Many ecologists now claim that there is nowhere left on Earth that is truly wild, truly untouched by man – certainly nowhere humans haven’t visited. That may be true. Certainly by altering the composition of our atmosphere, oceans and the circulatory climate systems, we have spread our influence: everything that breathes air, now breathes a different number of carbon dioxide molecules; and plants and corals uptake a different ratio of carbon isotopes, for example.

So is this the end of exploration? Have we been everywhere, seen everything? No, we’re only just beginning. A century ago, Rutherford explored our planet’s smallest region: the atom. Now, we’re discovering that he didn’t really understand the geography at all. Explorers at CERN are looking for a key landmark, the Higgs boson, to help re-chart the territory with much greater precision.

The same mapping is happening for the stuff of life, our cells and genetic code, and we’re exploring the ecology of our bodies to find out the mix of microorganisms that live within us and start to understand the myriad of ways that they influence us.

We’re exploring our planet in new, more inclusive ways. We can visit remote places by satellite, by plane imagery and through the readily available journeys of others. We can look at the microscopic all around us and remotely, probe the most furthest depths of our oceans. And in many ways, these explorations provide us with more context than a single journey made by a few brave adventurers. The more humans explore, the more we realise how complex is our planet, its geology and biology.

Travel around our much-trampled world now is still, to me, the most exciting adventure. It remains true exploration, because even if it’s thoroughly charted and mapped and visited by everyone, until I’ve smelt the air, eaten the food, chatted to the people and animals, it’s hardly more real to me than Wonderland or Lilliput. This year promises plenty of exploring for me, although some of it will be virtual, because it’ll have to fit around writing projects. But I do have plans to visit some new places – and to take you with me.

Wishing you a great year of explorations in 2012.

Higgs in June

This year we’re in London, back where we started, Christmassing with our kittens, who weren’t even born last year.

With his two brothers and sister.

Hope your holiday is as relaxing as theirs!

The keepers: Higgs and Mo

Sydney, December 2011

Now that he has gone, the room is as it was before, when this was the spare room, and he slept in the big bed with my grandmother; four years ago, before he got so sick with Parkinson’s that he would call out in the night, thrashing around violently, needing to get up and down and making it impossible for anyone to share his bed. He was a man who filled space – he was big and, because he was kind and funny and clever, people were drawn to him. So that his absence makes the house seem voluminous. My grandmother scuttles uncertainly along corridors, frail and bereft – she lost, with him, her purpose.

My grandparents

On a 4 billion-year-old planet, as a species that’s been in existence maybe 100,000 years, among a global population of five-, six, seven- billion people, living for less than a century, scattered across latitude and longitude, it’s good to have a peg in space and time. He was my peg. An internet-savvy emailer, he was also my link to 19th-Century Europe: he was born during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lived through the First World War and the Second, through the 20th-Century’s depression and Holocaust, communism, socialism and capitalism, was a doctor before penicillin was available, was interviewed on radio about the findings of his research in the slot after Salk presented his rather more spectacular trial results of a vaccine for polio, was witness to the Great Acceleration after 1945 of production, population, agriculture, travel… “Nagypapa, did they have horses and carts when you were a boy?”

His mother, my greatgrandmother

He was my link to my personal past – he knew my life story because he knew me my whole life, and he knew my father all of his life too, and extending my story back further, he knew his life and could tell me about his parents and grandparents. I have his nose, his curiosity and his sense of humour. I share his DNA, all the way back to other Levites of the Middle East. I share his name, but the ancestry of Vince goes back only as far as him – he changed it after surviving fascism to something of undefined ethnicity. Perhaps because he was an atheist, I am an atheist; maybe because he loved books, I love books; because he tried every type of food, I try every food. Unlike me, he was a good skier and tennis player, loved bridge and women, thought post-modern art was a joke and had no ear for music. But when I look at his bookshelves, of the books we’ve both read, I can no longer remember who recommended which to whom. Some are easy: Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Tim Winton (he to me); McEwan, DHLawrence, ASByatt (I to him).

On his 80th birthday

The geography and architecture of the house is the same as before, which is confusing. The pictures on the wall, the many photos of adored grandchildren, the chairs and tables, carpets and light fittings, books and plants are all unchanged. So when I pass the door of his study, I expect to see him in there, sitting behind his desk, a book or the newspaper in his hands, reading. He will glance up, see me and smile widely, beckoning me in. “What do you think about this?” pointing at a report of parochial policy change or global scandal or elections somewhere. I would play him: “Don’t you know I’m an anarchist, Nagypapa.” Or, to wind him up more, “a communist.” And my grandfather, who had escaped a communist dictatorship, to arrive as a refugee in Sydney with his wife and son, would smile sadly, hug me and give me a book to read, like Animal Farm (which had escaped the censors for a while, because they thought it was about agriculture).

Me, my brother and sister as children on the wall of his study

My grandmother and I sit and talk on the terrace, sipping lemonade, reminiscing, aware that things are the same but also that they will never be the same again. I tell her to eat her fruit, I tell her to take care of herself, that she absolutely must not die. No one else I love must die ever. He was my immortality. Once he dies, then it’s possible my parents might one day die. All that is solid falls away. Are we really just intricately arranged chemicals in an ecosystem that lasts only tens of years? But what about my Very Important Life, with its busyness and decisions and deadlines and just general Importance? Is it really just a flash in the 100,000 year timescale of humankind? To realise this is to despair, and so I happily avoid any confrontations with mortality. My grandmother laughs: “I am not getting any younger, Gaia. I’m in no hurry, but I won’t be around forever.” In our culture there is plenty of advice about staying young, looking young, rolling back the years. But no one teaches you how to be old, how to live with pain and disability and the long slow hours of a clock that has an ever shorter time left to tick.

My grandmother

In the drawers of my grandfather’s desk, among his paediatrics journals and driving licence, I find dozens of letters I’ve written to him over the years, cuttings of newspaper articles I’ve written, more photos of us all as children. He loved me so completely and the only tangible things I have of him are these scraps of a life: shared memories in a few minds, and a future shaped by his past.

Me as a child in his study

Connie Hedegaard, EU Climate Commissioner (photo: Mogens Engelund)

This inclusion of all countries in emissions cuts is important not because it’s fair – it isn’t, rich countries got to build their economies at the expense of everyone else’s air, water and health – but because it is essential. Carbon dioxide is an odourless, colourless gas that is opaque to infrared (heat) rays and, as a chemical, it is also utterly apolitical. It makes not the slightest difference whether a tonne of carbon dioxide comes from a poor man’s smokestack in India or a billionaire’s coal plant in Australia. Every tonne of CO2 heats the atmosphere, and we’ve all got to emit less of it. (Actually, if you want an illustration of how ugly investing in coal is, click here.)

Energy provision, on the other hand, is political. Ideally, everyone on the planet would have access to energy for lighting, cooking, heating, transport and communications. The technology and capacity exists to provide this energy in a low-carbon way; whether people have the money to pay for it is another thing – and a political issue. Richer countries have a duty to help poorer countries pay for this clean energy, and all countries have a responsibility to safeguard their current, let alone future, citizens’ right to a liveable planet. And that means developing an economy based on low-carbon options, rather than aping the rich West’s coal-based economies. It means widely distributing clean cookstoves and  better exploiting microhydro, for example, and in places where there is little infrastructure, leapfrogging over the usual coal plant to generator scheme to instead implement the kind of integrated smart grid approach that can take a variety of renewable inputs.

If Connie emerged the heroine from this Durban drama, there were also villains. Canada, which has today formally exited the Kyoto Protocol is a shameful example. Canada is a long way from meeting the emissions reductions it signed up to in 1997, something it will not face any repercussions for, thus shining a glaring light on the weak foundations of the entire process: ‘legally binding’ or ‘with legal force’ are meaningless terms when there is no penalty or body charged with issuing penalties when nations don’t meet their commitments. As it is, the new Durban deal only commits nations to voluntary emissions cuts until a new deal (to be decided) is enacted in 2020. We’ll need a miracle if we are to avoid catastrophic warming at this rate.

Australia, where I am now, relies on coal for three-quarters of its electricity production, despite solar potential that exceeds that almost anywhere else on the planet and plentiful uranium, for example. Climate change is already having a significant impact here: droughts, coral bleaching, flash floods and bush fires. Today, former prime minister John Howard launched a new book aimed at kids by the climate change denier Ian Pilmer, who among other inaccuracies, claims that carbon dioxide is harmless because humans breathe it and plants absorb it. And Howard has also spluttered onscreen that he believes the term climate change ‘denier’ is insulting because of a connotation with Holocaust ‘deniers’. Sigh.

Meanwhile, Australia’s current PM Julia Gillard (Labor) has introduced a carbon tax from July 2012, which, while limited, is progressive and could help put the country on a less expensive path to sustainable energy production. Naysayers, of which there are many in this oddly conservative nation, would do well to realise that this is a welcome opportunity to be at the forefront of the new energy revolution and not let nostalgia for a soon-declining dirty energy market blind them.

Literally a green house exhibited at the conference

But with no agreement likely to be reached before early hours of Saturday, the barrel must be scraped. Yesterday, reporters excitedly wrote up what they interpreted – or willed – to be a change of heart in the US position on agreeing to the EU roadmap that might resuscitate the dying Kyoto Protocol and get us some way out of this mess. The reports, based on a “subtle change in tone” and a “nuance”, but sadly not on US representative Todd Stern’s actual words, were swiftly squashed in a “clarification to the media”, issued by the US State Department. Basically, if the US was to see sense and act on international climate commitments, then Obama better kiss a second term goodbye. Having seen this year’s crop of Republican offerings, I’m willing to forgive him for this otherwise inexplicable moral madness. So, it’s down to China now…

Alternative agriculture on display

Outside the negotiating halls, meetings, lectures and other activities continue. A few Canadian and US students have been ejected from the conference for protesting the lack of urgency and progress on actually doing something about carbon emissions. In a rather unconvincing bid to prove that climate change deniers are not part of the loony fringe, Lord Monckton and Senator Inhofe descended from the skies like a bug-eyed alien and confused old guy, in a parachute stunt that was largely ignored even in these news-straitened times.

Monckton

Pursuing other diversions, I sought out a group of waste-pickers, who are campaigning for greater recognition of the work they do and some protection for their livelihoods as their countries mechanise and develop. Waste-pickers and other ‘informal workers’ are people at the very poorest end of society. They are often homeless or slum-dwellers without basic water, sewerage and electricity provision – often these people have no identity papers or method of receiving government help. In short, waste-picking is the only way that millions of people have of acquiring food for survival.

Africa with this morning's cardboard collection

In the poor world, enterprising individuals can often find a task that needs doing and scrape by on that. As economies become richer, corporations are given contracts to perform these services, and they start to own the space and occupations of the most destitute. In addition, no respectable country wants to see bare-footed rag-wearing tramps bin-diving in its newly shining cities.

Waste-pickers meeting the recycling collection truck

As the countries of Asia, Latin America and, now, Africa start to provide municipal services like waste collection and treatment, conflict is breaking out as corporations seal off landfill sites and security patrols ban people from collecting waste from shops and residences. In response, waste-pickers have been banding together in cooperatives, with the help of NGOs, and have even formed a global alliance to defend their livelihoods.

The waste-pickers are paid according to weight of their collections

The case they make is bigger than their own livelihoods, though. In poor countries, as it should be everywhere, recycling is not a middle-class lifestyle choice, it’s a matter of common sense – there is almost nothing that cannot be re-used or have some further value eked out of it, whether that be feeding it to a cow or having its materials disassembled and sold on by waste-pickers. Governments confronted by waste management issues, however, are contracting companies to deal with it in the most cost-effective way: incineration or landfill.

Waste-pickers recycle more than 95% of rubbish, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, and energy use.

The new cooperatives are making some progress. In some places, such as Pune in India, they now have safer working conditions, including trolleys for their collections, overalls and gloves, and they now get better pay and even schooling for their kids.

Durban has an estimated 15,000 waste-pickers, I learned, and I spoke to Africa, who has been working as a waste picker for 25 years and has never had it so good. Thanks to the help of a charity called Asiye Etafuleni, he now receives a better rate per kilo for the cardboard he collects, a trolley so that he doesn’t have to haul it on his head, and overalls. He’s also now a recognised part of the local economy with waste-collection relationships with businesses.

I made some short videos of my meetings with the waste pickers, but I’m an idiot at editing, filming and generally anything that might make the results look like a watchable video, so apologies for that, but I’ll post the clips anyway.

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China, for example, is growing daily friendlier with Europe, Brazil and South Africa, our very accommodating host. India is not really in the party mood and standing by the snacks complaining of hunger but refusing to eat, while the USA is sulking outside with a filthy cigar, leaving his beleaguered date, Todd Stern, to explain his behaviour.

At the moment, it looks likely that the Kyoto Protocol will be extended (woohoo!) but with big caveats (boo!).

Campaigners for the Kyoto Protocol

Currently, states are split into two Annexes in the protocol, according to how rich they were 20 years ago when the protocol was ratified: the rich ‘developed’ countries are in Annex A, and the poor ‘developing’ countries are in Annex B. Annex A countries was required to cap its emissions over the past decades, but Annex B was not. This is partly because developed countries were the big emitters of greenhouse gases, and partly because it was appreciated that in order to develop their economies the poor countries would need to produce increasing amounts of carbon dioxide. In 2011, though, some countries that in the 1990s were considered ‘developing’, such as China, have now become such significant emitters that their per capita greenhouse gas emissions exceed that for some EU countries, let alone their total emissions. The Guardian has a cool interactive here.

John Prescott in town for a few days

The new proposal currently being negotiated, I understand, is for the introduction of an Annex C, in which would be subject to an emissions cap but at a different volume or rate as those in Annex A. Annex B emerging economies, such as China, Brazil, Mexico and others could become Annex C, distinguishing themselves from, say, Rwanda and Guatemala in Annex B.

It’s ideal on several levels: it wouldn’t require a whole new treaty to be ratified because it’s just an adjustment of the existing protocol; the USA can’t disrupt it because they aren’t a part of the Kyoto Protocol; and it allows the protocol to continue past 2012, rescuing this whole sorry international process.

A cheerful Kofi Annan

Before we crack open the champagne, there are a few niggles to be ironed out – the negotiations have another couple of days to go and delegates would feel cheated if they had to spend them relaxing on the beach rather than sweating it out in a beige conference room. The first problem is India, which refuses to consider any caps on its right to emit – I’ve written about this before, and it does seem crazy that starting as it is from a base level of infrastructure, it doesn’t choose clean energy (like Maldives, for example) over coal, thereby setting itself up for the same tricky grid/energy switch that Europe’s facing now. (It’s like going from no telecomms to installing payphones, rather than directly to cellphones.)

The other issue is the timing of all this and the level of the caps. Europe wants the process to begin in 2015; China is talking 2020. And over what time period will the reductions run? All problematic. But, as the surprisingly trim John Prescott told us yesterday – bearing in mind that the protocol is in many ways his project – it was only in the last 3 hours of negotiations in 1997 that agreement was reached on the Kyoto Protocol. So, it may be a late night for delegates on Friday.

Meanwhile, Japan and Canada are exiting the protocol altogether – a process that simply requires them to send a letter with one month’s notice. For shame.

If the Kyoto Protocol fails to be extended or replaced, the ramifications are serious. For starters, the EU, which leads on climate sensible policy, will never get its 30% greenhouse gas reductions policy agreed, and it’s likely that the current north south global split will prevail in Europe for climate mitigation, as it already does economically. And if rich blocs like the EU can’t act, then what hope for the rest of the world? Impressive moves from Mexico to Brazil will surely falter. Even in China, where domestic policy – led by a top-down respect for science, because the leaders often have a science background – has committed the country to producing 15% of its electricity from non-fossil fuels by 2020, it still opens 1.4 new coal power stations every week (down from 2 a week).

China, though, is not the place that most worries me: it has big plans to be more energy efficient than Japan, to be the leading wind-energy producer, it’s developing smart grids, expanding micro-hydro, and the progress it’s made in cheap PV manufacture have been to the benefit of other developing nations the world over. If China wants to go green, I have no doubt it will – and hopefully before its wildlife and people expire from the pollution there.

Other countries, though, need these international negotiations to succeed, because in this corporate market based society, where a few rich groups set the agenda in so many ways, only strong regulation and binding commitments will produce change.

And did I mention my video is in the exhibition? Here it is (but do visit the exhibition for far more talented offerings):

City on the Indian Ocean

Black kites hang above the city, frangipani flowers are in fragrant bloom and surfers ride the waves off the city beaches. It’s hard not to fall for this clean and relaxed, African city. (Although there is another side to Durban.) The locals are smiling more than usual: with an extra 20-30 thousand visitors in town for the COP 17 climate negotiations, taxi drivers are working around the clock and every hotel and restaurant is fully booked. “I started work today at 2am,” one driver tells me, as he careens around a corner at 7pm, high on adrenaline or something more powerful. In the past two days, I’ve passed 5 junctions hosting serious car crashes, and the top discussion point on local radio is the question of why more delegates aren’t using the free city bikes provided by the conference organisers. This, incidentally, is in a city where car use is almost a necessity because public transport provision is so poor.

Hand-pulled rickshaws ply the modern streets

The conference centre behemoth is abuzz with happy-looking delegates, despite the negotiation pessimism. This is presumably because the pale and fraught looking people from the north are delighted to see the sun again, and the southern delegates are just glad to be away at an event where people are interested to hear their stories. All the usual agencies are here manning exhibition stands and issuing documents, from the influence-wielding scientific institutions and NGOs to the fringe campaign groups, some of which border on the loony. Among the delegates, the same rule holds. These annual, international climate conferences, which have been going for nearly two decades, have become an enjoyable lifestyle choice for some people. For others, it’s a frustrating process that sees the annual presentation of scientific findings increasingly caked in political excuse and delay.

Rachel Kyte of the World Bank is a reliably good speaker, unlike so many other delegates

There are some cool ideas on show, including a Korean university pilot project to make paper and biofuels from red seaweed plantations, which “avoids deforestation, provides marine ecosystem services and sequesters carbon”. Another project aims to avoid deforestation by poor people, who use timber to make charcoal fuel to sell for food, by replacing the wood with fast-growing bamboo – the charcoal produced looks like hollow rods.

Women face the biggest impacts from climate change and this year's conference has several events with the gender theme

In terms of the actual negotiations, there have been a few positive developments already, and it’s still early days because most of the parties are only arriving in Durban today. The push to pay (or ‘compensate’) poor people for conserving rainforests, rather than chopping the trees for charcoal, timber, agriculture, grazing and other lucrative pursuits, received a boost. Delegates have agreed a mechanism for measuring avoided deforestation in terms of the carbon stored in the living trees, and how this will be regulated and reported in a transparent way. This is actually a pretty important step. At the moment, individuals, corporations and industry that want to pay – or are compelled to through carbon cap policy – for their greenhouse gas emissions (‘offsetting’ them) use this ‘REDD’ system to fund avoided deforestation in the tropics, equivalent to the amount of carbon emitted.

Could vegetarianism save the planet?

The system is full of flaws and obstacles, but since it’s the only mechanism currently available to get polluters to pay for carbon storage, it is certainly worth pursuing. Later this week, delegates will try to thrash out the funding issues for the REDD system so that international agreement can be reached in a legally binding manner. They will almost certainly fail. But, in the mean time, the achievement made around the technicalities of how to measure and regulate the system, can be used in smaller-scale schemes between individual countries (such as Norway and Brazil) or subnationally between rich and poor states, such as California and Amazonas.

The development that has the biggest potential to overturn the entire stultifying UNFCCC process and render it a successful and progressive business, is the suggestion that China may be willing to agree to legally binding emissions targets. This would be such an exciting prospect, that I hardly dare report it. But in a couple of press conferences and interviews here, Chinese delegates (including Xie Zhenhua, who heads the Chinese delegation) have hinted that they would agree to caps from 2020 or even 2015. The wording is careful and, of course, key, so it’s not sure exactly what China means. If it is agreeing simply to the cuts laid out in previous agreement – ie, for ‘developed’ countries (as defined in the 1990s) to cut their emissions, while China continues its dirty development trajectory – then it is saying nothing new. But it’s possible that China is now willing to engage with this important process.

If so, then that would leave India – which would surely capitulate – and the USA as party poopers. The US has had China’s position to justify its own crazy selfishness (between the two countries, they emit 40% of global carbon emissions). Without a Chinese excuse, it would be isolated, taking a stand with the likes of Russia and Saudi Arabia. And it is likely that the rest of the world would simply continue the process of negotiations, making progress without US hindrance.

Right, I’m off for a tasty Bunny Chow.

Female gorilla in Rwanda

Now, I’m preparing to head for Durban in South Africa, where the world’s leaders gather next week to negotiate how we will reduce the anthropogenic climate change threats, including of melting glaciers in Nepal, drought in Rwanda and acidifying oceans around the Galapagos. The likelihood that heads of state will experience a collective epiphany over the coming fortnight – in which, knowing the world’s top scientists’ predictions of dire consequences for humanity (in the rich and poor world) if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut NOW, they decide to put aside the problems of social construct (like the economy) to deal decisively with problems of the Earth’s physical limits – is slim to nil.

With Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, in London

Data show that global carbon emissions are soaring, in 2010 we pumped record amounts into the atmosphere – a 6% jump, which is the highest year-on-year rise and worse than the IPCC’s 2007 worst-case scenario. The gap between our furious trajectory and the path we need to be on by 2020 if we are to remain within the ‘safe’ warming of 2 degrees, can still be bridged – and cheaply – according to UNEP. Current pledges, let alone action, are way off target, and every country has by now experienced some effect of climate change, whether it be warmer seas or land, drought, floods or extreme weather. All the political players at this month’s negotiations agree that climate change is a real problem that needs addressing.

It seems unbelievable, then, that many developed and developing nations are approaching the crucial opportunity for action and progress at Durban with preprepared excuses. The US and Saudia Arabia are refusing to sign off on the international Green Climate Fund, in which rich countries help poor ones to adapt to climate change. Other countries are talking about agreement in 2015 or as late as 2020, as if it were somehow possible to negotiate with physics.

Turkana woman, northern Kenya, which has endured nearly a decade of drought

Preventing climate change seems to have become perceived as some enormous, expensive – almost insurmountable – problem. Governments seem to think that by agreeing to any sort of emissions target, they are giving valuable ground and weakening their state’s diplomatic position – as if there were some benefit in being inefficient, polluting and slow to grow a clean-tech industry.

However, even though international agreement grows daily less likely, there has been progress at a national level. Emerging nations from China to Brazil to Mexico to India have taken often quite major steps towards a green-growth economy, and even the smallest and poorest countries have issued low-carbon development and action plans, from Bangladesh to Rwanda to the Maldives. Small disconnected steps to solving an enormous global crisis.

Energy decisions made now will determine whether orang utans survive the next decades

Politicians may be unwilling to look further ahead than their next election, but some sectors regularly do look to the future for daily decision making, such as pension fund managers and other longterm investors. Industry is taking the risks of climate change on board and acting accordingly. Some believe that we may have reached a tipping point for momentum on carbon action from businesses - they are forging ahead and setting their own carbon standards. At the same time, whatever the ludicrous desire of government and energy companies to build new coal-fired power stations is, in Europe (apart from Poland), they are falling at the first hurdle: pension funds won’t invest in them, because they represent a poor prospect. Even if there is little disincentive to releasing CO2 from coal now, investors know that the time will soon come when the price of carbon will impact any financial returns.

But this momentum is fragile and must be nurtured. Without binding agreements over how much each nation can be allowed to emit and a price put on carbon to allow markets to innovate and adapt, these efforts will falter. I sometimes wonder where we would be now, if Jimmy Carter had served another term, or Al Gore had made it to office. But there is little point in such musings.

Children in Madagascar. More than one-third of people do not have electricity

The difficulty with curbing carbon emissions is not one of cost (it’s really not that expensive), or of technology (we have the knowhow) or even of electoral support – most people believe we should act on this global issue. Instead, the problem is more to do with an intrinsic societal stasis: We operate in a world built on and optimised for working with plentiful fossil fuels. Alternatives to coal are a first step; moving away from fossil fuels entirely, is the goal, and that means tough policies on transport and agriculture. Energy markets must be reformed from the 20th-century goal of cheap fossil energy, towards optimising low-carbon production and distribution nationally and across regions. Financial risk must be managed, so investors provide capital to build the infrastructure for 21st-century industrial revolution.

Around 2 billion people on the planet don’t have access to electricity – and the rest of us are certainly not going to stop needing it anytime. We have constructed a global economy based on making a few people in a few countries rich. Resolving the climate change problem means tackling social inequality within nations as well as between them, while reconfiguring markets to incentivise low-carbon energy production.

Social change is key to sustainable management of our shared resources

Absolutely key to a sustainable future must be a new social movement – an engaged civic society that actively works against social inequality at a community level right through to the top echelons. The Occupy movements we’ve seen in several cities might well be the first stirrings of such an action – indeed, they may hold some sort of protest in Durban – but the movement is disparate and is so far not being taken seriously by governments. In the 1930s and 1960s, people campaigned for social change on a far bigger scale; the change needed now, must be still bigger and, crucially, occur faster. The planet won’t wait and people will grow hungry.

East Africa is the birthplace of humanity

Climate change is perhaps the most serious problem ever to affect the poor. But people will not die solely because of changes in the weather. The majority of the deaths occurring now and in the future “due to climate change” are as much to do with inequalities, poor governance, social, technological and economic failings, as with meteorological alteration. This is a good thing, because it’s much harder to change the weather than introduce good and effective policy change.

Let’s try to be good ancestors.