A sad and bitter day
Another day in Delhi - a beautiful day, funnily enough - but one defiled by acrid disappointment. I feel a bit heartbroken, though the outcome of the Copenhagen summit was, sadly, hardly a surprise.
It's clear everyone's exhausted. For the past six weeks, most of Greenpeace India has been in Delhi, passing round viruses in a box that looks like a guesthouse. I had a bunch of slapstick moments that I was planning to write up, but they don't seem appropriate or interesting now. A coalition of NGOs ran a climate camp in the Indian capital city for those who hadn't flocked off to Copenhagen, hosting some 50 activists from various parts of the country. I was speaking to one of them, a 19 year old student, last night, and she started crying as she told me that her mum was having an operation back in her home village, but she wasn't going to be there to take care of her as she couldn't afford to go both to her village and to the climate camp. She'd chosen the climate camp. I fear it didn't deserve her.
On the twelfth of December the coalition organised a massive march with over five thousand people for the global day of action. What was really striking was the variety of people that attended. Every major religion was represented, often by leaders as well as their followers. There were businessmen, school children, politicians and rickshaw wallahs. The point was that every faction of society had something riding on the outcome of COP 15. The climate skepticism that's currently ruling the comment pages of UK online newspapers hasn't reached India yet.
I can't stop thinking about the people I've met over the last six months. There are people who are living underneath flyovers, in the most abject poverty I've ever seen, whose numbers will swell as agriculture and life in rural areas becomes less sustainable. There are children who will be taken out of school because their families need help coaxing the increasingly infertile land into yield. There are women who rise at 2am to travel to far-off markets to supplement the family's income as the fishermen's catch is now so unreliable. Families are huddling on beds to cook because floodwater is swirling over the floor, mosquitoes are laying their eggs in the pools and spreading malaria.
Many, many people are going to die. Millions more have just been condemned to hunger, poverty and disease. There's a part of me that wants to scream and cry and say I don't understand how this is happening in front of our eyes; and then there's another part that's quiet and resigned, because that part understands perfectly.