Shifting Baselines
It’s been 7 years since COP21 in Paris. It was the first of 3 UN climate change conferences that I managed to attend.
Paris was beautiful but one particular moment stood out. It happened when I chose to visit a small village during a break in the international negotiations at the UN conference.
This was what I wrote in Facebook at the time:
The sky is blue with beautiful cloud patterns. The temperature is a comfortable 10 degree Celsius. In the fields and along the sidewalks are beautiful wild flowers blooming in all their glory.
All in all, it is a beautiful day to be out at the little village south of Paris. In our conversations with the people staying in the town itself, such a scene is actually considered strange.
As I chatted with an uncle over breakfast, he asked me to look out of the window. The backyard was an ordinary one — that of a garden with wild flowers. This was precisely the scene he wanted me to witness. He was not one to attend the UN climate change conference but he knew climate change was real.
When this person was a child, the backyard would not have been one with wildflowers. This was not the scene of his childhood. It should have been a few degrees below 0. The temperature that day was closer to 10 degree C.
Another person shared his childhood memory of walking in the woods and seeing animals, and how difficult it is to see these animals nowadays. He talked how it was really strange to have temperatures closer to 10 degree C.
He remembered that in the recent past, there would be snow or ice. The land would appear to be white. The lakes would freeze enough for people to ice skate.
On that day, the lake was a scene of beauty. There were swans paddling slowly, huge fishes swimming below, and a backdrop of blue sky patterned with white clouds.
What a world of difference it was from the person’s frozen lake memory!
These were seemingly small moments that hit me right there in the gut.
I was attending the UN conference for the very first time. Much as I wanted to know if what was being negotiated is what I’d like to see in the future, I was frustrated by my inability to follow what was discussed. I was also frustrated with how much time they spent discussing words like ‘should’ and ‘must’.
It was also frustrating to see people at the UN conference discuss about climate change as if it is some academic topic to argue about. I know how easy it is to fall into these ‘traps’, having being a researcher in this area myself.
I felt that people who were thick in the ‘action’ may not truly understand the rapid change that was happening before our eyes.
I remember thinking of the phrase ‘shifting baselines’. As a former scientist, a key part of my work was to document the ‘baseline’. What we really document is a snapshot in time, or at best, several snapshots. When we talk about human’s impact on the planet, which snapshot are we talking about?
I feel that often times when people talk about sustainability, we are really thinking about the word ‘sustain’ or ‘to continue as is’. As climate change become obvious to the everyday citizen, it becomes harder to say what are we trying to sustain.
If a child grew up in the village in the last 7 years, the child might say we need the temperature to stay at 10 deg C. The uncle I met would say it should have been below 0 deg C. Both would be right in their own way.
