It is 30 hours since I flew out of Christchurch, 24 since I was flying over Australia’s Nullabor, 2 hours since taking off from Dubai.
I am en route to Kampala, Uganda. The parties to the International Criminal Court are holding their first Review Conference, eight years after the Court’s jurisdiction came into force. New Zealand is a party, with 109 others. I shall blog more on that later. Suffice to say, for the allayment of public concern, that I am going at no cost to the nation’s taxpayer of whom I am one, nor even the consumer of whom I am one.
The New York-based organisation I used to work for back in the early-‘90s, Parliamentarians for Global Action, is sending me. I am to address a pre-conference meeting and make an input through a combined submission into the diplomatic conference itself. No Kiwi dollars spent, just global carbon miles (to be offset from the personal pocket) to promote the rule of international criminal law. In my view, it is worth the effort. I am missing the NZ budget debate, but Green colleagues can do that instead. I am not visiting the Eiffel Tower. I am not going to a beach in Hawai’i.
Right now what I am doing is flying over the seemingly endless stretch of Saudi’s Empty Quarter. But it is taking me 60 minutes to cross the sands where it took Thessinger 60 days on camel some 70 years ago. That is the nature of the explosive change in material capability, personal mobility and profligate energy use we humans have ignited within a single lifetime.
The rocky dunes stretch, reddish rather than golden as in the Sinai or the Sahara, in a north-west to south-east pattern, with no sign of human imprint below – no road, no building, no apparent water-well, though surely some oases must be down there beyond aerial view, at least from human eye. Only the Thar Desert in the Punjab competes for the world prize in natural desolation.
I succumb to the torment, not the temptation, of imagining the scene around the whole planet. This is, probably, how Mars would look from 36,000 feet. And we can do it, down here on Earth. All it requires is business-as-usual for the global economy into the indefinite future. More of the growth-manic, macro-economic policies that governments, guided and goaded by the earnest menace of interminable advice from treasury officials the world over, steeped in neo-classical orthodoxy, pursue. That is all it will require.
I look away. Are these musings tantamount to an apocalyptic gloom? No, says the defence. I have been asked twice recently, after talks, whether I am an optimist or pessimist on humanity’s fate for the new century. I reply that I am a defiant pessimist. Extrapolation of current trends, including the trend-lines over the past quarter-century, since we learned about our globally unsustainable behaviour and its consequent climate change, logically makes one very sobered. Yet logic cedes to faith – so I am defiant because of hope and opportunity; because we still have it within our grasp to make a strategic change in direction for the global economy. A step-change, as they say. But not in growth, as Bill English rhapsodises. Rather, towards dynamic equilibrium.
Inside the plane, in the row in front, a man – never mind the ethnicity, call him the global citizen – watches an animation cartoon, skull entrapped in headphones, riveted by the banality of the age, oblivious to the Empty Quarter, at least the one below. Yes, defiance it will take, for sure; and hope and faith.
We have just flown over the Yemen now and we are crossing the Red Sea that separates the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa. It is Queen of Sheba territory. Or once upon a time it was. The romantic fable of Solomon and Sheba is ceding ground these days before the merciless mercantilist belief embraced by the progenitors of the global economy. Trade, we are told, was actually the common interest, the siren call, between these two mysterious, charismatic figures of antiquity. Nice one. Nothing is sacred forever, you see.
We shall alight briefly in Addis Ababa – ethereal capital of Ethiopia. I was here once before. Here, not so long ago, I met Lucy. Her delicately small, white skeleton was stretched out, vulnerable in eternal public rest, in the National Museum. She lay, appropriately, within a simple wooden case beneath a simple glass frame. I saw her there, remarkably preserved, beautifully evocative of the age of innocence of the earliest days of the ascent of man. Three million years ago, Lucy lived out her life, breathing the atmosphere of the same Earth that I encircle as I write. She would perhaps be sad, to be breathing it again, today. It is no longer the same.
On to Entebbe, Uganda. Time to refocus on international crimes. They are crimes of war. Not of ecocide. Not yet.
