The Next Eco-Warriors (4 page)

Everywhere I went, I worked with mainstream media, shooting any and all environmental stories I could and exposing the movement's fight to the masses. There was a revolution in the camera. I had begun to understand that in the Galapagos but grew more passionate about it over the years. I believed that capturing environmental news from inside the battle exposed people to a world many didn't even know existed. To me, it was simply good journalism and effective activism—the two went hand in hand. So I was heading to Copenhagen, to cover the biggest story of them all, for it was sure to be this generation's biggest battle yet. But would it be enough?

Bouncing off the plane in Denmark, I was beaming. The airport was packed down the corridor with posters from Greenpeace and WWF alike, reminding us all what was at stake. A contrasting mosaic of individuals bustled out onto the subways, from habit-wearing nuns to Indigenous Peruvians in traditional wear, from cowboys to hippies, from corporate sellouts to top-tier negotiators. In the center of the city was a sixty-five-foot (19.8-meter) green globe you couldn't miss for miles, on which images of the Earth were projected, and a concert called “Hopenhagen Live,”
where companies like Coca-Cola sold “hope” in bottle form and the ignorant masses danced. It was a climate circus, and the feeling of being utterly alone began to sink in for the first time.

Everyone there had a purpose, everyone there had a mission, everyone there had a group of people they were with. Either you were affiliated with a nonprofit organization, a science body, or a governance of some sort, or you were in the way. Or at least that's the way it felt. Having lost a media gig and media partner just days before my flight, I was determined to still be in Copenhagen for this crucial moment in the
saga to save the planet
, and I was equally if not more determined to have an actual reason to be there, even if this all meant doing it by myself.

Desperate to find any job I could, I latched on to a volunteer correspondent opportunity for MTV News Canada. I would cover the Copenhagen summit, engaging youth back home in one of the most important issues of our time, maybe even inspiring others to get involved. This coverage would be a window into a world otherwise unrelatable to young people. I couldn't have asked for a better gig.

The only catch was I had to do it all alone: be my own camerawomen, reporter, editor, and techie, sending my clips through cyberspace and back in time for the six o'clock show in Toronto that day. Long days and little sleep were ahead, but I had done this before and I knew I could do it again. Yet what I was not ready for was what was about to happen inside the summit.

_________

WITHIN THE FIRST FEW DAYS, a leaked document called the “Danish Text” exposed the inequalities of the summit before it had even really begun. The text was a draft climate proposal between the Group of Eight nations that virtually backroomed the negotiations, making a mockery of the multilateral United Nations process. It was also the quintessential blueprint for the negotiation procedures, dotting the lines for effectively excluding the most vulnerable countries, such as island states and developing nations. Those that will be most severely impacted, those that are the least responsible, and those pushing the most ambitious targets.

In response to the “Danish Text,” the Group of Seventy-Seven leader, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, walked out of the conference in that first week in protest. Representing more than a hundred developing nations that felt sidelined, he temporarily shut down the negotiations. Despite this, the exclusivity continued into the second week. As security ramped up with heads of state beginning to arrive to the summit, thousands of members of accredited civil societies were closed off from the negotiations. By the end of the week, only three hundred of the twenty-four thousand civilians present were allowed to participate.

Being literally shut out of the gates myself, I knew it was more than just a security measure, but an attempt to stifle public involvement. As a friend of mine, Clive Tesar, who was working with WWF told me, “excluding civil society essentially strips the process of its passion and grounding.”

Media too was being excluded. Orwellian “red zones” were established, restricting where, what, and who reporters could cover. The summit was essentially being censored, while the deal itself desperately needed questioning. In the final days, a leaked UN document showed that the climate deal on the table would mean a three-Celsius-degrees (5.4 Fahrenheit degrees) temperature rise—a far cry from the two Celsius degrees (3.6 Fahrenheit degrees) scientists say is safe and world leaders had agreed to. It was a deal that virtually guaranteed cooking the planet.

Then came the final day, the Obama day, the day the United States would pronounce its climate providence to the world. This was the sink-or-swim moment. It seemed as if all were holding their breaths. This could have been a defining time that changed the direction of the negotiations, if only politics back in the States weren't gridlocked by a few select senators. Instead, it was another well-written speech that fell empty.

For some, President Obama then attempted to salvage the pieces of a broken summit by holding a closed meeting with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa—which became known as the BA SIC Group—to hash out an agreement among some of the world's biggest polluters in secret. For others, it was nothing more than that “Danish Text” realized, a well-orchestrated dress rehearsal that had finally come to its stage with its main actors: excluding
most of the world leaders and the majority of people from having a say to instead allow the biggest polluters and their self-interests to decide the fate of our world. For me, the only thing worse would have been if a black hole had sucked up the universe in that instant.

I found myself at the activist convergence space, shaking, trembling, and defeated. I knew the summit was a wash at this point, but didn't want to say it out loud. Instead, just suicidal fantasies fogged my mind. I know that may sound overly dramatic, but I had made no difference whatsoever, none of us had. Despite all the best intentions, all the hard work, and years upon years of sacrificing for this moment—
poof
—it was all gone. Vanished with two words: Copenhagen Accord, the so-called climate deal that only added injury to an insulting failure of a conference.

After two years of intense negotiations to establish this treaty—some would say even twelve years' work with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997—it all ended in a few hours of a secret meeting with a few heads of state that created an alternative text. A noncommittal draft that circumnavigated the UN multilateral process and fell far below scientific demands. We didn't get any of our requests for a “binding, fair, and ambitious” deal. Civil society's message was so clear and yet we got none of it. If anything, this Accord had now created a path for climate tyranny, doing away with the shaping of a global treaty and putting most at the mercy of those few that predominantly created the problem.

Some might say that the only way to accomplish a climate deal is to negotiate strictly with the biggest polluters, and that the world is too divergent to unite on any single issue. Maybe there is some merit in that, but one thing I do know is that if I have ever seen one thing unite us, it is our very basic need to survive. In the last few years, people have crossed boundaries, divides, and oceans for the purposes of uniting on one issue. What many say is impossible may be impossible for the elites and politicians but is very probable for us, the masses. Despite all our differences, single issues, and criticism of one another, we are uniting, uniting in the face of climate change. It is the umbrella issue of our generation.

To testify to this, four thousand cities, in 128 countries, with nearly one billion people—that's nearly one-sixth the Earth's population—participated
in Earth Hour in 2010, turning off their lights to support the fight against the climate crisis. In its first year, the
350.org
movement synchronized more than 5,200 events in more than 180 countries to perform climate rallies. CNN later called it “the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.”

In my home country of Canada, where I felt the environmental movement was in its grave, nearly five thousand individuals showed up in the nation's capital for Power Shift 2009, a youth-oriented demand for an energy shift. The reality is the movement was widespread and growing—from social justice spectrums to environmental justice spectrums to apathetic spectrums— all because climate change was uniting us, in a way that people like my father had only dreamed possible.

So to say that the world cannot unite on one issue and that therefore only the elites should make the decisions for us is simply not true. The elite power structures have created the problem, not the solution. The only question is, can the masses defeat an elite tyranny in a time when the clock is ticking against our own self-made apocalypse? I guess only time will tell, and only the growth of this revolution—and I mean
revolution
—will save us.

_________

JUST DAYS BEFORE THE MISERABLE END TO THE SUMMIT, I decided to do something. Instead of just watching complacently the slow death of the negotiations, I wanted to stand up against the climate tyranny. I took my camera to document the action I was about to be a part of and a chocolate bar to keep me happy. What can I say, I'm an emotional eater.

It was a usual rainy, bone-chilling morning in Copenhagen. But this morning, I was looking for trouble. In the wee hours, I searched for convergence
spots in the city that had masses of activists and less cops, as I knew there were going to be takedowns. I met up with a guy named Dave Vasey, a Canadian anti–tar sands activist I had met in Copenhagen, and we decided to buddy up that day so at least one person would know if either one of us got caught and jailed.

Waiting outside at a subway station for a critical mass of activists, we could see that all of a sudden the police were getting ready to pounce. Letting other activists know as we skimmed our way past onlookers, we booked it for an empty highway. Just escaping arrest, we got completely lost on the stretch of cement that went as far as the eye could see, and we didn't know where else to go. Making the rounds of calls on his mobile, Dave soon found the location of a successful contingent of activists making their way to the summit grounds. We jumped a fence and ran for it.

Before I knew it, Dave and I arm-linked ourselves to strangers, connecting to more than four thousands activists in one block. The police had taken down the three other activist blocks already. But by noon, our block had made its way close to the summit grounds; we just had to get past a fortress of riot cops. We did. Pushing and squeezing, with some getting arrested, we broke past the police barricade and onto a bridge in front of the summit.

We were exactly where we wanted to be, the place some among us didn't believe we would reach. There we were, standing in front of the summit. To keep ourselves there, we had to hold our ground. We all became a wall holding the cops out to keep ourselves in. Dave and I were in the middle of it all. At first it was exhilarating. When push came to shove, we pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back to keep our lines. Except soon the space between us activists became less and less and less. My body, my rib cage, my lungs felt as if they were being pressed, even flattened, until I almost couldn't inhale and couldn't see the top of anyone's head. I felt like a teenage girl in the mosh pit of a rock concert. Dave saw me and picked me out.

We moved, but we just happened to move to the frontlines. Standing there, catching my breath and bearings, I was arm-linked again to people from around the world, people who fought on diverse issues but were united
in this one moment, people who were the faces of a new movement, and people I was proud to stand beside. But as I stood there on the frontlines, yet again staying quiet, holding my position, and trying to look tough in front of snarling guys (this time cops), I couldn't help but think about how in war, this is usually where the soldiers get killed.

I won't lie; I was petrified. I had already seen the police wrath firsthand in the push and shove, as they beat young and old with batons till they were bludgeoned, pepper-sprayed people directly in the eyes, and herded us like cattle. It was one of the scariest moments of my life when a cop riot van came up toward me looking as if it was going to run me over.

But I stood my ground; so did we all. In response to their attempt to silence our opposition on the streets and kill our future on the negotiating table, our generation finally stood up and said, “No more.” We took a world stage in front of the conference center, with all the world's media paying attention to our fight. Creating a circle, activists held off the cops. Inside the circle, we began our own dialogue, a dialogue on the future we wanted, not that of a select few elites who would never come to see the consequences of their actions.

There was a lot of things said—
an end to neoliberalism, down with capitalism, Copenhagen was an orchestrated failure, we need to make the movement accessible to all
—and then all of a sudden, I heard it:

“This is the dawning of a new movement,”
an anonymous activist yelled out on a megaphone.

After a week of being stepped on and beaten to the ground—at least that's what I felt had happened to my soul—I had the first genuine reason to have hope again. Why? Because I knew these words were true. As I stared at the brave faces of the women and men around me, who were fighting and constructing a new narrative, I knew right there and then this was the
beginning of a new era. It wasn't just that the sparks were flying, as in my Sea Shepherd days, but that the fire was now burning, and brightly.