COP30 Day 3: Reflections from a Cynical Earth Scientist
Nestor Walters
Good morning, good day. My name is Nestor Walters. I am not native, but I live and study on ckuwaponahkik — the land where the sun first looks our way — ancestral homeland of its people, known to westerners as the Wabanaki Federation. Before we begin, I ask the ancestors to bless us with a good day, good page, good thoughts, good actions.
Disclaimer: This is a work of reflection, not journalism. Names of people and parties have been omitted to avoid misattribution, and quotations have been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
It occurred to me, on the night before attending the first day of the U.N. Climate Negotiations in Belèm, Brazil, that I no longer “believe” in Climate Change. I am a PhD student in earth science at the University of Maine, and that evening I had gathered with U. Maine law students in our rental apartment in downtown Belèm to prepare for the conference. One of us had worked in defense consulting, and had pitched a bill on hybrid-electric armored troop carriers and bio-fuel jets to a certain southern state senator, who had declared that he, the senator, did not believe in “that Climate Change nonsense.” “I don’t care about your beliefs,” this peer told us he had responded, and had pitched “strategic leverage” to the senator: safer marines and foreign fuel divestment. “People only care about what benefits them,” was the conclusion, dissected at length by my law student buddies, and value propositions to show the benefit are the only way to convince people.
I agreed to a point, but something left me uneasy. Shouldn’t we care about a person’s beliefs? If Climate Change — with two capital Cs — has evolved to this dogmatic ideology where fossil fuels are “bad” and clean energy – whatever that means – is “the savior”; where meat producers are murderers while veganism is “pure”; where did that leave the people caught in the systems? Fossil fuels, for all their evils, have powered all progress we have today – though not everyone has seen this progress equally; and the current food industry, for all its flaws, is the one that feeds the United States and much of the world today. If you are a part of these industries, and if a new ideology villainizes your work, dismisses your professional contribution, and promises to replace you with “modern” training, or worse, with automation; why would you ascribe to that ideology? How can anyone in that situation be expected to “believe” in the very thing that condemns them? With these thoughts in mind, I attended the first day of the conference.
The first panel I attended was in a resilience-themed pavilion, a celebration on learning from indigenous wisdom keepers. My research is on building AI models of arctic landscape evolution, and I have come to suspect that indigenous knowledge will be crucial to these computer models; but I only wandered into this pavilion by chance, and sat down because I had heard someone speaking English. But when the ceremony began, I felt I was home: five tribal leaders arrayed in feathers, beads, shawls, sashes, and face and body paint, each vastly distinct from the other, each took their turn in song to ask blessings of the ancestors in their own language. One chanted and clapped, another whispered and whistled through a shell; yet another bellowed operatic notes.
The first speaker was from a tribe in the high-elevation southwestern U.S. desert mesas, where, despite having no running water, for thousands of years they have been successful farmers. “With hearts and minds together,” the speaker said, “with each other and with nature, we can right the wrongs of our shared history and build the just, livable world that all of us truly come from; in death or abundance, one consciousness, one family, one humanity.”
A speaker from a Mexican wetlands tribe talked about offerings, rituals, and work done to successfully recover wetlands that had been destroyed by industry in the 90s. Indigenous leaders – 145 of them – had been killed or kidnapped, but not stopped. “Not just defenders,” the leader said, “but lovers of truth; and to be in love is to transcend wars and destruction.”
An African tribal speaker discussed Vodún ecological spirituality, distorted by colonization as “bad” and “witchcraft,” whose grandfather knowledge-keepers were killed to destroy this sacred ecosystem science and to exploit the forests. “Biodiversity,” this leader said, “is not only plants and animals, but also human beings. How can we bring back sacred water?” he asked. “How can we pass the baton, convince our children it is possible?”
A Siberian tribal speaker told of original shamen – sa-man – “the one who can see and sense.” How they, the speaker’s people, are children of sun and nature, grandfathered by time and fire, and lived thousands of years in harmony with ice, permafrost, and frozen landscapes that are now fading away.
A northwestern U.S. tribal leader told of an 1850s white merchant who first saw their river and the people drying salmon along it, and called the sight “the most beautiful thing.” Twenty years later, no one could drink from the river because sawmill waste poisoned people and clogged the gills of fishes. The “great” New-Deal highways, according to the speaker, brought workers who beat the tribal men and hauled off tribal women, leaving nothing to be passed down to their grandchildren. “We have 50 harvests left,” the leader said, “before we destroy all our topsoil, in all of the country. The wealthy want to take off to Mars,” he went on, “and leave us with a burning planet. What would it be like,” he asked, “to be indigenous and not have to be resilient? To look toward a just, livable future?”
The final speaker, the operatic singer, began. “I come from the largest continent,” the speaker said, “the Pacific Ocean.” Saltwater people, drawing strength from the energy of the sea, from the reflections of stars onto waters. Their AI is Ancestral Intelligence, according to the speaker, the sciences of living and breathing, with trees, forests, and rivers as siblings. “Honored to stand here,” the speaker said, “after resistance through colonization, with relatives under the waters leading us, trying to get us to listen.” The first river to receive legal personhood, the speaker told us, was theirs – Wanganui; same with the mountain Taranaki-Maura. “Do you know the name of the river where you live?” the speaker asked. “Of the mountain? The ancient name that vibrates in your bones? When you get up to speak,” the speaker concluded, “these are the voices that you speak from…and that is why we are gathered here…to share our languages and ways we speak with one another.”
I left the pavilion feeling invigorated but also troubled. “Go out to the world with purpose,” the ceremony moderator had concluded, “and an open heart and mind.” But everywhere I went, it seemed, my disbelief surfaced. We have this tremendous opportunity, I kept thinking, this incentive from crisis, to reconnect with each other and with nature, to learn again to sing and dance and laugh, to learn from the preserved knowledge of indigenous people; but every session seemed to be on some new technology or policy that either enriched some corporation or gave some advantage to a nation. On a panel in the pavilion of a war-torn country, some CEO discussed power stations and grid arrangements that would “help so many people,” build so much more “resilience”; but of course they needed more capital, more investment, more buy-in – to that CEO’s company.
A panel on “AI for nature” turned out to be a mega-tech company’s self-promotion of new AI-driven geospatial tools. “Tell us how your nonprofit benefited,” the mega-company’s moderator asked the representative of a small, local nonprofit, then grinned through the description of eight scholarships awarded out of four hundred exceptional applicants, with no mention of how torrents of this company’s advertisements are driving the consumption that destroys the very rainforests the recipients were studying. Cutting-edge fishing vessel monitoring was another triumph of this technology: “Those poor fishermen in horrible working conditions,” the panelist said; who could now be monitored by real-time AI-analysed cameras for bycatch and the system would soon to be required by such-and-such major superstore chains. How hard would it be to say, “Of course it is also important to reduce tuna consumption”?
The day concluded in a refugee and migrant peoples session – stories of women and girls abused when gathering wood around refugee camps; stories of long travels and persecutions. One refugee woman had become a successful farmer, and praised a certain African country for not only welcoming refugees, but including them in that country’s climate negotiations. “Displacement is always the result of an injustice,” one panelist said, “but when done safely and with dignity it is not a failure… it is an adaptation.” “What gives me hope,” another said in conclusion, “is the people in this room.” But I could not feel it. I wanted to raise my hand in the question session, start by saying, “I am sorry for what my people have done.” But I did not know what would be worse – to know that the apology meant nothing or to not say it; and perhaps it was better that my weakly lifted hand was not chosen. I met my cohort for dinner where I ate rice and half a steak, while the vegetarian in our group ate rice and potato salad – and there I was, a meat-consumer, being part of the problem.
On the second day’s morning we bought fruit and nuts from an open-air market, and I attended my first negotiation. The parties sat in a dimly-lit room around a large square of tables, and took turns presenting their requests. One country suggested a structure for the negotiation, another reminded everyone that they were there under such and such an article and needed immediate results, yet another expressed regrets and suggested certain requirements for implementation; a smaller-state coalition reminded everyone how precarious their position was.
They were discussing the distribution of finances from “developed” countries to “developing” ones to respond to climate change. The developed countries, I was later told, tend to request verbiage that allows them to stall payment or squirm out of it indefinitely, while the developing claim that wealth was made at their, the developing countries’, loss, and damages should be paid in the form of financing climate resiliency projects. But some countries, which were developing thirty years ago but now are leading economies, still cling to the “developing” group and make developed countries reluctant to pay. Yet other groups are mixed: one impassioned statement was delivered by a young woman who spoke of colonial exploitation and external “conditionalities” of developing countries, and how this, the discussed financing, was neither discretionary nor charity, and any attempts to selectively implement it would be absolutely unaccepted by the group she represented. I was inspired until I discovered that this group includes those countries made richest by fossil fuel exploitation, whose royal families’ wealth dwarfs that of many western billionaires. “We are all closer to being a refugee than a millionaire,” one panelist in the migration panel had said, but here, again, where it seemed we, the non-millionaire people could unite under our shared struggle, we still divided ourselves along imaginary lines called ethnic groups and borders.
My outlook was not improved in session with a California senator who talked for almost an hour without pausing for breath about a new electric affordability bill he was proposing. Bang for buck…grid utilization… wildfires… no one wants blackouts… data centers… sell to our neighbor states. But windmills kill migrating birds, I kept thinking; electric cars use slave-labor trace metals and still burn fossil fuels, while luxury shopping centers blaze lights all night in major California cities. It was a small session, and I got to ask a question. “Why don’t we hear more about personal responsibility?” I asked. “Where are leaders who can set an example and say, ‘Friends, we are in a crisis, let us reduce our consumption?’” Well, the first senator told us, he had a newsletter, all about electrification… heat pumps reduce use… a landmark bill about plastics, and so on. Another senator, who had just joined toward the end, admitted it was a tough question. “Uruguay has the lowest per capita emissions,” this senator said after some verbal meandering, “Eighty percent renewable. But you can only use your toaster at certain times of day.” And this senator did not know how to make America be like that. “We can’t be morally castigating,” he added. “No judgment – if you drive a pickup and eat a cheeseburger, you are not worse than the plastic-free vegan.” I left even more confused, and wondering if I was now the villain.
This brought me, finally, to a panel on resilience in the cryosphere and on small islands, recommended earlier in the day by a cohort buddy. “When the ice fails, planetary systems fall,” began the opening speaker, immediately capturing my attention. Then the same things, it seemed, began: We need long-term cryosphere monitoring, another speaker insisted, more data, more satellites, more research, more analyzers, more sharing; global problems, global actions; impacts know no boundaries. And it sounded like more of the same – give us more money to do more of our things — when the solution, it seemed, is right in front of us and absolutely free: grow closer to each other, cherish family, friends, simple food, clean water, clean air, reduce this ravenous consumption.
My answer came, before I asked a question, when the cryosphere scientist on the panel took the microphone. “We have to be honest,” she said. “There is no good news from the cryosphere.” She gave figures on glaciers retreating and permafrost thawing – all of them accelerating. “What happens in the cryosphere happens everywhere,” she said. “We still have a lot to learn. There is still time to mitigate, and mitigation is the cheapest form of adaptation. But we will have to adapt to some degree, and right now adaptation is a moving target.”
Very well, I thought, we monitor and model, and perhaps engineer massive barricades to stall glacier outwash – but I still asked my question. “In World War II,” I said, “everyone was involved in the effort – rations, metal donations, motivational posters. How long,” I asked, “what has to happen before we see that kind of united commitment?”
The scientist smiled. “We fail to a certain extent,” she said, “to communicate our own science.” And this was the first time I had heard anyone on any panel admit their own limitations. “There are powerful economic things we are up against,” she said, “but they are not evil. The important thing is that you are here and that you are listening and learning.”
That evening, the cohort had dinner at a restaurant specializing in plant-based maniçoba, vatapá, and other Brazilian specialties, and I realized, having eaten only fruits, nuts, and granola bars earlier, that I had spent the day vegan; and one day was infinitely more than none.
On the third day, Wednesday, we visited the Amazon State Park in the morning, and I arrived at the center just in time to watch a former U.S. vice president spend an hour glorifying the AI-satellite carbon-tracing company he was affiliated with. First came vivid pictures of recent floods, hurricanes, typhoons, and the former VP’s agonized moaning about climate change deniers; then catchy visuals of colored auras around aerial compound pictures, animated emission trails, colorful graphs; more raving against climate deniers and clean energy refusers and statements from a Lord Mayor on how useful this might be — but I still had the same infuriating question: why should anyone “believe” in a system that will only shift wealth from one dominating party to another and everyone else left in the same precarious mess? Perhaps it was good that after the talk there were no opportunities for questions.
I went outside to get air, and found myself chatting with clean transportation sector delegates. “Chemistry is improving,” one of them told me, “allowing more battery recycling and requiring fewer slavery-produced trace metals. And cities are demanding that: when they order electric buses they won’t allow certain metal sources and require a certain percentage of recycled material. That’s why it is important for the public to be informed, so they can make these decisions.”
After speaking with them, I sat down to write this post, feeling pleasantly mistaken. Maybe politicians did talk fast and line their pockets, I thought, but maybe they are not evil – they are only playing the game we taught them. Maybe technology is overused, finance manipulated, indigenous wisdom ignored; maybe leaders have their own reasons for not speaking out against consumption.
But the same people, with all our flaws and secret motives, had come out here. We were failing, but trying, each in our own limited way, to at least attempt a solution. People had brought us to this mess with slave trades, oil wars and guzzling factories; but the same people — that shared humanity the tribal leader spoke of — climbs tall mountains, tells stories of stars around campfires, and covers an unknown child with their own body to protect the child from harm. So maybe, I thought, that refugee speaker was right – that hope is also in us, the people. And that, I thought, was something I could believe in.
This is the part of a series of daily blog posts from the University of Maine delegation to COP30.