Preventing trauma: the choice of a generation

Dear friends and colleagues gathered in the name of peace, I greet you at a distance from San Jose, capital city of Costa Rica. I am honored to be speaking to you today and very impressed about the technological tools that allow us to have this conversation from thousands of kilometers away. If we have been able to bridge time and distance so dramatically in the course of a generation, it only makes me wonder what other bridges our generation could build.

In a time when the global human society has become ever more integrated, complex and sophisticated, opportunities, wealth and comfort have not become a standard around the world. What is worse, the standard of opportunity, wealth and comfort has triggered an absurd rate of consumption that is exhausting natural resources worldwide, not only for the human civilization, but also for thousands of other species who have collapsed faster than we were even able to notice.

I do not intend to make this a presentation about climate change, which some people still choose not to believe as a reality, one that is perhaps the most severe conflict that life on Earth has faced in the last four million years. I do feel a responsibility to bring the topic to this conference because, as we discuss trauma, it is highly important that we understand that there is much to do to avoid future trauma for hundreds of millions of people around the world who will face life-threatening conditions arising from human-made alterations of the global climate system.

In an attempt to make a brief diagnosis of the conflict as I perceive it, we are facing increasingly long and wide episodes of human suffering that are leaving a deep trace of trauma behind it. Most of this suffering is, paradoxically, induced by humans onto humans. I call it a paradox because humans are the most intelligent species on Earth, and by intelligent I mean self-conscious of the fact that we are able to love and able to choose to love. And still many humans choose violence instead. Violence, in my opinion, is the absence of love, or, in the worlds of His Holiness, The Dalai Lama, the absence of lovingkindness.

There is, unfortunately, no guarantee that this scar of human trauma that is being left behind is going to reduce in number of episodes or intensity in the coming years. What is worse, there is a strange feeling in the air that things might continue aggravating. So, our gathering in Istambul during the coming days will be searching both for answers to treat existing trauma as well as identifying and creating together alternatives to prevent future trauma in the years to come. In conflict transformation, there is a method that is seldom applied to real-life conflicts which is to enlarge the pie. If you imagine that a present-day situation could become larger in the future, then we would understand at least two things: first, that the present situation, as bad as it looks, is not as bad as it could be in the future if we fail to act effectively to prevent it from happening; and second, that there is a need for conflict transformation into the future given the prognosis of what happens if things continue evolving the way they have evolved until now.

So, our call for action is to act with our hearts in the present, and keeping our minds focused on the future, searching permanently for a more prosperous scenario for those who suffer. Only in recent times, this was the role of governments. A handful of nations managed to reach high levels of human development and economic wealth that allowed them to live a long episode of widespread comfort. The reality for the rest of the world has been less prosperous, and, in many ways, there are hotspots of violence around the planet that deteriorate the living conditions for all humans alike. Whether it is a massive exodus of entire populations that flee starvation, disease or armed conflict, or large communities that are severely affected by natural disasters foreseen and unforeseen, in today’s interconnected world everyone is impacted in one way or another.

Today, many governments have failed to adapt to modern circumstances and to the complex social sophistication we live in. Agriculture, education, healthcare, and technology have evolved tremendously during the last 100 years, and still states and governments look in many ways the same as they looked 100 years ago, with similar methods, policies and institutions to solve problems that do not exist anymore; that is, in democratic states. In other non-democratic states, government looks like it did several hundred years ago or more. The failure of governance is yet another example of the Tragedy of the Commons: because governments do not belong to anyone, there was no one concerned with its flaws and inability to adapt effectively to human evolution. Governments failed us. Ironically, history has proven that a bad government is many times better than no government at all.

Politics, or the persuasion of masses through ideas, has become, in many places around the world, a vehicle for violence. Every state that sponsors the manufacturing, trade and use of military armament on civilian populations is using politics to spread violence. There is no justification around that fact. And while climate change adaptation requires, worldwide, some 100 billion US dollars per year, worldwide military expenditure reaches 1.4 trillion US dollars per year. To put it in simple terms, if the military economy spent 7% less per year, climate change adaptation could be financed completely for all communities worldwide, especially the ones most at risk.

As governments and states weaken, the rule of law also weakens or becomes inexistent. This brings a dangerous lack of order, a violent lack of justice, a severe lack of basic infrastructure, a general lack of prosperity. This, in time, only worsens when environmental constraints affect living conditions and force people to turn to their governments for answers, solutions, hope, perhaps a little bit of lovingkindness.

As I mentioned earlier, if left unattended, the conflict situations we are witnessing today will only tend to aggravate. As Albert Einstein reminds us, “we will never be able to overcome a problem if we continue thinking like we did when we fell into it.” I interpret his wisdom as a reminder that this generation, all of us in good health and willingness to contribute, has a unique opportunity to shift things over.

More importantly, it is never too much to remind ourselves that violence breeds violence, and the more we try to repress violent conflict through violent means, the more we will perpetuate the very conflict we are attempting to suppress. On that same token, peace breeds peace. Lovingkindness breeds lovingkindness.  

I strongly believe that humanity must bypass some institutions, power structures, beliefs that we have created throughout history in order to regenerate livelihoods, to restore ecosystems, to bring life and peace back to Earth. I mean to develop grassroots support systems like the ones humans created when we settled down as hunter-gatherers and became farmers by domesticating food. That was the way humanity started, and even though it was not a world free of conflict, there was as much concern for one’s own life as for that of our neighbors. We were each other’s keeper indeed. Our livelihoods depended on three elemental things: access to drinking water, access to arable land and housing solutions. The rest was hard work, fast learning and a predominant lovingkindness that made civilization prosper.

I also strongly believe in modern support systems that cross political borders. Much healing and assistance and development and prosperity has been created by solidary initiatives of humans helping humans.

To conclude, our emotional efforts should stay focused on our present conflicts and all the suffering they are provoking. Our intellectual efforts, instead, should be strongly harnessed into future scenarios of prosperity from which we can derive a much-needed sense of optimism as well as the mental energy to creatively co-create together those scenarios that humanity deserves.

In the process, and exercising the method of enlarging the pie, let us accommodate in our vision of a better world all other life forms. Only then will we be truly able to transform trauma into healing, conflict into harmony, and violence into lovingkindness.

Thank you.

Imagination moves mountains

Albert Einstein is quoted as having said that “imagination is more important than knowledge”, perhaps based on the fact that, as a kindergarten toddler, he was taught how to imagine before he was even taught how to read or write or make the simplest mathematical computations. We all know what happened next: he imagined mathematical formulations about theories related to the origin and dynamics of the universe, some of which have not yet been disproven, many decades after he imagined them. And I stress the fact that he imagined them because he never traveled at the speed of light to have even the slightest empirical proof of what he was suggesting.

Since humans settled their predominant nomadic lifestyle some 10,000 years ago when they managed to domesticate crops and developed what we know today as agriculture, we have developed a sense of ethnocentrism, giving great importance to the location of our community and believing there is not much more beyond our surroundings and definitely not better than what “we” have “here”.

Even today, the Chinese name of China is “zhong guo”, which translates into “middle kingdom” or the central kingdom. It could be claimed that it makes historical sense given the times when the centuries-long battles of the kingdoms over what today is Chinese territory came to an end when all kingdoms where consolidated into one and had their political center at “Go Gong”, what we know today as the Forbidden City.

But the truth is that many Chinese people, mainly those that have never traveled abroad –the immensely vast majority of them- believe nobody has it better than them in terms of quality of life, civil and political rights and freedoms, environmental standards. In fact, we all behave like this, in a way, believing that what “we” have “here” is better than others elsewhere.

The times we live in today, where we have sufficient information about material limits of the natural environment, about the socioeconomic services provided by ecosystems worldwide and about the essential constraints that affect the subsistence of life on Earth within this century, make it mandatory that we focus on the dynamics of a conflict so severe and so widespread as climate change, in order to transform unsustainable tendencies and recover viability of human civilization on the planet.

Perhaps it is important to restate the obvious: this is the only planet in the universe where there is scientific proof of the existence of life, and humans are the only species with such awareness. This puts us atop the hierarchy of intelligent species and the only one willing and able to actually change the course of actions that are conducive to collapse of human civilization as we know it, and also to the extinction of thousands of species that, simply but sadly, exist no longer and have disappeared within this generation.

But as David Suzuki exclaimed at a conference at United Nations University in Tokyo on December of 2012, “what intelligent species pours every year billions of metric tons of a highly toxic chemical into the very air it breathes!”

Einstein also said “we cannot solve problems thinking in the same way we did when we fell into them.” Therefore, there is no choice but to imagine a new way forward and shift into paradigms of collective action that are not yet here. This includes, but is not limited to, multilateral institutions, modern diplomacy as we have come to understand it in the last 300 years, the representative political systems that have been mainstream in most states during most of the last 100 years at least, and perhaps even the way in which we create laws, public policies, economic incentives, and even the territorial limits we have self-imposed onto us humans. Needless to say, we are the only species that has artificially created limits to deter large migrations. This could be detrimental in the long run in our quest for solutions to climate change.

Upon reimagining human civilization, a quest for an identity that entails a feeling of belonging to the planet itself lies at the foundation of an urgent reconstruction. That is, a sense of wellbeing that includes not only all human beings but also all forms of life; a special sensitivity for all forms of life as a proof that we are still bioliterate; a vision for the future in which the elements that sustain life on Earth are enriched and not degraded any further.

So, being a global citizen means it does not really matter where one is born or what passport one carries, where one resides or what work one does. The main concept is being aware that, whatever one does, there is a consequence, an impact, an output that affects the entire global environmental ecosystem. This is true, whether our multilateral organizations are aware of it or not.

Throughout his experiments with truth, Gandhi not only transformed himself but also transformed millions of people even beyond his own life. The impact of his life’s quest can be described in political terms, even though his intentions and his methods were anything but political. He was only searching for the truth and verifying it empirically over and over again.

The country I represent has a unique track record in its institutionalized decision-making based on ethical principles that transcend even the local culture that defines it. In the XIX century, coffee growers imposed taxes on themselves in order to create government funds to invest in public infrastructure. In that same century, a military general who presided the country abolished the death penalty and, later on, a peculiar Education Minister pushed for a reform that made education public, obligatory, free and sponsored by the State.

During the first half of the XX century, universal healthcare was institutionalized and the military army was abolished. Environmental conservation started around mid- XX century and it included heavily investing public funds in renewable energies. Today, Costa Rica has legally reserved up to a third of its territory as conservation areas; it generates up to 95% of electricity from renewable sources; it created the payment for environmental services, a policy innovation that is considered today as an optimal mechanism to regenerate biocapacity and recreate natural capital; it is a pioneer in ecological tourism; and it hosts ten times more biodiversity per square kilometer than any other country.

All of this has been the result of an understanding that the Costa Rican nation is part of a larger entity, both of human beings and of other forms of life. This makes Costa Ricans aware of their global citizenship, conscious that we might not necessarily have it better than others elsewhere, but content with our current path of development. So proves the three years in a row topping the Happy Planet Index.

To end on a future note, since 2007 Costa Rica launched the Peace with Nature initiative, an aspiration to become the first carbon-neutral country, which is no easy task, but an audacious and doable challenge. Although there has been criticism about the feasibility to reach the goal by the expected date of 2021, there has been widespread consensus to attempt it on behalf of public and private institutions, as well as academia and other civil society organizations. Most interestingly, there is no law or public policy behind this initiative. It was simply a presidential call for action and the public responded affirmatively. This is ethics. And it moves mountains.

Agenda regional América Latina-Japón

Recientemente fui convocado por la Cancillería japonesa junto con los demás embajadores de América Latina y el Caribe para participar en una iniciativa de su nuevo director general para nuestra región que consiste en mantener reuniones periódicas con este grupo de jefes de misión. La reunión era fundamentalmente para escuchar lo que teníamos que decir en cuanto a objetivos, temas y metodología de trabajo de este ejercicio.

Me sigue pareciendo que la agenda que más le conviene tanto a los países de la América no-anglosajona como a Japón es una agenda de crecimiento verde que consista, al menos, en cuatro áreas de intercambio: 1. Conservación medioambiental de tierras y mares; 2. Valoración económica de ecosistemas y biodiversidad; 3. Bio-innovación, sobre todo biotecnología; y 4. Nuevas tecnologías para la generación de energías renovables.

Si América Latina posee el 50% de los bosques lluviosos del planeta y acapara el 40% de toda el agua potable del mundo, no hay duda de que somos una región que aporta a la causa global un inmenso valor socioeconómico en forma de agua potable, aire limpio y alimentos producidos esencialmente con agua, sol y tierra fértil, y estos tres factores de producción abundan en América Latina como en ninguna otra región del mundo.

Quince de los treinta países con mejor eficiencia ecológica se encuentran en América Latina. Esa tendencia es el resultado de una manera particular de desarrollarnos en relativa armonía con nuestros bosques, ríos y mares. Al decir relativa, dejo plasmada la urgente cuestión de que atendamos aquellas áreas por mejorar en nuestro desempeño ambiental y nuestras metas de sostenibilidad para mejor mitigar y adaptarnos al cambio climático.

Sin embargo, ese aporte planetario no ha sido monetizado de manera que entendamos los latinoamericanos la riqueza que poseemos, que no es nuestra, pero sí es nuestra responsabilidad administrarla como estados soberanos. La responsabilidad es global, y este es un tema ético que debería estar a la cabeza de toda discusión de comercio e inversión con América Latina.

Aproveché para mencionar en dicha reunión dos temas: primero, que si bien la diplomacia tradicional suele velar por los intereses nacionales de los estados que integran el "concierto de las naciones", los principales problemas que enfrentamos en la actualidad son de índole global. Así que el tiempo que dedicamos a la discusión de intereses nacionales es tiempo que dejamos de dedicar a la discusión de asuntos globales, tanto en lo que nos afectan a lo interno de nuestros países, como en lo que podríamos contribuir a su solución según las mejores prácticas que cada país haya logrado innovar e implementar exitosamente.

Lo segundo es que, independientemente de los objetivos, temas y metodología del grupo, deberíamos seguir el principio rector de la creación de valor compartido. Esto es, a partir de las fortalezas nacionales y regionales que tenemos, identificar oportunidades de innovación sinérgica.

Recuerdo a Einstein cuando dice que "no lograremos salir de los problemas pensando de la misma manera como lo hicimos cuando caímos en ellos." Debemos emplear el "design thinking" (pensamiento diseñador) para crear nuevos paradigmas que nos permitan transformar eficazmente los problemas globales que nos aquejan.

A propósito, el nuevo señor director general para América Latina de la Cancillería japonesa es experto en cambio climático. ¡Qué buena oportunidad para escuchar de él la posición oficial del gobierno japonés y el diagnóstico de ese severo y preocupante conflicto global!

América Latina cuenta con fortalezas naturales que la hacen quizás la región más resiliente a los peores escenarios del cambio climático que se vislumbran. Esa oportunidad debemos aprovecharla con determinación e iniciativa y no esperar una neo-colonización que nos diga nuevamente qué debemos hacer y por qué. Más bien, somos nosotros los que debemos decirle al mundo qué deben hacer y por qué.