The Tragic Resilience of Humanity
August Riordan — is a foreign service officer for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Canada. He recounts for us his personal reflections on the climate diplomacy front in the first half of 2050.
January 2050 – Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ottawa
“Human,” I said. As though I was not, as though the word was a complication. “They’re so very human.”
“What do you mean?” Yaga asked.
Nothing in particular. Only that I wished they weren’t. Only that everything would be easier if they weren’t.
I sat across from Yaga in his office, forlorn files laid out on the table. The air smelled of winter. Snow covered windows offering slivering views of an impermeable grey sky. The whir of a heater in the corner of the room. Two coffee cups on the surface of the table, one was a steaming black coffee and the other an iced cappuccino.
Yaga’s days were steady in the winter. As climate policy director, he attended to strategy for the Ministry and ensured our team operated within the palm of steady management.
I was not as steady. I sat across from Yaga now, tapping my shoes against the table legs.
“What’s your favourite coffee?” I asked. “What’s your favourite country? Last time you smoked?” They were inane questions, born of a bored mind. My drink reminded me of confectionery sweets. A delicacy in some other place, some other cuisine. Bonn, perhaps.
Yaga did not care for such trivialities. He was a steady man. “Go to work, August.”
“I haven’t received a new assignment.” I said
“There are reports to be filled, some dating back two weeks. The funding can only be allocated after you account for property damage, casualties, medical fees, and the like. Do your job.”
I tapped my shoe. As I did, I watched the small puddle of melted snow grow at the foot of the table. It, too, smelled like winter.
“August.” He was a steady man. I admired him for it. The heater whirred, melting my drink into a pool of snow in my cup, while Yaga’s coffee steamed and steamed. In the end, he relented and answered my questions. “Dark roast. Pakistan -- it’s where I grew up. I’m trying to quit.”
February 2050 – Ottawa, Canada
There were upsides and downsides to every sort of work in every sort of industry. In all senses, I was ahead of the curve. I came home to a glass-enclosed high-rise and a number-plated penthouse apartment in Canada’s capital. I came home to a night sky with no stars yet illuminated by the city lights that expanded miles upon miles.
However, I also felt that I was so far ahead of the curve that I was actually behind. At a loss. At some point, all my fortunes had arched into a sphere, and I was falling off a spectrum I’d failed to realise I was on the precipice of.
My mind was somewhere far away from me. It was buried in the snowbanks of my childhood home, and more recently, clinging to the night stars so, so far away from the balcony of my beautiful home. I remembered a time, so many years ago, a time of night stars, when the first snowfall of the season was to be expected, not something to pray for. I was one of the lucky ones -- our prayers had been answered, and the Canadian soil was covered in a layer of white. Yet I also knew, across the seas, down south, there were others drowning in their own oceans and suffering from claustrophobic heat waves.
The news didn’t lie. My last mission abroad resulted in tragedy -- Pakistan had been struck with the third 1000-year flood within the past twenty years. A novelty, a grievous one that left the nation debilitated with property damage and casualties. As one of the foreign service officers on site, delegated by the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change to meet with Pakistan’s leaders regarding Loss and Damages responses, it had been my team’s responsibility to assess the damages and help create fiscal structures for Canada and the rest of the world to help rebuild their infrastructure.
I’d never had trouble with my work before. I suppose it is easier to be efficient when you’re less affected. But not everyone was as fortunate. It’s a collective endeavour to try and achieve global net zero and help other countries approach our level of prosperity. It shouldn’t be hard to do my part, but all I could remember were those broken, crumbling homes and the bodies afloat in waters that once fed and nourished them. What was the point, I couldn’t help but wonder, of doing a singular deed if another fifty had to die before anyone looked?
March 2050 – Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ottawa
“You can’t break into my office, August. It’s against the rules.”
I smiled and stood from Yaga’s chair, catching the trace of tobacco that entered the room with him. “So is smoking, sir.”
“What do you want?”
I offered a bribe of coffee.
“Dark roast,” Yaga said pleasantly, as only bitter black coffee could evoke.
“I wanted to say salutations. I’m going to Bonn tonight -- you’d know, of course, since you were the one who sent the order, but it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it?”
“I’ll see you all too soon, I’m sure,” he said
“You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried,” I said cheerfully. “I hate goodbyes. But I thought I saw a bit of smoke by my window and figured I’d give you one last look at my face before I went off.”
“Get out, August.”
It wasn’t so much that I hated goodbyes. It was more so that I could ensure the probability of how many of those goodbyes were temporary -- a condition, a promise, a tether to a return one day. How many goodbyes had I dealt over the course of my work?
However, I liked field work. I liked travelling, especially after my promotion to join Canada’s delegation to the annual Conference of the Parties. I treasured my childhood memories of winter. With every year that went by, I was more and more determined to preserve those snowfalls for future generations to see. I wanted them to feel the bite of winter wind, to see the icicles on tree branches, to skate on Lake Ontario after a day downtown. I sought to conquer that persistent sense of boredom that accompanied peoples’ acceptance of a false inevitability. I saw my dreams fulfilled with this year’s first snowfall, and I used hope to suppress my despairing thoughts whenever I remembered tragedies abroad. Hope was what kept me from sinking into perpetual despair.
Yaga smoked because of his despair. He was not in field work. He watched his team go time and time again and read the reports that came back. If I quivered in the memory of tragedies, I would have surely assumed he would break. But Yaga was steady.
I caught him smoking on multiple occasions. For someone who was so well aware of what fossil fuels had done to the environment, who was so aware of how carbon emissions polluted the air, he never seemed to understand how tobacco polluted his ever-dying lungs. Yaga smelled like death. Steady, no matter how many times he promised to quit. But Yaga was human. Yaga despaired in a way I swore I wouldn’t.
March 2050 – Bonn, Germany
I found politics to be a labyrinth of information and sentiments.
I considered this intimate balance dividing domed conference rooms and their echoing acoustics from the earth they dictated policies upon. I considered the diplomatic signatories who assumed ever moving positions, and the knowledge they wrought from all they had bore witness to. I considered how I thrived in this carnality, this space where humanity liberated itself of vulnerability and morality.
The annual Conference of the Parties was intended for countries to review national communications and emission inventories and, based upon this data, assess the effects of the measures taken by Parties. By doing so, COP identified the progress made in achieving net zero and the Paris goals. Some states’ reports presented successful results, others demonstrated struggles in adapting to the worsening climate conditions. Over the past years, the familiar divide between the Global North and South closed but hasn’t been eliminated. Of course, there was salvation in unity – or should be. Taking the long view, North-South relations had improved to better collectivize global efforts and implement green energy. Somehow, we had still managed to prevent the 2-degree cap from being breached.
In fact, the 2050 COP here in Bonn specifically set aside time to recognize how national governments had “successfully” stopped the temperature rise at 1.8 degrees in 2050. This acknowledgement was met with applause. I hated that, too. It was assuredly a celebratory feat -- we had narrowly evaded certain global despair. However, sitting in the room and hearing about India’s successes in converting from a fossil fuel-powered society into solar powered one only reminded me of the catastrophes that had struck throughout South Asia.
Pakistan continued to drown. Surely, the other nations were aware. I was aware, and it gnawed away at me constantly. Since the Loss and Damage agreement established during COP27 in 2022, there has been a greater global effort in addressing crises and bridging fiscal gaps. I myself am part of Canada’s delegation to the international team working to address the details of Loss and Damage responses to particular disasters. Pakistan is my main mission -- it’s been my focus for years, making its crises particularly painful. The threat against an entire nation’s welfare, one that I had grown up learning about and hearing in the news, was incomprehensible. The thought that one day, this nation might no longer exist, that future generations would have one less country on their world maps, struck me as horrifying. And yet, the COPs continued, celebrating the “victories” of net zero.
Politics were a thorny maze to navigate. During previous years, there had been numerous negotiations regarding certain countries’ willingness -- or lack thereof -- to pay for losses and damages in affected nations. There were other conflicts regarding nations’ disposition to accept climate refugees, and the implications of climate change for immigration processes. The irony.
I wondered if there was a point to this dreadful sentiment. I had done my part -- I represented my nation, I worked on the Loss and Damage accords. I submitted my reports to the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change where Yaga and others continued the work of living with and fighting climate change. After this meeting, future conferences will go on, more plans will be made, and hopefully more countries will unite within this emerging, environmentally conscious global community.
However, what can be said for the losses along the way? What to do about the irreversible damages? Hope warred against apathy within me.
When the conference concluded, I walked out.
April 2050 – Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ottawa
I dropped by Yaga’s office. The smell of tobacco was thick, almost as though he wasn’t trying to hide it anymore.
Your humanity is killing you, Yaga. The same humanity that’s killing our planet.
“Politics are dark,” he said, looking down at the conference report, bright on his tablet.
“Almost as dark as your lungs.”
Yaga closed his eyes and leaned his face into worn palms. Steady palms, palms that the Ministry entrusted their morality in. “Pakistan again. The summer forecast is not good. You and the team will need to meet with officials there to negotiate Canada’s role in what’s coming. We’re hoping to get ahead of it this time. Don’t be late with the paperwork.”
Even as he spoke the words, Yaga began to cry. He cried with red-rimmed, polluted eyes and black lungs and the perfume of tobacco that had long become a constant in our interactions. As the tears fell, I recalled our earlier conversation where he mentioned Pakistan was where he grew up. I realized that, for all my trauma after witnessing Pakistan’s sinking state, Yaga’s sense of displacement must be infinitely worse.
He wasn’t just losing a spot on the map. He was losing his memories, his identity, any number of family members still living on the country.
I thought about other nations around the world -- places like Pakistan, the South Pacific islands -- the ones less fortunate than Canada and fraught with environmental disasters. The COPs worked. Sort of. The world reacted, but not quickly enough to salvage all of what should not have been lost, only to lessen the damage. It was difficult to imagine a world before. It was even more difficult to imagine a world after.
Dismay engulfed my sense of reality.
June 2050 – Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ottawa
“Ethics,” I told Yaga when I returned, “are a wall of morality that’s thick enough to delay a bullet, but not stop it indefinitely. If those people before us had just acted a little quicker, we wouldn’t be here, would we? These people don’t deserve to die. You don’t deserve to lose your memories of home.”
“That’s why we keep working,” Yaga said, steadily as ever. “To stop these things from getting even worse in the future, to halt he steady spread of disaster.”
I knew he was right. I knew that if I stopped now, that if I relented because it seemed hopeless, I would be no better than my predecessors. Those despots who called themselves God and cast this burning, flooding fate upon us and expected us to make do.
I smelled the air and blinked in surprise. “You stopped smoking.”
“I did,” he said, “and you are only human, August. But that’s enough. We must only keep trying.”
August Riordan