Chris Stone – Swarthmore at COP29

Nothing for Us, Without Us

by Chris Stone ’23 (he/they)

The sun rises on my final flight out of Egypt.

Let me start off by following up on a few of the things I was looking for in my last blog post:

Yes, I did find a handful of other peers from Myanmar.
Yes, I did find a better understanding of why it matters that I attended this conference.

The two are closely tied. After panels, there’s often space made for the audience to pose questions to the panelists or contribute comments based on the topics raised. Through these opportunities, I spoke about issues concerning Myanmar and it’s people, both within the country and outside of it. It was a chance to bring to light that even if we aren’t being brought to the table, our voices should still be heard. I’m reminded of the slogan that across the Pakistan Pavilion.

The slogan, “What goes on in Pakistan won’t stay in Pakistan”.

The mentality by those in positions of power that the issues they’ve caused within the sacrifice zones, ones they benefit from, won’t have any negative repercussions disregards the ways we are inextricably linked. The climate catastrophes in the Global South and reconstructions of the Global South won’t stay there either. As to the campaign led by the Climate Action Network International (CAN-I) on Friday: The Flood Is Coming, and that means to everywhere.

Similar to the pavilions themselves, sharing my voice publicly at the conference drew others toward me. At first, those people included high schoolers to professionals interested in what I was sharing about heritage, (climate) refugees, and food systems. Until finally, after one event, I met several friends from Myanmar at once working on issues from indigenous advocacy to climate finance. I was overjoyed, even while we had to jump between English and Burmese to keep up the conversation, to meet others also conscious of how often topics around climate change are quick to brush over the needs of people in Myanmar. It gave me clarity that the direction I have been heading in hasn’t been for nothing after all.

Having lunch with my new friends from Point Myanmar, an advocacy group for indigenous peoples in Myanmar. I had the chance to have some homemade lahpet thoke!

It also became clear to me how my platform can be used to share information that those who remain in the country may not be able to speak up about without risking their livelihoods. This was a harder thing to face, both that as diaspora I had the power to address a particular leverage point at the seams of systems of oppression, and that it might mean all the longer that I am unable to go back.

I think back to how I felt when I first learned the term transgender. Joy: the past fourteen years of my life finally made sense. Fear: the rest of my life will be spent facing discrimination.

Joy: I have a whole community and history of trans folx to stand alongside.

It may be a long time till I return to Myanmar… but as I eat lunch alongside the Asian Pacific Islander Caucus, where uncles and aunties have brought back food they cooked back in the places they’re staying, I know that home is here too.

A mix of goodies including: Laphet Thoke from Myanmar, a “Filipino dish made with Malaysian ingredients that tastes Nepali”, and both white and purple rice.

The networks that others had been connecting me to while I had been searching for others from Myanmar were not for nothing either. Through them, I found opportunities to participate in some of the demonstrations happening around the conference. In these messages, I learned that the venue had designated action zones and that these actions had received approval from the UNFCCC, though I’m not sure how many action zones there are, where they all are, or how many actions actually receive approval.

The majority of demonstrations I saw took place at “Action Zone 1”, right by the entrance, though I saw demonstrations at two other locations. Primarily led by BIPOC folx, they were for the purposes of demanding loss and damage finance or climate reparations or for demanding an end to fossil fuels. The two I participated in were organized around youth and Asian identities.

Asian People’s Movement Loss and Damage Demonstration

As soon as we showed up, signs were handed out to us, so we could jump right in. One person would take point on the mic, explaining the purpose of this demonstration, sharing chants with the rest of the rally, and passing off the mic to others to share their stories. Stories that showcased how the people experiencing the very worst of climate change are the least responsible for it. Sometimes people would jump in to share chants from their own related movements, and I don’t just mean in terms of campaigns, but also cultural songs and dance of political resistance.

The People!
United!
Will Never Be Defeated!

During the demonstrations, I had men touch and move my body without my consent. There were men who would repeatedly move me out of the way to get a closer shot of someone else, or raise a camera directly into my face, or grab the sign I held beyond my reach, only to hand it back to me once their colleague was done taking a photo of them. Even while feeling empowered to be in solidarity, I marveled in the ways our actions seemed to be interpreted as a photo op.

Despite being surrounded by cameras, I heard some organizers reflect that they themselves were unable to take any photos because reporters and passersby were blocking organizers from getting to each other. They would just have to hope that they’d get photos later. As someone without mainstream social media personally, I still found pictures of me online.

No more blahblahblah
Loss and Damage Finance Now!

At one panel, an executive from a Big Tech company expressed:

Maybe it’s a good thing that the conference is taking place in countries like Egypt, and should continue to do so. It forces global leaders to see what it’s like on the ground and it will motivate them to actually take action.

Unfortunately, I cannot help but disagree. The Global North already takes their chances to travel to the Global South as an opportunity to engage in the tourism economy (or even the more philanthropic “voluntourism”) that perpetuates the commodification of cultures and is not doing anyone favors. As we see this conference stress test the capacity of Egypt to respond to the high expectations of leaders and delegates from the luxuries of “developed” countries in the Global North, I would be pained to see this repeated again and again across the Global South. Frankly, people from the Global South and reconstructions of the Global South in the Global North have been stating clearly for decades what the circumstances are like as a consequence of climate change. Instead of coming into our homes and gawking, listen to us. These people do not exist to perform as trauma porn just so that the Global North will take us seriously.

Pay Up!
Pay Up!
Pay Up for Loss and Damage!

It’s true that developed countries are the most responsible for climate change, that’s why they’ve been given the responsibility to take leadership in reducing their impact. However, so long as they remain accountable to themselves, the conversations will keep centering their issues foremost conference after conference. I believe that if instead, the so-called “developing” countries, countries treated as “poor” when we are rich in our own ways, were centered in leadership, then there would be no COP27. We might have resolved this all a long time ago.

A loss and damage demonstration on the way from the pavilions to the plenary rooms.

You giant carbon emitters, you owe us this money!… Let’s not go to COP28 with the same conversations! For how long are we going to talk about climate finance? Every COP, every COP we get and have conversations, same conversations! Can we get done with climate finance on COP27, please? Next year, COP28, let’s have other conversations! We can’t keep talking about the same. We are wasting time, resources, money, everything, we are wasting a lot of time. It’s overdue. This money will help a lot of countries that have a lot of loss and damage. Please pay up today! Thank you.
Transcription from the demonstration

Also, make sure to check out the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Key Takeaways on Climate Finance:

Climate change will not be solved by financial mechanisms – they are a cause of it. Real solutions foreground Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth, not financial institutions.

Climate Reparations Now

by Chris Stone ’23 (he/they)

On the bus from the airport to my hotel, my first sunset in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Where are you from?

I’m from the US.

Okay, but where are you really from?

It’s a question I’ve often been asked at the COP 27 conference.

It’s a question that usually makes me cringe, as an Asian American and one of the few in my family to be born in the US. It’s a question that comes tinged with a sense that somehow every Asian is a new pervasive immigrant despite several hundreds of years of Asians in America (see: The Making of Asian America by Erika Lee, 2015). With it goes the myth of the American Dream, of being a “model minority” who can achieve being “American” if we just pick ourselves up by the bootstraps.

However, here at COP 27, it’s a question I am, for once, excited to answer:

I’m Burmese Chinese, and my parents immigrated from Myanmar.

And after some chatting, we get to the point where I clarify that Myanmar is not at this conference.

Neither were they last year, after the return of the military coup in February 2021, striking violence across the country in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. I remember that day, feeling my face getting heated, my throat closing up, and my eyes starting to water. I remember the unbearable frustration I shared with the few other peers with ethnic heritage from Myanmar I had, seeping out and spilling over. Just as we had grown up struggling to search for legitimate streams of information about what was going on in the country outside what we knew from those we were directly connected to—some of us furthermore illiterate in our native languages—our calls to action for international support made far from the headlines, or the headlines that did were riddled with disinformation.

Yet, as the country is a member of the UN, I still found this sign in the overflow room for the plenary.

A sign that says Myanmar on a table in a room with many other tables in front facing rows.

I’m excited to share my ethnic heritage with people in the hopes I might find someone else out there from an ethnic group of Myanmar. To have a connection with more than a plastic sign here. Even with my complex feelings about the notion of a “national identity” around “Myanmar”, I knew the exclusion of the country would be one of the largest defining factors in my ability to find other members of the diaspora. I knew it would mean the global conversations around climate change would move on without acknowledging the people in that country, my friends and family, who have been undergoing floods at unprecedented scales across the recent years, putting a global biodiversity hot spot at risk. It’s my fourth day here, and I have been thankful to the many people who have tried to connect me to groups that might be able to help… but I still haven’t succeeded.

This will not stop my search.

On the other hand, what I did find were other youth who shared similar sentiments:

Oh, I am/We are also from a community that is not represented at this conference, attending through other means.

These peers too understood the experience of being of communities that are silenced from the international political dialogue, one that has been structurally designed to erase us. We sit as observers in negotiation rooms as jargon flies by, we sit as the pressure of what all these conversations are supposed to mean to us creeps in. We ask each other:

So… why we even here?
And is that enough?

Am I doing enough, to carry the burden of all my ancestors before me who worked hard so I could be here now?

It’s hard to watch, as people move in groups all around me, connected by one thing or the other, while feeling so incredibly aware of how, if not for colonialism, imperialism, you name it… there would be others like me too. It’s certainly not a new feeling, but it is one that hits different each time it comes up again.

Suddenly, I feel so small.

Though, having someone that understands makes me feel, a little less small, and a little more of a sense of belonging.

I am reminded of a quote that too, re-emerges just as often:

There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
Arundhati Roy

Marginalized peoples, whether acknowledged by international political powers or not, have never been “voiceless”. We have been fighting for hundreds of years. Our voices continue to ring on.

There have been many references to the centerpiece of this COP:

This is the year that COP 27 actually moves towards acting on implementation.
This is the year that COP 27 actually centers food systems.
This is the year that COP 27 actually supports youth participation.
This is the year that COP 27 actually addresses loss and damage.

Well, I can tell you for a fact that this is the year that COP 27 has a Climate justice Pavilion in the Blue Zone, in spite of representing people that would otherwise be in the Green Zone, one-off events to check off the “diversity” requirement of their programming, or not present at all. I am thankful to have had the invitation to volunteer with them during my time in the conference through one of the main organizers WeACT for Environmental Justice. One of WeACT’s top community priorities is energy security and I connected with them through Young Professionals in Energy-NYC’s mentorship program.

I am continuously starstruck to meet environmental justice leaders whose works I’ve read in class or podcasts I’ve listened to while on the subway or online webinars I attended from my bedroom, and to be actively part of the work to support them. I could only describe this as a fraction of the amount of gratitude I have. Their work has pushed me to further dive into decolonizing my own identity, and working for and with community.

Dr. Beverly Wright introducing the first panelists and opening of the pavilion

As the first event “Global Afro Descendant Climate Justice Collaborative” unfolded, the energy could be felt in the room:

One chants: What do we want?
All join in: Climate Justice!
One: When do we want it?
All: Now!

Now. Now!

Now is and always has been and always will be, across every moment in the movement for social justice, the time for those responsible for the climate chaos we are experiencing to compensate those from which they have extracted from and disproportionately sacrificed, from Black and brown communities in the Global South and the reconstructions of Global South within the Global North.

There is no climate justice without social justice. Until then, none of us are free.

The panelists made it explicit: racism is baked into COP27 proceedings. Climate reparations must be in dialogue, must be paid up, and must be noted as only a piece to addressing a history of systemic injustice.

Having voices from climate justice communities be represented for the “good optics” is not enough. They need to be centered, and actions must be taken to implement the solutions that will genuinely address the needs for/with/by those at the frontlines. An example of an approach to this is what Dr. Robert Bullard would refer to as “community-based participatory research”.

My hand holding a copy of Hoodwinked in the Hothouse

A member of Climate Justice Alliance stopped by to hand off copies of the latest edition of Hoodwinked in the Hothouse: Resist False Solutions to Climate Change. I recognized it right away. After all, one of the contributing organizations, Energy Justice Network, collaborate along with Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) to engage Swarthmore College students in the Environmental Justice courses and Campus Coalition Concerning Chester (C4) in the fight against the nation’s largest incinerator for “waste to energy” (a common false solution) located in the city of Chester.

Chester, less than 4 miles away from our campus, is a predominantly low-income African American community faced with generations of health conditions due to the toxins they were being forced to live with in the air. Air that travels along to even our seemingly unaffected predominately white institution located on an arboretum designed on stolen land. CRCQL has been in this fight for over 20 years, and they have been told before that if did not take the trash coming in from all across the US, then it would be sold to be shipped and dumped to another country in Africa—perpetuating the global waste trade (see: Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice by David Pellow, 2007).

If you don’t think you live in an environmental justice community, then you’re living next to one.
Zulene Mayfield, while visiting our class last year

After the second event of the day at the pavilion, “Climate Litigation in South Africa: Vulnerable communities resisting fossil fuels and protecting their right to participation (Earthjustice)”, members from the audience joined in to share their experiences, their fights, their wins, and their strategies, from Liberia to Zimbabwe to Puerto Rico, picking up between each other while sharing their truths. Local revolutions collectively all part of one big revolution, reminding me of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs, 2011.

The Blue Zone’s dominant operating narratives put global climate justice stakeholders at a dissonance from one another. Climate Justice Pavilion is not just a site of resistance to dismantle these narratives, it is a site of healing and grounding. The Climate Justice Pavilion structurally configures itself subversively, building power and kinship in solidarity for a just climate transition across cultures, faiths, and generations.