Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
is not yet personal for many more affluent
citizens around the world. We need to explore
deeper how we can be with that information in
a place of intensity and chaos. It seems clear
that we need to find new ways to problems
solve – be more soft, spongelike and receptive.
The latest UN Climate Change Conference
in Copenhagen in December 2009 failed to
agree on a deal to tackle Climate Change.
The failure of Copenhagen makes it clear that
Copenhagen is read in very different ways by
different people and that there is no common
path towards change. There is the issue
and challenge as to how to connect scientific
research to legal and political measures - a
gulf between law and all sciences seems to
preclude such an exchange. Law has a very
difficult time absorbing science and jurists
reinterpret scientific work through a legal lense
often obfuscating the results. So while some
make sense of the failures at Copenhagen (also
referred to as “Brokenhagen”, “Tokenhagen”
or “Hopenhagen”) as the climate negotiations
being highly complex and too technical for the
politicians and lawyers, the author argues that
we need to look still deeper than that.
To many people it was no surprise that
Copenhagen failed, given a negotiation
process of such Byzantine complexity and the
fact that most negotiating teams are mandated
to defend the rights of their country to continue
using oil and coal to fuel economic growth
unless they are paid not to (Cullinan, 2009).
For some critics the mainstream prescriptions
amount to a complex politics of cooptation
that leaves intact the underlying framework of
economics and the market that is inimical to
nature in the first place. Although the climate
challenge is receiving a lot of attention these
days, the global temperature increase is but
a symptom. The planet has a ‘fever’, and it
is essential to identify the disease in order to
prescribe the right medication(Dahle, 2010: 87)
(Lovelock, 2006). Those who focus exclusively
on solutions are rather like doctors who only
prescribe and never diagnose (Orr, 2009:xv).
The solutions most talked about are
technological and so neither require nor result
in any particular improvement in our behavior,
politics, or economics that brought us to
our present situation in the first place (Orr,
2009:xv). That some corporations have got the
new religion on energy efficiency or greening
their operations or carbon-trading schemes
pales besides the fact that none is capable in
Korten’s words of “voluntarily sacrificing profits
to a larger public good” (Korten, 2007).
Decolonising Nature – Knowledge
of Nature and the Nature of Nature
A view from the World People’s Conference
on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother
Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April 2010
for example is that the corporations and
governments of the so-called “developed”
countries, in complicity with a segment of the
scientific community, have led us to discuss
climate change as a problem limited to the rise
in temperature without questioning the cause,
which is the capitalist system. In other words
COP is viewed as an attempt to only deal with
effects, better allocating the pollution pie so to
speak – using science to allocate maximum
levels of pollution. The current international
negotiations focus on political agreements
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