“…I remember, how we used to sleep/ In the government yard in Trenchtown/ Oba observing the hypocrites/mingle with the good people we met/Good friends we’ve had/good friends we’ve lost/along the way/In this great future/you can’t forget your past/So dry your tears, I say…”
Bob Marley and the Wailers
As I look over my first impressions of COP28, I am really taken aback by how my first impressions are the same as how I left and in the week that has followed being back in the US: awesome and heartbreaking.
My thoughts and feelings have ranged over this week–a lot of reflection of my younger days spent on the streets, on college campuses, at many capitals and in front of federal, state and municipal buildings raising my fist, raising my voice, raising resistance. As these memories flood back, the anxiety of wanting change now rushes over me; the discontent of unsubstantial change stabs in my heart. These feelings are the effects of historical racial trauma, and ultimately what was reflected back to me during COP28 from people all around the world.
What has since layered on and infused with those initial feelings is the awesome: pure love and admiration for how people from the poorest countries of the world held themselves with resilience, knowledge, beauty, grace and agency in demanding from Western countries their equitable share in fixing the impacts of climate injustice for continued survival.
Reparations for the years of resource and labor theft is the way to clear a path for solutions, yet even at the UN’s Conference of the Parties where the realities of climate change are discussed openly, the topic of how we got here–the history that is desired to be forgotten, but what we cannot lose–is elusive. Reparations is still a dirty word, largely because the US refuses to provide any significant funding in the loss and damage fund. And that is because the US does not support reparations–a blatant way to side-step broken treaties and the 40 acres and a mule once promised and never delivered.
Paying into a world fund designated to help the poorest nations of the world whose land and resources were taken by Western colonialists would be an admission of guilt to what happened and happens on our soil. The US does not want to open that door, and that is the heartbreak: as a supposed world leader, if we began that process we might begin to heal as a nation and we might actually lead on the moral highway for the rest of the world. I shed no tears today. I stand as I always have with my fist held high, in the background and one among the many doing the work as it needs to be done in search of our great future.
Denise is the Senior Director of Development and Marketing at Climate Generation. Denise leads fundraising and marketing efforts, supporting Climate Generation’s team in growing resources to amplify our mission and vision. Denise has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of St. Catherine, and has worked in fundraising and development for 17 years. She has served as the founding chair of the Saint Paul Almanac, as director for the Lex/Ham Community Council, and on the Central Corridor Community Advisory Committee. Denise’s passion is fueling transformative work through collaborative processes, and has worked in early childhood development, employment and health and human services. While new to working directly on environmental issues, Denise has seen the first hand effect of environmental disparity in communities where she has lived and believes that radical, lasting change in who we are as a people will come from uniting around practical and expedient action to restore and nourish the environment.
Denise is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP28. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.