when the sun is out everybody is enlightened. Everybody is as happy as a Sichuan dog when it baths in the sun. From waiting for the light of life to come out to being shone by it, my people have fully enjoyed, with due respect, the cycle of life in universe.
Works Cited
Abram, D. 1997. The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage.
Basso, K. 1984. Stalking with stories: Names, places, and moral narratives among the western apache. Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society: 19-55.
Hetch, S. B. 1985. Environment, development and politics: Capital accumulation and the livestock sector in Eastern Amazonia. World Development: 13 (6): 663-684
Hogan, L. 1994. A different yield. Religion & Literature 26 (1): 71-80.
Kincaid, J. 1997. In history. Callaloo 20 (1): 1-7
Silko, L. M. 1981. Language and literature from a pueblo Indian perspective. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today: 48-59.
Language is a double-edged sword that both empowers and disempowers humans, with regard to human-environment interactions. Where it empowers, it gives humans identity, sense of belonging, and means to free ourselves from our inner world that cannot be said. Where it disempowers, humans use certain identities, narratives and concepts to separate humans from humans and the animated living world.
Perhaps the most liberating and anthropocentric tool, language enables humans to “make claims” about ourselves and our surroundings. Narrative is the primary use of language to construct social norms that holds together a community. These narrations people carry on generations after generations are also fundamentally shaped by our relationship with our land. And by naming the physical locations and subjects, we make stamps and declare the evidence of material reality. Our reality. Leslie Marmon Silko tells the story-telling format from a Native American Pueblo eye, “one that embraces the whole of creation and the whole of history of time (p.49)” In communities where stories of the Creation survive, stories are also told to give directions and ground members of the community for both internal purposes and social conduct. Just like the West Apaches, as anthropologist Keith Basso unveiled, who “negotiate images of understandings of the land” – into stories that “stalk” people. These claims of reality, through naming of places on which stories “naturally” occur, constitute the moral world of the West Apaches. That moral system prescribes checks-and-balances not only to the social world, but also to the society-nature interactions.
Humans’ particular way of claiming of who we are reminds me of human’s use of language from a Chinese perspective. Chinese idioms, mostly famously the ones composed of only four Chinese characters, do not conform to modern Chinese grammatical structure and syntax. They are highly compact and synthetic in that the meaning the whole idiom goes beyond those of the four characters combined – “the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.” Each idiom has a story, mostly a historical event or a myth, that derives from ancient literature. It usually entails a moral lesson. We treat them as our cultural treasury and learn them throughout the 10-year mandatory primary education. For example the idiom“蜀犬吠日(shu quan fei ri),” it tells the story originated from the Tang Dynasty more than a
thousand years of ago of a dog from the Sichuan region, where I come from, who would bark at the Sun whenever it comes out. Seldom do people living in the Sichuan basin see the Sun because of the topography and climate. The Sichuan people thus carry the stereotype of living in their isolated but fertile heaven. It is also used to describe people, often disapprovingly, who are too easily panicked at something normal due to their isolation.(Picture left:Credit LISA MINOT)
Humans use language to not only make claims to ourselves or even ridicule ourselves so our offspring will no follow suit. We also use sometimes very powerful narratives to claim biophysical spaces and resources we are made to believe we belong to. Apt to be the master of our language, humans also use it to disempower our fellow species, living and nonliving on planet Earth. In her essay “In History,” Jamaica Kincaid told the less narrated side of the Christopher Columbus’s heroic and groundbreaking “discoveries.” It serves as an example of great scale in which one man, replete with self-placed superiority and “sense of wonder,” placed names onto thousands of physical and living objects in the “New World” as if they never have names or any history before him. They were “new” only to him and his shipmates. Negotiations over “property rights” – a western invention – have often sparked fierce, if not violent, conflicts among different groups of actors carrying different identities and discourses to justify who truly owns and belongs. And too often, we find out in the end the long-existing primary caretakers of the land are ousted and replaced by “efficient,” entrepreneurial and technocratic entities, in the name of progress, modernity and development. Those who are disempowered are forced to conform to a constructed new norm or standard. In the end we hear very polarized narratives of who owns what and who can best use the land, which denotes completely different policies, if necessary at all. The Amazonian forest region is one thus example where government, corporations, big industrial rangers and the indigenous have heavily contested the ownership and usage of the land, resulting in the exploitation of both the forests and already marginalized populations. Living organisims have the tendency to overdo themselves with the same means they make the world around do for them. “The result is a spiritual fragmentation that has accompanied our ecological destruction,” says Hogan, and social destruction of segments of the global society, as I would add. The conversion of forest land into cattle range was driven partly by the government incentives, encouraged by global financial institutions who champions liberalizing the markets, to make “productive” use of the land, which in the end resulted in speculation of land at the expense of small-holder farmers.
All the same, we can reclaim the same human intellect that has crafted the sensorial expression of ourselves as language to reconnect with the Creation. Language is a tool of knowing the world and ourselves. As David Abram points out, we learn language by basic mimicking – it is physical, intuitive and “bodily.” We need to bring forth our animal nature, echoes Frances Moore Lappé, to heal ourselves and our broken relationship with the land. “What we are searching for is a language that heals this relationship, one that takes the side of the amazing and fragile life on our life-giving earth,” says Linda Hogan in her account of “A Different Yields: A Spiritual History of the Living World.”
There could be in every human being’s inner self a desire to heal the wound. And today’s worlds are in urgent need of true healers. Nevertheless, by solely mimicking the shamans in Southeast Asia, says Abram, is only to treat the symptoms without awareness to the broader physical and ecological environment. “For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it.” To be a healer, or a true magician, one first needs to understand the intricate relationship we have with nature and call on fellow species to respond to their respective inner calling. However, what arouses human sensual experiences, emotions and expressions are what we treat as “external” stimuli. To understand that the “external” is only part of the big Creation and the whole history, we will be able to internalize and reclaim respect for ourselves. Because only when we begin truly listening to and loving ourselves, can we appreciate and protect other parts that constitute the whole.
In reflecting on the thoughtful analyses and writing this paper, my understanding of the path I have chosen also renewed. I have always understood that I do not mainly express my passion for the environment through writing. After all, written words have many limitations despite their higher position in Western culture. What I have learned out of these readings and the study of political ecology is the ability to discern the power-laden messages, directives, confrontations imbedded in stories people tell that have largely shaped human landscapes and have been driven by evolving ideologies and ethics. At the end of my undergraduate study as an environmental studies major, I have finally found a set of tools that will allow me to see the world through languages and other representations, and re-create narratives that speak the language of our Creation and an honest self.
Here, let me end by returning to my version of the barking dog story. The visiting poet who coined the phase in a way used a euphemism to belittle the local people’s animal behavior. Yet in the locals’ accounts, when the sun is out everybody is enlightened. Everybody is as happy as a Sichuan dog when it baths in the sun. From waiting for the light of life to come out to being shone by it, my people have fully enjoyed, with due respect, the cycle of life in universe.
Works Cited
Abram, D. 1997. The spell of the sensuous. New York: Vintage.
Basso, K. 1984. Stalking with stories: Names, places, and moral narratives among the western apache. Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society: 19-55.
Hetch, S. B. 1985. Environment, development and politics: Capital accumulation and the livestock sector in Eastern Amazonia. World Development: 13 (6): 663-684
Hogan, L. 1994. A different yield. Religion & Literature 26 (1): 71-80.
Kincaid, J. 1997. In history. Callaloo 20 (1): 1-7
Silko, L. M. 1981. Language and literature from a pueblo Indian perspective. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today: 48-59.
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