From marchers to wastepickers

I’m currently sitting in a side-event in the midst of COP 15, listening to a man from Brazil talk about waste-picking - people who earn their livelihoods from picking through trash to find what is valuable, and to recycle it. According to these speakers, the recycling system in the developing world is in the informal sector, employing 15 million people around the world. Yet they struggle with social marginalization. Their work makes a significant difference to climate change. The impact of recycling is large (comparable to the transport center) and felt throughout the economy.

The man is heavy, with a dark beard and dark curly hair and glasses. Listening to his soft, gentle voice, I am struck with the unusual and precious aspect of this conference and this issue – that Climate Change can bring a waste-picker from the slums of Brazil to a global negotiation conference, where he would speak on a platform of people from India, the United States and Europe, to people like me, while outside a demonstration is vaguely audible, the beats of the drums and the march of the feet, and not that far from us sit negotiators and texts and people drinking coffee after their meal. They are strongly against the clean development mechanisms, which rarely support bottom-up solutions.


So far as I can tell, which is not very far, the COP process is not going very well. But the process has been designed so that people can meet one another, share knowledge, and learn. As one woman I met today said, its like going to a 2 week long intensive school, except you are not entirely sure what you are going to be learning before you get there!

And it is one of a million ways in which innumerable issues, many of which I don’t tend to focus on, are connected – informal work relates to gender issues relates to consumerism relates to climate change relates to values and norms in the North and the South. And it’s connected to those negotiators sitting not very far from here. Connections – but still, so much marginalization, and so much lack of connections!