Brixton reflection

Brixton underground station, London.
This is the wonderful part of South London that I am proud to call home. It’s the morning rush hour and a torrent of humanity pours through the mass of morning activity – market traders setting up for the day, incense sellers outside Iceland and fluorescent jacketed newspaper distributors. It snakes along Brixton High Street, flowing into the great yawning mouth of the station.

Nestled at the end of the Victoria underground line, Brixton enjoys the luxury of always having at least one train waiting at the bottom of the grubby escalator that looks permanently in a state of repair. People rush through, grabbing a ubiquitous free paper, shaking off leaflet touts and queuing like sheep to beep their Oyster cards against the yellow pad, awaiting their judgement. Occasionally some poor soul drops their pass or has run out of credit causing an almost irrevocable blockage. Smartly suited men and power dressing women mutter angrily or tut loudly – such is their thirst to get to work. The whole scene is offset by the tranquil overtones of Bach or Vivaldi, soothing frayed tempers and zombie sheep.

After the commuter equivalent of a waterfall, the survivors scurry down the escalator pausing only to examine both trains and decide which is leaving first. Looks like left wins today. Reaching the bottom, I turn right.

Well, I’m about to head off on another set of journeys. This time it’s work related. After a short trip to Brussels to take part in the Alliance for Water Stewardship Roundtable, I’ll be heading off to Nigeria for a regional team strategy meeting, supporting their advocacy work. I’m part of WaterAid’s West Africa regional team, one of our regions consisting of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger and Nigeria. There’s plenty I could tell you about each of the countries, but here are some snippets:

• The Sahel region includes part of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. Traditionally, most of the people in the Sahel have been semi-nomadic, grazing livestock in the North during the wet season and migrating south during the dry period. Remember that Barclaycard advert with Rowan Atkinson walking off with a burning carpet saying ‘smell those Touareg campfires’?
• Niger is roughly 2/3 desert and is currently in the grip of a major food crisis. Every year, the country faces food shortages with a ‘hungry season’ from May to July, but this year it started in February. It is the lowest ranked country in the UN’s Human Development Report 2009. WaterAid has just started working in Niger.
• WaterAid has also just started working in the conflict-affected countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia, as a joint programme run from Monrovia.
• Nigeria are playing South Korea in the World Cup while I’m there . Go Super Eagles!

After that, I’m heading straight from Abuja through to Bangladesh (well, as straight as the ridiculous aviation industry will allow), where I’ll be for 3 weeks to work with WaterAid Bangladesh on climate change and disaster risk reduction, a combination of some field visits and advocacy work. Bangladesh suffers floods annually – largely due to increases on rain upstream rather than sea level rises (although storm surges from cyclones drive some floods). Flood season is June to September, during the monsoon. Other water related issues that Bangladesh face include arsenic contamination of wells, and salt-water contamination along the coast, driven by over-use of groundwater.

On the sanitation front, WaterAid’s partner, Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) successfully developed the Community Led Total Sanitation (unfortunately abbreviated as CLTS) approach, where communities work to create ‘open defecation free’ villages through changing attitudes and behaviours rather than just building toilets for individual households.

So there we go, a small taste of what I’ll be doing over the next month and some of the challenges in the countries that we work. More to come…

It was the year that everything started. I knew everyone, I was playing badminton every day, running training sessions several times a week, volunteering for Nightline, writing for the student paper. 4 months later I went through the most incredible experience of my life, campaigning hard and eventually finding myself elected President. I had an emotional and spiritual growth spurt.

The rest of the decade has been a whirlwind. I met an incredible woman and shared wonderful times together. I learnt to dive, to snowboard, to climb, to use a camera, to tango, to raft, to love, to grieve. I discovered politics, encountered the UN and went inter-railing through Eastern Europe, returning to start work for the MOD.  I unexpectedly fell in love and landed my dream job. I bought a house and had succeeded in life, before asking myself too many questions. I quit my dream job and sold my house to chase rainbows in New Zealand, not knowing that NZ would lead to Colorado and coming home to a place I’d never been before.

I had the worst year of my life to date. Trapped in a job I hated, crashed out of love, experienced two friends dieing unexpectedly and before their time, I was homeless and directionless. I let the darkness overtake me and slipped into depression, before clawing my way out and getting my head back above water. I let someone into my life bringing light with them and with whom I properly shared my whole life for the first time.

I chased rainbows through Thailand, Coventry, Cornwall, South Africa, Nepal, Malaysia and Singapore and ended up in retreat in Japan, trying to prove something to myself, but learning far more than I’d planned to. I chose to come back and fell into the most intense experience of my life, chasing a global dream that ended in Copenhagen discord.

And now? I think I survived my Saturn Return, but I’m coming up to a fork in the road again, with a inkling that this is the first domino of the rest of my life. I’m a little wiser, a little more cautious, a little more cynical, a little more hopeful and a little less invincible.

This New Year’s Eve was spent at a last-minute gathering in my flat in Brixton with a smaller group of newer friends, drinking champagne, eating homemade bread and watching fireworks from my bedroom window. We tried to make paper lanterns with tealights and newspaper and ended up playing Cranium until 5am. Mark nearly set fire to himself. Kate fell down the steps. We were free. Life was fun, spontaneous and crazy.

It’s easy to fall prey to criicising those lower down the food chain than you, to mock their sense of self-importance. But the reality is that it hides my sense of self-importance and the fact that my ego feels bruised. There is a genuine sense of disempowerment and acceptance of the state of affairs, but there’s also an ego-driven part of me that wants to play the part.
Now all of this sounds terribly pessimistic, like nothing we do matters, but that’s not true. Nothing most of us do matters here in this forum, but imagine if the energy, passion, creativity and commitment on display here was directed to places that really mattered, where change is possible. What a world we’d live in. But to get there we need individually to look inside and ask ourselves “what am I doing here?” “is this the best place for me to contribute?” “am I here for my ego or to create real change?” “where am I best placed to stimulate change?”. Time to pause. Appreciate the stillness, get perspective. Time to take stock.

A Bear of Very Little Brain

I’m going to try to put down what goes round in my head, my worldview, or at least the main thrust of it. It’s an ever evolving kaleidoscope of thought, but I felt it was time to try to share it more. But as I do so, I’m reminded of a quote from a great sage:

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

We are a great moment of change. A period of instability, and in a complex living system, novelty emerges from critical points of instability.

How would I characterise this instability? It’s a feeling. A sense of powerlessness, a general malaise often disguised by escapism and consumerism, but we feel something is wrong and we’re starting to think about it. We work jobs that often have little meaning, that are a means to an end. We are passengers, flotsam in the river of life, slowly being washed out to sea. Our world, our creation, seems out of control – we’ve successfully created a complex living breathing system that is beyond our control. That’s not to say that it’s uncontrolled, it’s just that it is self controlled and although we are the system, we cannot direct it. Control is an emergent phenomena (Frijtof Capra has written some excellent work on these concepts and set up the Center for Ecoliteracy).

How does this lack of control manifest itself? Global inequality, rampant consumerism, war, violence, hunger, poverty, the faltering of the economic system (I won’t describe it as a collapse just yet), climate change. Giddens described it as a runaway world. To me, we are like cellular slime mould – a remarkable organism that will create beautiful complex patterns when a population is grown in a petri dish, patterns that increase in complexity and beauty as the individuals interact in ever more intertwined, networked ways. Eventually this breaks into a third dimension and the individual cells begin to behave like a whole – a 3d organism emerges (there’s a whole other ramble about the role of global communications technologies and the internet in faciliting this development, but I’ll save that for another time).

We as a species have multiplied and grown, interacting with each other in increasingly sophisticated ways until now, we are starting to emerge as a living single organism. That’s not to say that we’re all going to join hands and teach the world to sing, but we are part of an interconnected whole (DFID’s White Paper is but one acknowledgement of this).

This critical point of instability is exciting and worrying – it’s a uncertain and messy, out of our individual control. And the change, the novelty that will emerge, this sort of paradim shift is on the same scale as the Reformation and the Renaissance. Its scale and nature are so great that we cannot comprehend what the other side will look like, yet we will look back and wonder how on earth we thought like we do now. And, try as we might, we cannot plan it and mobilise the masses to bring it to life (although these efforts will be part of the change, just as carrying on will be part of the change – there’s so much more to be said about this, but again, it’ll have to wait). This next R of the world is driven by a cast of thousands of changes and socio-political drivers, yet in a way we can’t do anything about it, it is just happening. In some ways it’s a Reimagining of the world, a Rethinking of our view, but they both imply conscious thought and control. So is it ceding control, a Relaxation of our cartesian desires? Or is it simply a Realisation, a Revealing (or perhaps for those with a more biblical bent, a Revelation)?

2 weeks of negotiations between some 200 countries in pursuit of an ambitious global deal on climate change. When you think of what’s at stake, the whole process seems cumbersome and inadequate, but what alternative is there?
I’m here representing the UK on so called bunker fuel emissions, basically emissions from international aviation and shipping. It’s a painful topic, sadly omitted from Kyoto as a tragedy of the commons. Unable to agree responsibility for the emissions, the issue was shunted into ICAO and IMO, the international bodies responsible for aviation and shipping respectively. 12 years later, nothing has really changed.
The EU has taken it’s own action on aviation, the UK has taken on bold domestic targets, but at the end of the day, few countries are even willing to discuss it in the UN.
However, what has changed is the surrounding political environment. Just last week we saw ‘super september’ with the G20, Major Economies Forum and the UN general Assembly all talking about climate change. Whilst bunkers remains a marginal issue (despite what others may say, the sectors collectively only represent about 3% of global emissions), this new political climate means that Copenhagen is the best chance of making progress on climate change as a whole and by extension, bunkers. The challenge is to move beyond our traditional position based posturing and actually start listening and thinking creatively about solving a ‘wicked problem’ that brings together a global environmental issue, global trade (and therefore development), global equity and equality and individual travel choices. I’m still hopeful…