Action in the Air Conditioning
19/08/08 19:42
I’m in Stockholm for World Water Week. I speak tomorrow with some colleagues as part of a larger series of talks on water and climate, though I’ve been here for several days. This is an unusual meeting for me: heavy on policy and programs, light on science and what I am used to thinking of as analysis. And being here captures some of the tension that a lot of us involved in climate adaptation work feel on a regular basis: How do we balance between being in a clean, well-appointed convention center, somewhere in the over-developed (even post-developed) world, talking about “issues” with people that are often several steps removed from where the action is -- places in the developing world, out of the air conditioning and the people sampling the smorgasboard of ideas and recommendations in the cold light of energy-efficient bulbs.
I know why I am here, of course, and I realize the value of being here: there are ideas to be exchanged. Some people can only meet in places like this. And I can receive much as well as provide a little.
Perhaps it is the questions I hear in sessions following talks that bothers me. Two or three sounded smugly apologetic and a little shrill, as if they really believe that the most important things in the world actually happen in air-conditioned rooms with well-dressed people. I am struck by how small so many of the circles of people involved in development really are -- that it is quite conceivable in some areas like “sanitation” to know many of the major individuals and organizations involved, like institutional constellations made up of only a few stars.
But those “stars” from the naked-eye truth of the surface of a small planet facing away from its sun are often whole galaxies themselves, even clusters of galaxies. And they represent millions, even billions of stars when we see only a single point of light. These individuals stand in for thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the the field. They stand like ghosts on the stage behind the speakers. I will feel them with me tomorrow.
I remember in college during a cold Chicago winter, a cultural anthropologist working in the Amazon basin brought a friend of his from an indigenous group in Brazil. He stood in a large lecture hall in the chemistry department and talked to us. I noticed he kept looking outside at the curving, snow-laden elm outside through the window. He was speaking with the kind of natural gentility Melville mentions, describing through a translator something about his world and the problems his culture faced with change. He hoped we could have some understanding. A few years later, I was in Nicaragua working ineptly at a small rural clinic run by a nurse from the U.S. Occasionally she too would don out of date “nice clothes” and head to conferences and churches in the States, asking for money and seeking medical support from physicians’ groups. Explaining the plight of people in a distant place with limited medical facilities. I was obviously very moved by seeing a Kayapo man in my world, and I understand why Dorothy made her sojourns. And I make mine now too. But I try here to remember some of what I know and have seen and the people outside of the air conditioning.
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