Earlier this week I found myself in a bright blue container, placed near Utrecht station. The object was put there by the Museum for the United Nations, as part of the Global We Campaign, and I will do my best to write the rest of this contribution in Dutch again.
Simply put, the idea was, and is, to get people from different places around the world to start a conversation about climate change, how it affects the lives of those people and in those places, a conversation about challenges in possible solutions (sorry), but especially about the human side, what do you do yourself?
And also: how do the southern part of the world view us in the north, how do people in areas where the climate crisis is already hitting much harder view the countries in the world where a fair share of the emissions have been produced in recent decades?
Symbiotic relationship with rivers and forests
I knew there in a short speech – yes, I was asked that, and yes, I had to fill some time outside the container while everything was done inside to actually establish the connection with (initially Mumbai, India). – something to add: a sentence like ‘a better environment starts with yourself’ and all kinds of adjustments to your own behavior are nice, and necessary, but should never let us lose sight of the big picture, which is that very many governments are pursuing climate policy with the brakes on – because employment…, because the business climate… – and that quite a few (large) companies seem to invest more in marketing (and greenwashing) than in actual changes.
Once in the container, we sat in front of a life-size screen, as if we were in Mumbai, with local activists. Noting that I think that we are all, or should be, climate activists.
We heard about recycling on a large scale, volunteers keeping beaches clean and striving for a symbiotic relationship with rivers and forests and the land you live on.
Thirty minutes later I was in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and we heard about parts of the country that have been more or less dry for forty years, about neighborhoods in the city where people produce their own compost and then their own food, and especially about trees . Planting lots of trees.
Green miracle in Ethiopia
The current Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised to do that a few years ago, and our interlocutors in the container in Addis raved about it, about 20 billion trees have been planted in four years. Noting that I haven’t been able to count them, and I don’t know how free everyone in Ethiopia is to talk about the government, but that there is a green miracle going on there, it seems clear to me.
And I could share that we are mainly concerned with protecting trees against highway widening and nitrogen emissions, but that we have the same goal 6000 kilometers apart.
These conversations are of course symbolic, but also real. And the realization that all over the world (Kenya, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Poland, Barbados, Colombia, New York, Anchorage, et cetera) people are doing about the same thing, made me leave the container with hope.
Dolf Jansen is a comedian and writes a weekly column for Trouw. Read his columns here.