What is left of life if man cannot hear the beautiful cry of the night bird, or the arguments of the frogs around a lake at sunset? The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind riding over the surface of the lake…Everything that hurts the earth will also hurt the children of the earth…”
Each sentence of the extensive letter is full of beauty. As if poetic narration were the best instrument to also transmit the worst of warnings. It happens that that message from a nineteenth-century indigenous person warned about the chaos that modern society was causing in nature, and the tragic consequences that this would have.
In 1854, American President Franklin Pierce offered a considerable sum of money to buy a portion of territory from the Red Indians. Chief Seattle rejected the succulent offer in that letter that, in 1972, was declared the First Ecological Charter in history by a World Congress that deliberated in Stockholm.
“We know that the white man does not understand our way of life. “He treats mother earth and her brother, the firmament, as objects to be bought, exploited and sold…His appetite will devour the earth, leaving behind only a desert,” the letter that Noha Seattle, chief of the Suwamisu tribe, began by saying. , he gave Isaac Stevens, the governor of the territory, to send it to the “big boss in Washington.”
The desert that that red-skinned chief announced in the mid-19th century is already advancing voraciously over the planet. The biosphere is changing rapidly, generating threats to human existence. This is the most pressing reality. Never in history has there been a greater risk than climate change. It is the topic that COP28 in Dubai addressed. But the world was dealing with other serious things and, once again, did not pay due attention.
The exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners and the breakdown of the truce in Gasa, the growing impotence of Ukraine to confront the invading army and the death of Henry Kissinger, the man who left his mark on the 20th century for better and worse, They almost completely covered up the climate summit which, as an irony of history, was held in an oil powerhouse: the United Arab Emirates.
The absence of Joe Biden and Xi Jinping was the first worrying sign regarding global awareness of the greatest threat to humanity. The United States and China are the two countries that produce the most greenhouse gases. And the presence or absence of presidents marks the level of priority that countries give to international summits.
Another worrying sign was the approval of a fund to pay for damages and losses caused by floods and droughts caused by global warming. By the way, it is not bad, quite the opposite, to help the millions of farmers and rural producers who lose their livestock and crops due to increasingly intense and repeated climate phenomena. Nor does the fund created seek to compensate for the products that are lost with the production of other food products and to repair the cities, villages and houses devastated by the increasingly powerful and destructive storms. But all of this, even though it is essential, implies acting on the consequences and not on the causes.
More encouraging would be if delegates at the UN summit on climate change had agreed to make contributions to combat rising temperatures in the atmosphere and oceans. That is the cause of climatic phenomena with devastating effects. Repairing damage is not acting on the problem but on the consequences of the problem. Certainly, and as on previous occasions, everything discussed was important. The exhibitions enriched the arsenal of existing elements to mobilize the consciousness of global society to make drastic decisions urgently.
One of the most forceful interventions made it clear: that of the president of Brazil. Lula da Silva stressed the need to comply with the agreed principles: responsibilities are common but differentiated; the commitment of developed countries to contribute one hundred billion dollars a year for climate policies and technologies, to achieve zero deforestation and the urgency in meeting these goals, that is, to act now.
The credibility of Lula’s speech is supported by the centrality that his government has given to the climate agenda. That is why it is credible when she affirms, together with her Minister of the Environment Marina Silva, that “the planet is fed up with unfulfilled climate agreements, with ignored carbon emissions reduction goals.” It is an interesting statement if she really referred to the “planet” being fed up. In that case, the allusion would be a metaphor for the damage that is advancing on the biosphere, and not on global society. Because what is evident is that global society seems to prefer serene ignorance of the seriousness of climate change.
The outcome of COP28 may have been positive, but its weaknesses show the biggest problem that humanity has at this time: it does not seem willing to become aware of what the alteration of the biosphere means and, therefore, it does not impose on its leaders give the fight against climate change the priority it should have.
No ruler of this time seems to measure up to Chief Seattle. None has the enlightened vision of the man whose name calls the capital of the state of Washington, in the northwest of the United States. That leader of the redskins who, in the mid-19th century, was already pointing out the crossroads of modern society, warning what it meant to alter the earth and the sky. “Whatever happens to the earth will happen to the children of the earth,” he wrote.
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