“There won’t be any justice in their negotiating text”

Jessie Dennis at the 16th International Climate Negotiations in Cancun Mexico. Photo credit Orin Langelle/ Global Justice Ecology Project-Global Forest Coalition.

Next week the Paris climate negotiations (COP) start and I’ve been thinking about them with a fair  bit of dread. It’ also taken me back to some COP memories.

It was working on climate stuff around the time of the Copenhagen talks that I confirmed my belief that it is elsewhere, outside of these talks, where we can find answers and hope to do something about climate change. I went to the talks in Mexico a year later and saw how it was indigenous environmental groups and movements leading the way on rejecting the bullshit coming out of the COP talks (same at home of course).

Outside the talks the air was full of rage and incredible pain; a rage that was confined to security ‘protest areas’ marked with tape (rules broken soon enough of course, resulting in large swaths of us being banned from the UN area).

We had the privilege of meeting people from so many affected communities like those travelling from towns choking on fossil fuel pollution, where their family members were dying from living near coal plants. They bought the immense pain of their community and it made the feeling inside the talks all the more eerie and revolting.

Inside, the pristine halls were filled with the quietness and day-job tedium of thousands of negotiators there to do their job each day, travelling from their on-site resort, to represent Govts who had already decided long before they got to COP the shitty deals and privatising and nature-commodifying mechanisms that they were there to negotiate for.

Despite already carrying the knowledge that these talks weren’t going to fix our problems to COP with me, seeing the problem, feeling that the fucked up inequity of it was encapsulated in front of me was something I’ll never forget. It’s still something I think about to remind myself that I know in my bones that connecting the dots of our struggles and a politics of solidarity is how we can have a shot at doing something about climate change.

And now we have another round… and another ‘biggest ever climate talks’ and  ‘last chance to save us all’. While the French Government is letting huge sports games still go ahead after the Paris attacks, marches around COP have been banned citing security. Some groups have condemned the ban and the ‘shadow of the future’ and politics of fear they fuel. Activists are being put under house arrest before the talks even start.

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The violence from Isil, the state terrorism and colonisation that created it, and the interests represented at these corporate sponsored climate talks are all sides of the same coin. COP has proven time and again that its purpose (and result) is to actively maintain the systems which are destroying the people and air around us.

I marched at the People’s Climate March today to stand alongside all the staunch, wonderful people working on this and connected struggles and to stand alongside people around the world doing the same. I also marched to stand with not only those who are not only impacted by climate change but by the wars and state and corporate violence which is part of the very same problem.

As these talks drag on in Paris and the world watches, I know that people around the world will be getting on with what is really making a difference, organising across struggles and resisting fossil fuels, building resilience and empowering the people around us.

As I saw on a poster for the Paris protests, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Read more about Jessie’s experiences at the climate negotiations in Cancun