The main reason I’ve excited to be in Copenhagen, at these climate treaty talks, is that Oxfam America has asked me to report on the stories of the “climate witnesses.”
These are men and women from around the world whose communities are already experiencing the consequences of the changing climate. Yesterday I met two of them for the first time.
Constance Okolet, 45, is a peasant farmer from Uganda, and the founder of the Osouku United Women’s Network, a regional community organizing and aid group. She and her husband have five sons and two daughters, ranging in ages from 10 to 25 years old.
Around 2007, she says, the two growing seasons per year that she and her village were accustomed to became unstable. Now unpredictable floods and droughts have destroyed the agricultural cycle they depended upon for their own food and their livelihoods. “We don’t know when to plant, when to harvest, whether we’ll harvest or not,” says Okolet.
“Now we’re just gambling with the agriculture,” she says, and her once self-sufficient community is going hungry, struggling for wage labor, and accepting government food aid. “We used to feed the government with our food,” Okolet says. Now it’s the reverse.
According to Okolet, selling produce once paid for all the village’s basic needs, such as medicine, schooling for their children. Now parents like her struggle to come up with the fees to educate their children beyond the mandatory, state-funded elementary grades.
I asked Okolet why she’s come to the climate treaty talks. “I come to this meeting, first of all to share my stories with many people, since the whole world is here,” she answered.
“I also came to talk to the world leaders, to help us, to stop damaging our lives. They should stop or reduce the emissions.
“They should have some funds for us, atl least to adapt to climate change, since the rich rich countries are the one’s who caused all this by polluting so much. At least we can have some funds for us to adapt to the changes.
“And maybe to seek justice: we want justice.”
Shorbanu Khatun, 33 years old, was also a farmer. Khatun has three sons and a daughter ranging from 6 to 21 years old. She spoke with me via an interpreter.
A villager in the southern coastal area of Bangladesh, Khatun and her husband had three acres of land where they grew vegetables and rice, had fruit trees, and pond for fish. The first sign of climate change impacts came about 14-15 years ago, as seawater encrochment into her community’s farm fields.
As the soil became too salty to grow crops, they lost their harvest for two three years consecutively.
Khatun’s husband turned to honey-gathering in a nearby forest to earn money. He was killed by a tiger.
Khatun, now a “tiger widow,” says her husband’s family held it against her that he’d been killed. “They started torturing me,” she says, and ultimately threw her and the children out of the house. “That way, increasing salinity has caused me to lose everything,” Khatun says.
She had to return to living with her own parents, and earned a living catching fish from the river, collecting firewood, and working as a household domestic. She had re-established herself, until May 2009’s <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Aila#Bangladesh”>Cyclone Ayla</a> submerged and destroyed her home and village. “That washed away everything I had,” she says. “Actually on that day I was cooking food for my children. Suddenly the water came, and washed away my mud house. I along with my children was floating over the roof…I lost my consciousness. I was rescued and regained my consciousness after two days.”
Khatun says that she and her children are now living on an embankment. They are among the 35-40 thousand people left homeless in the wake of massive floodwaters created by the cyclone. Scientists have long said that the impacts of global warming would include intensification of the destructive power of cyclones and hurricanes.
Khatun becomes angry when told that there are Americans who still argue that global warming isn’t real, and believe that some are using it as an excuse to take money from industrial countries.
Like Okolet, Khatun’s family was self-sufficient before the impacts of the changing climate washed that life away.
“I have lost everything, and that’s why I have come here,” she says. “You are telling me Bangladesh is poor, that is why I have come here to seek money from you. Then what else can I say?”
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To suspend my reporter’s cool for just a moment, I must admit that these are probably going to be among the most challenging stories I’ve yet worked on as a journalist.
The matter at hand here in Copenhagen — whether nations will do enough to stop or slow global warming, and how to aid the poorer peoples of the world who are on the front line of the changing climate — requires just the sort of objectivity that both journalism and science are supposed to provide.
But the stories of people like Okolet and Khatun render the chilly distance of a phrase like “the impacts of climate change” near-meaningless.
The main reason I’m excited to come to Copenhagen to attend these climate treaty talks is that Oxfam America has asked me to report with an “outsider’s perspective” on the stories of the climate witnesses.
These men and women from around the world live in communities already experiencing the consequences of the changing climate. Yesterday I met two of them for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »
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