How the UN and Member States must do more to end resource-fuelled conflict.
Drawing on Global Witness’ experience in Angola, Cambodia, DRC, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, this report aims to promote understanding of, and a strategy for dealing with, the problem of natural resource wealth incentivising, financing, and preventing resolution of conflicts.
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With the greatest respect to the efforts of the UN, and although it is important to have representatives that can voice our wishes and perceptions at international level to organisations that seem focused on anything except respecting our earth and her many species of children, our main lesson UNlearned is that of “self-responsibility.”
Heyomysts Storm of the Cheyenne says that most people will do many things, up to and including murder (or should we say ecocide which amounts to the same thing) to avoid taking self-responsibility. He’s right. Self-responsibility can mean stepping into the unknown, the uncharted; economically, socially and evniromentally. Considering that we live pretty much on a knife-edge these days, that is pretty scary.
If we let go of the global economic advantage to implement the environmental lifestyle changes that are required to survive, we might end up as one of the poor and starving nations. Let’s get real. We are on that road anyway and we are compounding that problem by leaving ourselves astonishingly unprepared for it. We have no local resilience and we are killing the very systems we expect to rely on when the bottom falls out of the boat.
Despite the tarsands, fragmented and dying forests and diminishing water resources (how can we vote that one is worse than the other as all are abominations?) I don’t see people en-mass jumping out of their cars shouting, “I’m not driving that thing again! It is killing the world and my children’s future! It is uses Alberta Tarsand oil, it takes hundreds of thousands of litres of water to produce one and it pollutes with CO2 and other compounds that kill the very trees we expect to save us from our folly…Gosh! I’m not doing that again!” No…we expect to carry on with business-as-usual and techno-fix our ways out of these problems.
Localising economies, creating localised and renewable energy systems, creating global equity that will encourage reduction of population and the subsequent environmental degradation associated with poverty and generating localised rainwater harvesting and sanitation systems is a must to put us in a position to turn this around. Much of this… people… you and I … can and will have to do ourselves. But often the will isn’t there to buy local, grow and make our own produce, create local energy cooperatives….there are many options we can initiate ourselves, but we often hand our personal power and self-responsiblity over to governments to sort these issues out. Krisnimurti defined the word responsibllity as “the ability to respond.” That puts a slightly different slant on what we are giving of ourselves when we hand our self-responsibility over to the big guys. We do this, and then we get upset when they don’t come through for us, or furthermore, when they don’t want to give us our personal power back.
Governments, and government representatives in the UN, are made up of people who are not any more sorted out than we are. They are also people who see us as children who need to be led by Moses-like do-gooders, saved from our misunderstanding of global economies and spoon fed our decisions according to thier rules and perceptions. I don’t know what happened to representation. Actually, I don’t think that one person can speak for another in the first place. In some indigenous cultures, you couldn’t say “we” in terms of “we think”, because you couldn’t speak for someone else.
Nevertheless, governments and such officials have our power and they like weilding it. Governments and the UN are big institutuions. They create big answers that are like plasters stuck on a cracking wall. Their projects please voters (and keep global industry and its investors making money), but are mere blanket solutions. We’ve seen this with the World Bank whose solutions are expensive, debt-riddled and take over public resources (such as water) placing them in private hands. Government and many UN projects are expansive gestures, hard technological blunders that cannot and will never adapt too the many intracacies of our mutual survival on earth in the gentler way that soft, localised technology can do.
Furthermore, governments are often under the extreme influence of corporations who, for one reason or another, seem to be run by souless (at worst) or uninformed (at best) executives who hide and minimise their part in the destruction of our fair planet in order to keep their shareholders happy so that their present positions in the Titanic’s staterooms and potential positions in her lifeboat seats will be guaranteed. It is the tragedy of commons. If I lose my position to be comfortable now or to possibly survive this disaster,someone else will take my place…so I can’t take the actions that I know I should and must take… Self-responsibility goes out the window.
If any of you look into the financing of 1millon tonne paper mills (for example) you will find how difficult it could be for the UN or any government, anywhere to intervene. These mega corporations have international landholdings and land access greater than many small countries, financial turn-around greater than many small nations and global financial arrangements that are way out of most governments’ leagues. What can we do? Lots. Use less. If we don’t use it, they can’t sell it or afford to produce it. That includes wood-fibre products, oil products and energy-use.
It is down to self-responsibility. Maybe we need to take our lives back and start calling the shots. If we want to work from home one or two days a week, we should be insisting on that, rather than asking permission like a bunch of school children. We are reesponsible adults and we know what we are doing. You get the drift and probably have many wonderful ideas to initiate.
Good luck to all of us…we need it.