Messages to America from the UN Climate Change Treaty in Copenhagen, Denmark 2009

Excerpt and Quote of the day

Posted by cdchase on December 10, 2009 | 2 Comments

While negotiations in Copenhagen in open session and behind closed doors struggled with difficult conflicts, my first choice for the quote of day is this excerpt from President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech which I hope inspires everyone at COP15 to rise above their politics and seek common ground.

“…a just peace includes not only civil and political rights — it must encompass economic security and opportunity. For true peace is not just freedom from fear, but freedom from want.

It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can’t aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.

And that’s why helping farmers feed their own people — or nations educate their children and care for the sick — is not mere charity. It’s also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement — all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action — it’s military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance.

Agreements among nations. Strong institutions. Support for human rights. Investments in development. All these are vital ingredients…. And yet, I do not believe that we will have the will, the determination, the staying power, to complete this work without something more — and that’s the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share.”

It is appalling to witness the long lists at COP15 of damages both happening and foreseen – from the acidification of the oceans to the desertification of lands; from the loss of biodiversity to the melting of the Arctic. What is it we cannot understand when we hear these problems? How can we keep dithering over the costs as the costs continue to mount? Is it because the suffering and lives lost are not perceived to be our own?

It seems obvious that we have lost touch with not just our moral imaginations – but with the interconnectedness of life on earth itself.

Which brings me to my second choice for quote of the day:

“Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” John Muir