One of my nephews, a big strong young man with a shaggy beard, some questionable habits and a degree in marine biology, is preparing to start a new job. Come January, he will spend an entire year on a research vessel in the Atlantic, way south beyond the equator, towards Antarctica, where the ocean is rough and wild and cold.
He has been a troubling and troubled boy and young man, still is at times, this is his first job opportunity in a year or even more. But he loves the sea and all the amazing life forms in our planet's oceans and while we often, with a sigh and shaking our heads, call him a chancer, a cheater, a messer in so many ways, he knows what's at stake.
This is for him.




Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

For a long time I stood at the kitchen window watching R digging and replanting, raking leaves with the last blustery winds from last night's storm around him. Last night, a long conversation with a friend who returned from the climate summit in Marrakesh about the unusual melting arctic sea ice and jet streams and possible outcomes.
Tomorrow is our daughter's birthday. The long hours of labour and her birth changed our lives dramatically, in ways we never thought possible, never expected in our hippie innocence and which we only realised and continue to realise in hindsight. The way we and everyone and everything is connected, the gift that will always return, the myriad faultlines that run deep below us all. There was a time when the memory of that day would fill me simply with happiness, incredible happiness that seemed to stretch forever into the future. Oh, it is still there, her voice, her face, her laughter and her tears, all of her will always reach into my deepest innermost heart. But there is also such fear now and a sadness I never expected. And worst of all, she knows. That her future will not be as easy and uncomplicated as the life we had as a family. That her generation and the generations to come will face challenges and disasters we never imagined.
This is a hasty translation of a comment in one of our national papers, by Kai Stritmatter, author and foreign correspondent currently living in China.

Shout! Do not stop being horrified. Do not hide behind jokes. Stop reassuring each other that it may not be so bad. Assume that it will get much worse. This is how it looks from China: the world is now ruled by Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping. And: America is fucked. Europe is tipping. The liberal West is a thing of the past. Democracy is seriously wounded. And now? What about our children?I posted these lines after the US election on Facebook. A friend replied: "Relax!"
I did that once. In Turkey. After the rushed election of Erdoğan. When he stood before the people and pretended to be meek. I did relax then, I told everybody: Give the man a chance. Well, I will not do that again. I've learned my lesson: We must take them at their word, these megalomaniacs, these narcissists devoured by their thirst for power and revenge. Believe them when they promise to sow hatred and practice retribution. I don't understand how we can pretend today that the world is turning as always. Something monstrous is happening. It happens now, at this second, it happens tonight while you sleep, and it will happen tomorrow when you wake up. Barack Obama just visited Athens. He spoke urgently about the flame of democracy. He also tried, so I read in the newspaper,  "to take away the fear of Trump". Of course, he wants to keep a bit of influence on Trump. I think that will be disastrous. If Obama were honest, he should say, "Be afraid!"

What is now referred to as "the post-factual age", I've been living in for almost 20 years as a foreign correspondent in Turkey and China. Living with lies, propaganda and resentment, I've learned that in China and in Turkey. Existing among autocrats and budding autocrats. In societies where one lives in a minefield full of uncertainty and arbitrariness. But throughout I always had two consolations. First, I can always go back home and rely on the values ​​I believe in. And second, the world is always striving to become a better place because people elsewhere also dream of freedom and human dignity. Well, the charisma of democracy has been disintegrating for years: America's wars in the Middle East, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The revelations of Edward Snowden. What do you want, you hypocrites, people were asked in Cairo, Moscow, and Peking? The world has become a feast for cynics. For how much longer will my home country be a safe place I can feel proud of? Will Europe also fall?Do not let yourself be lulled. Not from the smell of your morning coffee, not from the subway that runs today as always  The world is no longer the same as  yesterday. Shout. Wake those who still believe in the comfort of hope, who lack the power of imagination. Wake them up. There's a monster. It stuck his gaze on us. Look him in the eye. Shout! And then go to work.

Right now, I don't have the nerves to read anything about the climate summit, the historic agreement, the big speeches, all that clapping and cheering. And the critics, of course, the sane cautious voices because who would believe anything anyway these days. In the end, we all ignored Rio, we laughed our way through the failure of Kyoto, so what else is new? A mad man in Russia, a mad man maybe about to be elected in the US, sure who cares. As long as our sweet little existence goes on as before.

Only, this beach here is almost gone. Literally. Today, now.

It is a special beach, I have at times been quite desperately homesick for it. But every rain shower, every storm surge (and storms have been increasing dramatically) means that more sand is swept away. Local people are blowing up the mountains inland, using the rocks to protect the beaches but it will not be enough. While coastal regions will be devastated all over the globe - and believe, they will be, everywhere, even in our own filthy rich and arrogant countries - island states will simply slip under the water. They will vanish. The homeland of entire nations will disappear, their schools and cemeteries, their churches, hospitals, harbours, playgrounds, markets, farms, restaurants, their wildlife, the magnificent birds, blossoms, trees, their beauty, all of their beauty. Their scents and music and all those wonderful calm Sunday afternoon picnics by the sea.

When we left paradise, I cried all the way to Mauritius (which was/is nothing in comparison, honestly and I tried to like it), I sat inside that sudden luxury of an Air France jumbo jet with my first fresh croissant and coffee with real (!) milk in three years served on a silver tray and all I could do was sob my heart out. At the time, we knew we could never afford to go back to our little shed of a house with the noisy bats and dogs and ants and giant centipedes. Money, jobs, family, and so on. Now we know that the loss is bigger, deeper and not just ours. Do we have any idea of the enormity of that loss?

I just watched this short clip in the hope of hearing something positive. Not really.
Instead, I have been carrying this quote below inside of me like a heavy dark stone:

In a recent interview the Nobel prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the leading scholar of cognitive biases, was asked about our brains’ limitations when it comes to understanding the dangers of climate change. “I’m not very optimistic about that,” Kahneman replies, despondently sipping tomato soup. “No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: there is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.”

I am asking for quite a stretch in imagination and compassion, but isn't that what being alive is all about?

This morning I was sitting in my kitchen with my head under a towel, breathing in the supposedly healing vapours of thyme and sage, listening to online radio. As my luck would have it I had tuned into one of my favourite Irish stations just as the news came on. Or rather: nuacht, that is news as gaeilge/in Irish. One of the charming little rituals that probably mean very little to most and an awful lot so some people in Ireland. Like the Angelus at six pm, still live on radio every evening.

I can understand three words in Irish: agus (and), buíochas (thank you) and grá (love). When I listen to someone speaking in Irish it's all mystery to me, like an ancient chant.
And then suddenly I heard the word Kathmandu. Another massive earthquake. Oh dear, oh saints in heavens and people on this planet.
Of course, we will all and everyone try and do what we can. Surely. It will involve money. The media will supply us with enough horrific evidence to imagine a fraction of what is happening.

And here comes the stretching because I am now jumping from Nepal to the Indian Ocean. To a place hardly anybody knows. A most beautiful place, paradise. I can honestly call it that because I have lived in a very similar place for a couple of years not too far from there. It has been the best of times for me and for my man and our child. The very best of times. And although we have all had many more best of times since, 25 years later we are all three still homesick for it. 
Which is why I can feel some of the sadness (sagren in Chagossian Creole) you can see in these faces if you please take the short time to watch:

Let Us Return - The Story of the Chagos Islanders - 2015 from Evoque on Vimeo.

And while I have been working too long for human rights organisations to believe that online petitions have any meaningful effect at all, I nevertheless ask you to sign here anyway and hope for a miracle. There is no doubt in my mind that these people need to return and that they can have a happy life there. Not a single doubt.
If you have a bit more time, also watch this video.

 

The guy on CNN just said that the people in Kathmandu were odd in their Buddha-like fatalistic stupor, burning their dead and not expecting much.

Seriously. 

I shouted it up the stairs to R who is listening to Jefferson Airplane while reading through his student's reports on their charity walk whereby a bunch of well-off teenagers walked for an hour and a half along the river and another hour and a half back to simulate walking to schools somewhere in Southern Africa. Don't get me wrong, they may all have figured out something about the world. Teenagers are admirably smart.

In 1994, a young man named Shrestha came to stay with us for a week or two. A law student from Nepal attending a youth conference here. His first time abroad. He stayed in S's room and slept in her bunk bed with the toys underneath and the raspberry coloured wallpaper. When we sat down for our first meal together he told us about home. He was studying in Kathmandu and his family lived about three days away. Three days on a train, a bus, by car? we asked. No, first on a bus for a day, then walking for two more days. He talked about his family and their lives, about earning a bit of money as trekking guide and his childhood and plans for the future and much later, before we all went to sleep, he asked us about the different gadgets in the bathroom and the kitchen. I come from a different planet, he said with a laugh when he tried out the blender and during the night I heard him getting up and checking it again.

A few days later I brought him to work with me and while we were waiting at a pedestrian crossing, two German women ran up calling his name and hugging him. They had been to Nepal trekking the year before and of all the places and people, he and his brother had been their guides. We laughed a lot that day. See, I told him, we are all living on the same planet.

We lost touch. This was a long time before the internet and fb etc. You know how many Shresthas there are in Nepal?

But we are on the same planet and tonight I hope he and his family are ok.

They are men and women like us – our brothers - and sisters (my addition) - seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war.

I never thought I would quote the pope of all people but desperate news ask for desperate measures.
As I was sleeping in the early hours of this morning, as the first chords of a magnificent dawn chorus was just beginning, as the lilac prepared to open its first blossoms of the year, 700 people drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. They were adrift on an overcrowded vessel few would actually classify as such, never mind declare seaworthy, and tried to alert the attention of a real ship nearby. Seemingly, this caused the vessel to capsize and the latest news are that at least 700 bodies are still in the water.

These are the people we are allowing to die in the Mediterranean: teenage orphans of several (!) civil wars, pregnant women without family, young and old, labourers and academics, sons and daughters.
Nobody - and I dare you - is making this journey just for fun, to steal our wealth or to cheat on welfare systems.

Forget the fact that this society wouldn’t work without migrants, that nobody else will pick your vegetables and make your latte and get up at 4am to clean your office. Forget the massive tax contribution made by migrants to the Treasury. This is not about economics. Far too often, even the positive takes on migration are driven by numbers and finance, by “What can they do for us?”. This is about two things: compassion and responsibility.

There are half a million people in Libya waiting to make the crossing. Libya is chaos. Libya is at war. Syria is at war. Sudan is at war. Eritrea is a cruel dictatorship. And so on. I know, African/Middle Eastern problems etc. but wait and think for a minute, it's not that simple.

Not all migration is caused by the west, of course. But let’s have a real conversation about the part that is. Let’s have a real conversation about our ageing demographic and the massive skills shortage here, what it means for overstretched public services if we let migrants in (we’d need to raise money to meet increased demand, and the clearest and fairest way is a rise in taxes on the rich), the ethics of taking the cream of the crop from poor countries. Migration is a complex subject.

We may discuss this another time. Meanwhile, what are going to do?

... let’s not be cowards and pretend the migrants will stop coming. Because they won’t. This will never stop.

Let's remember this:

We can recognise the human right to migration. We can recognise that we are ourselves, all of us, doubly migrants. We are migrants historically: our ancestors came from somewhere else, and originated, long ago, in the same spot in Africa. And we are migrants personally: life is the experience of moving through time, of abandoning each present moment for the next, of temporal migration.

the biggest story in the world

listening

. . . contemplate how human beings a century from now will view those of us who lived in the era when climate change was recognized, and yet there was so much more that we could have done. They may feel utter contempt for us. They may regard us as the crew who squandered their inheritance, like drunkards gambling away a family fortune that, in this case, is everyone’s everywhere and everything. I’m talking, of course, about the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will see us as people who fiddled while everything burned.

Many people believe that personal acts in private life are what matters in this crisis. They are good things, but not the key thing. It’s great to bicycle rather than drive, eat plants instead of animals, and put solar panels on your roof, but such gestures can also offer a false sense that you’re not part of the problem.
You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social. If you are a resident of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, you are part of the system, and nothing less than systemic change will save us.

Rebecca Solnit

Together we will punish the killer. Our punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance and more democracy.

(Fabian Strang, mayor of Oslo after the 2011 Norway attacks.)

If you share my belief that an open society, a democratic open society is the only alternative to any murderous ideology, you must accept how vulnerable an open society is - simply because it is open and messy and multi cultural and mixed and complicated. Let us remain open, diverse and generous, let us refuse to polarise, to dish out blame or separate the world into us and them, let us stay subversive, irrational and above all, gentle.

Once again, I have too many holidays left to continue working. It's absurd, I know. But there are apparently nine working days stacked up that I am entitled to not work before the end of the year and even if I wanted to, the paperwork alone would be bizarre. Being a public service employee is like living on another planet.

And because R is already on holidays, we have plenty of time now to argue about who should cook or do the laundry or should we invite people for dinner and when and who should cook then and so on.

Plus, we sleep in longer and longer every morning and mess around doing nothing most of the day and sometimes talk about all the stuff we could do and before you know it, it's dark and time to argue about who should cook dinner. 

So it was with great effort that I went into town and while I did spend a good two to three hours walking around the xmas markets with all the cute and crafty things and the tourists and the mulled wine and waffles smells, pretending to shop - I bought one tiny box of fancy gingerbread cookies for a friend - and a half hour in a crowded cafe reading the papers, I felt out of place, completely and utterly. There was nothing, nothing, nothing that enticed me one bit. In an effort, I looked through an entire display of fancy bed sheets, pure organic cotton in myriad shapes and colours, and all I could think was, who needs this stuff?  I walked past a stall selling about 45 types of French nougat and almost ran when this nice woman offered me samples. Ok, I don't like nougat but still.

On my way home, I briefly stopped at my favourite bookshop but I never even locked the bicycle. A lost day for consumerism at least as far as I am concerned. 

Tonight I went to an anti-neonazi rally in my city. I know the numbers are small and luckily, here the joyful crowd of all ages clapping and singing for an open society by far outnumbered the brown thugs, but I find it scary. Not just because I feel that people are being conned, that some clever Pied Piper(s) are playing with a general ignorance and unfounded fears, that nasty mix of xenophobia and manipulation, but also because at the same time, thousand more could only think of Xmas shopping and how the rally was messing up the parking and public transport situation.
There was a time when I could shrug this off, light a candle and trust that we all share a common decency etc. Tonight I just feel low. 

But still:
As we walked back to where we had locked our bicycles, I overheard a policeman explaining what was going on to a confused tourist: If you walk over there, you'll find a crowd of right wing people demonstrating. They are allowed to do this and we must protect their right of expression. If you walk over here, however, you will find people representing the open-minded, multicultural German society. 

Sheltering from rain today in a cosy cafe, I read that while there is a noted increase in specific types of depression during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, no significant evidence has been documented - as yet - that this is due to the gray and foggy weather. In fact, it's all due to lack of exercise and too many hours hiding under the covers in a warm bed.

I also read that for the next 16 days, the number of sunshine hours will be almost nil. 

I read that the number of people fleeing war and persecution, hunger and poverty today is higher than what it was after WWII. I also read about how European governments intend to criminalise refugees entering our wealthy countries with the aid of traffickers. To be so desperate as to pay someone to get out of hell will bring you straight into prison here.

Then I start to read some of the links on my news feed in relation to Human Rights Day (yesterday). 

This is difficult, I know what to expect but still. 

There is a president in tears and another former president praising patriotic acts of interrogation. 

I read about remarkable acts of humanity. 

Next, I open a link to a huge document, 400+ pages. I try to concentrate on the lingo and I fail. It's a descent into the inner circle of hell, carefully detailing a mix of ruthlessness and incompetence, about what happens when a person is forced to remain standing with his hands tied above him and not allowed to sleep for 59 hrs, how after 17 rounds of waterboarding, another person had to be resuscitated for further rounds as interrogations were as yet incomplete. I begin to feel nauseous when I read that on day five, the agents asked for permission to stop interrogations as it was too upsetting for them to continue. Permission was denied. 

I stop reading and order another cafe au lait. My father always criticised me for reacting with too much emotion and that it would do nobody any good.

I love science

When people ask me where I am from, I tell them I'm from Europe. Depending on circumstances, I might mention that I was raised in Franconia. Nobody outside Germany has a clue about Franconia, neither do I for that matter. I can tell you that my father comes from old Franconian stock, I have a copy of the family tree going back to the Thirty Years' War, but that there are quite a few Italian and Slavic traces here and there. As for my mother, who had a thing about the superiority of German culture, her background is a wild mix of Swedish, Russian, French and, apparently, Sami. 

When the discussion gets too territorial, I occasionally blather on about the world being our homeland etc. 

When someone mentions that there are too many foreigners here, I add that I am married to one of them. 

But no, comes the reply, he is a different kind of foreigner. 

Meaning? I ask. 

Oh, you know, the proper kind, like us.

Like us? Who are we?

And so on.

Which gives me an excuse to quote at length from an article by Moshin Hamid in today's Guardian:

The scale of migration we will see in the coming centuries is likely to dwarf what has come before. Climate change, disease, state failure, wars: all these will push hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, to leave one country for another. If we do not recognise their right to move, we will be attempting to build an apartheid planet where our passports will be our castes, and where obedience will be enforceable only through ever-increasing uses of force.
There is another way. We can recognise the human right to migration. We can recognise that we are ourselves, all of us, doubly migrants. We are migrants historically: our ancestors came from somewhere else, and originated, long ago, in the same spot in Africa. And we are migrants personally: life is the experience of moving through time, of abandoning each present moment for the next, of temporal migration.

It is we, those who stop migration, who are the criminals, not those who are migrants. And slowly, at a pace that does not terrify us, but whose direction is clear, we must gradually let go, and allow things to change. Only in doing so can we hope to build a world in accordance with the values we claim to believe in – liberty, equality, democracy – and wash clean the taste of hypocrisy that burns so bitter in so many of our mouths.

I imagine that centuries hence, when people are finally free to move as they please around the planet Earth, they will look back at this moment and wonder, just as we wonder about those who kept slaves, how people who seemed so modern could do such things to their fellow human beings, caging them like animals – merely for wanting to wander, as our species always has and always will.

my life of luxury

Tomorrow is bulky waste collection and all day the treasure hunters and scrap metal peddlers and their friends have been cruising the neighbourhood. We put out stuff and the old toaster which is slightly banjaxed. I got too nervous using it because it gets too hot or nothing at all and I had visions of flames coming from it one day and I was looking around the kitchen figuring out how quickly everything could burn down incl. the cat and the me. So the minute we put it outside this man jumped out of a dishevelled van - with Hungarian/Polish/Romanian registration - and took it out of my hands and politely said thank you. I still feel woozy and quite ashamed, actually.

gossip

My neighbour across the road tells me that 'they' have been robbing his flowerbeds. They? I ask stupidly, you mean it's more than one person? No, no, them, he replies. 

Them are the riff-raff, lay-abouts, foreigners, kids with no manners, maybe even foreign kids with no manners, or possibly eco-communists like us with the no nuke stickers. So now he has erected a sign warning all and sundry that he is counting the cosmea flowers and should he catch the culprits (incl. children) he will prosecute.

So there.

He is out there now with his fan club of blue rinse ladies all tut-tutting about the dramatic demise of the neighbourhood. Godlovehim, I'll sneak out through my back door, he gives me the creeps.