As COP26 continues, two perspectives from AUK’s Co-initiators. First from Pat Kane who was on the front line, taking part in more than the usual forms of activism:

Glasgow’s my hometown, so on a visit back there, responding to some COP26 invitations, it can’t fool me. The place had been given a good scrub with a green soap bar: literally, that colour now seems to be illuminating every other historic Victorian archway.

From street level to billboard and corporate fourth floor, digital displays proclaim the biospheric virtues of various enterprises (Whisky Giant Plants 1 Million Trees!). It looks like a slightly shilpit Blade Runner cityscape, in the mode of implicitly apologising for past excesses.

Yet even if the old workshop of the empire is trying too hard to demonstrate its credentials, the effort is occasionally magical (to my senses). I wondered why the main streets were unusually quiet and fragrant—then realized it was because of all the new electric municipal buses swooshing around, emitting only a faint, warp-drive-like throb. Hopefully they’ll still be getting charged up for daily citizens, after the COPtocrats leave.

I had three distinct and separate COP experiences on this short trip. The first was the glorious, multitudinous main march on last Saturday. Mass marches have their function - an indication to the political establishment that the citizens are not docile; a confirmation to the activist-minded that their efforts are not isolated.

But the global diversity of this massive march, where slogans and musics from Africa, India and Latin America mingled easily with saltires and Yes (to Scottish independence) flags, felt like a real moment of worldliness on Scottish soil—one that will pulse in the hearts of many attending for years to come. And out of the carnival of witty posters, my favourite, captured by the street sketcher Lucinda Rogers:

The second was speaking at the Wellbeing Economy Alliance’s music-&-debate festival Common Ground, part of the COP front. A student venue well-known to me (where I’ve both kissed and gigged in the past), Glasgow University’s Queen Margaret Union was a somewhat utopian space on Saturday evening.

There was a main hall full of Millennials and Gen Z’s who had the capacity to both party hard and listen attentively (our panel on what artists and creatives can teach us about a wellbeing economy (see my column on this here) was on stage just before The Fratellis kicked out the jams). Elsewhere, sessions on food system, energy and democracy were well attended and vibrantly engaged with.

On stage with the Club Of Rome’s Vice-President Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, and the super-smart songwriter and musician Rou Reynolds of Enter Shikari, I found myself in a revolutionary spirit, saying that the sheer drop in emissions required, from now to the mid-30s, meant that we were about to start a momentous journey in what we think work and jobs might become, as production and consumption both have to reduce.

Add AI threatening a Singularity that removes routine from human labour, I continued, and we might have to deal with the consequences of being deeply free, where “history is not ending, it’s only truly beginning!” And then it all went a wee bit Prosecco.

Even more sobering, next morning, was to meet with Vinay Gupta, the blockchain guru and entrepreneur, at an investment conference inside the fortress-like Glasgow International Hilton. In this anthill of smartly besuited, tablet-wielding financiers, Vinay and I snatched 30 minutes (in a room sponsored by a gold merchant) to explore whether crypto (in the form of his company Mattereum) could get capitalism to account for its toxic externalities.

Vinay believes that digitally tracing each object we make will push them away from disposability, and towards durability—incentivizing for repairable design, which would lead to a lower-carbon outputs for consumer products. I responded that we need a new cultural sensibility (something much bigger than hipster-retro, or Marie Condo) to drive demand for such a system. We recorded our chat, then packed up as the next bullion delegates were wandering into the room.

That the investor class cam could even give an ear to mavericks like Vinay is a sign that our elites aren’t quite as heedless and self-terminating as some might say. Yet they need to know the people care that the systems around them aren’t trashing the planet. So I’m glad I also got the dust of the streets of Glasgow on my marching feet this week.-- Pat Kane

Second, from Indra Adnan who couldn’t get to Glasgow but nevertheless found herself talking COP26 all week.

The week of COP26 in Glasgow is likely to be remembered as the week that a power vacuum emerged in the climate crisis. Global leaders made pledges that fall far short of what is required to meet the agreed limitation to 1.5 degrees warming by 2030.

In the UK, this crucial week was also undermined by a collapse of trust in the Prime Minister – official host of COP - as a person of integrity. Even the mainstream news echoed the hypocrisy at the heart of a governmental system that allows ministers and the wealthy to do the opposite of what is required to save the human species .

Meantime people took to the streets in huge numbers to express their grief and frustration, but without a plan of action. Greta Thunberg’s inspiring conviction that ‘we the people will do it anyway’ nevertheless prompted the question: how?

Maybe it was good to be away from the scene of collapse. In the course of that week we took part in three networks, each moving towards solutions in a distinct and focused way.

The first was Humanity Rising, a remarkable daily broadcast hosted by Ubiquity University which showcases whole-system, ecologically-inspired change. Most recently they have a launched a Masters in Regenerative Action and are now prototyping a Global Regeneration Corps. At its heart is the renewal of bio-diversity from the soil upwards. Hosted in the US, Humanity Rising offers a vital alternative US narrative to that offered by the current political divide in the age of COVID.

I hosted an HR session on Sunday 7th on citizen action (starting 45 minutes in) which included the work of

· Aneira Roose McClew: from Extinction Rebellion to Trust the People. How people building relationship and trust through participation offers new forms of democracy

· Stacco Troncoso, co-founder DisCO.coop. Reimagining work, values and distributed economics for socio-ecological restoration

· Becky Burchill: Director of the Change Festival: the power of Arts to generate the soft power – attraction and narrative – needed to engage everyone

· Shelly Alcorn (Ubiquity University) / Roberto Hinestrosa (Manantial CAN, Mexico) Why we need a parallel polis to harness growing people power and how to build it

Together their ideas gave us a strong sense of a new, citizens-led, systemic-action movement that could well show the way over the next few years.

Meantime, the Change Festival itself was showcasing how renewing the self – how we show up, where we walk, how we listen – is the lived experience of change happening. I took part in a great discussion hosted by Amisha Ghadiali of The Future is Beautiful, called Rise Up to Reclaim, which asked the following questions:

Who owns the land? Who owns the rivers? Who owns the rocks? Humans have long laid claim to the parts of the natural world they can physically hoard, leading to wars, colonialism and capitalism. This has also resulted in us now living in the greatest time of inequality that civilisation has ever encountered. Many studies have shown that we have enough resources to share equally between all humans, giving everyone a good standard of living. But how do we achieve that?

How do we reclaim power and resources from the hands of the few, to distribute to all human and non-human creatures? How do we radically reinvent the concept of ownership, within our homes, our workplaces, our communities and landscapes to ensure that every living being has equal access to all the incredible wonders that Earth has to offer?

17 year old award winning activist and public speaker Anita Okunde described how allowing her hair to grow naturally gave her an authentic identity and then a stake in her community. ‘Radical Geographer’ Paul Turner described how understanding who owns the land you stand on has such definitive implications for climate change and why trespassing is so powerful. Folk singer Sam Lee demonstrated powerfully the use of voice to create a field of collaborative action.

I talked about reclaiming our own dream of democracy, through developing citizen agency. Sitting in that space with the audience felt electric, full of the kind of energy transformation demands.

A third network that week was the artists network METIS, led by Zoe Svendsen who we’ve been collaborating with over the past two years. Over a series entitled Love Letters to a Liveable Future, a group of young artists have been imagining – and acting out - a future society that meets their physical and emotional needs holistically. Core to this shift is the reclamation of time – in this future, Universal Basic Income has become the norm – and the search for meaning, achievement, status, intimacy and privacy have all taken new forms. Watch this space for news of their upcoming residency at the Donmar Warehouse.

As A/UK reaches the final days of COP, we are feeling more solid ground beneath our feet. Not because of the decisions made or not made by global leaders, which we find hard to believe in. But because of a growing sense that the psychosocial conditions – the story and shared experiences – are emerging, within which change is possible. Without these tools and practices it will be difficult to make the choices we all know are needed to shrink our personal and collective carbon footprint. But with them, the future looks more tractable.

--Indra Adnan

Alternative Editorial: COP Reveals A Power Vacuum