PEOPLE’S PILGRIMAGE: TOWARD A SOLUTION OF CROSS-BORDER SOLIDARITY
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
——Mary Oliver
A little over two years after A.G. Saño survived Typhoon Haiyan, he and his brother Yeb (I will use their first names to distinguish between the two of them), along with 20 or so other people, finished a 1,000-mile walk known as the People’s Pilgrimage. The 60-day walk began in Rome with a blessing of Pope Francis, proceeded through the snowy Alps, and ended in Paris at the commencement of the 21st United Nations climate summit in 2015, deemed humankind’s most important meeting ever.
Dressed in winter coats, A.G. and Yeb embraced each other in front one of Paris’s popular outdoor cafés, where many people sat enjoying a cup of coffee despite the chilly weather. The purpose of the People’s Pilgrimage was to respond “from the human heart to the climate crisis.”1 The other pilgrims began to give each other weary hugs to celebrate, having accomplished their goal of walking all the way to Paris from Rome. Even I felt a sense of accomplishment while watching members of the group embrace, even though I had only walked the last 12-kilometer leg of their journey.
Suddenly a man emerged from the café, thrusting forward a copy of that day’s newspaper with a headline picture of marching French soldiers. The man was aggressively extending the paper, putting it in front of people’s eyes, putting it in front of the cameras documenting the moment of arrival. The picture was of an event commemorating those killed in the November 13 attacks in Paris, when 129 people were killed and many more injured. The man started to talk loudly at the chatting, embracing pilgrims. He talked passionately. He talked about terrorism. He told the Filipino group that people here in France were not concerned about climate change. He told them that the people of France were concerned about terrorism. Most of them, however, due to their jubilation and perhaps unable to understand French, ignored the man’s outburst.
The pilgrims were already well aware of the declaration made by French president François Hollande on the same day of the brutal attacks. The nationwide state of emergency was the first one the country had declared since 1961, a policy that harks back to the Algerian war in the 1950s. The state of emergency gave the authorities exceptional powers. They could create lines of division and limit the movement of people. They could forbid mass gatherings, such as the many planned around the coming climate summit. They could establish what they call “security zones,”2 or enhanced surveillance zones, to monitor people. They could close places such as bars and museums and other institutions. And the police could act without judicial oversight; for example, they could conduct house searches or put people under house arrest at any time. In many ways it was like a border zone: you were suspected of being guilty until proven innocent. Paris, in November and December 2015, was where the climate justice movement met the militarized counter-terror apparatus.
When I first met the participants of the People’s Pilgrimage, just outside Paris in a place called Choisy-le-Roi, the organizers were nervous. They had walked more than 850 miles, but the last seven miles coming into Paris were going to be the most challenging. They called the police for advance authorization, but were informed that France had banned political demonstrations, and they would risk arrest. Yeb Saño’s initial reaction was to compare the situation to “martial law,” when dictator Ferdinand Marcos ruled the Philippines with an iron fist, declaring that he was going to govern by public decree, enacting a nighttime curfew and banning public demonstrations.
Yeb’s real first name, Nadarev, is the acronym for National Democratic Revolution, the group that his parents were involved with and whose political actions had landed them in prison for year. In a way, for both Yeb and A.G. Saño, the final leg of the 60-day pilgrimage from Rome was the end of a longer journey. The larger odyssey had begun with Yeb’s forceful, emotional appeal to stop the madness at the Warsaw Summit at the same moment that A.G. was helping gather the bodies in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. The odyssey included Yeb’s removal by the Philippine government from the negotiating team before the Lima Summit in December 2014.
After that, Yeb tweeted, “They can silence my mouth. But they can’t silence my soul,”3 crossing the line from the official climate negotiator to the front lines of climate-change activism.
In Choisy-le-Roi, the organizers’ hesitance was surprising to me, because I had already been in Paris for a week and a half. I had arrived three days after the coordinated attacks.
There were two occasions when I had a sharp sense of heightened fear, and one of them was November 18, the day that the French National Police were pounding a residence in the Saint-Denis region of the city with 5,000 rounds of artillery. The barrage occurred not far from the Milipol homeland security expo that I was attending. Even though the French government prohibited the historic climate justice march planned for the eve of the summit’s inauguration, Milipol proceeded as planned, and, as described in Chapter Four, with a turbocharged buzz. For the security corporations selling products at the expo, all the violence seemed to boost their pitch.
On the third day of the expo, as I was taking in booth after booth of guns, surveillance devices, armored cars, and drones, I reached a point where I couldn’t take it any longer. I had to leave. I was in Paris, but I hadn’t even seen the city yet. I felt the intense collective grieving. I wanted to commemorate the places that had been attacked, the Casa Nostra, Le Carillon, La Belle Équipe, and the Bataclan, the historic music venue.
I was told to be cautious on public transportation and to not take the metro. I did so anyhow, boarding a metro B line headed south. A couple of minutes into the ride, the train stopped, the lights went out, and I immediately felt anxious. An announcement came on that an “incident” had occurred. We were near Saint-Denis, where the police were still attacking the residence with full force. Did the “incident” have something to do with that?
Just that morning I had seen footage of the actual November 13 attack, when assailants fired their Kalashnikovs at people in the Casa Nostra restaurant. The glass shattered with brutal force as the wait staff dropped to the floor all at once. And I couldn’t get Lina Kolesnikova—the Russian woman from the climate part of the conference who talked about “gates, guards, and guns”—out of my head. In one part of her talk she went on about “soft targets,” “the geography of attack,” the “hardening” of soft targets, even about the Paris metro system. For a moment I was seized with the Milipol mentality that something terrible was about to happen. But nothing did. In fact, over the next few weeks I noticed the “incident” announcement came regularly. So I made vigils to the attack sites, where I saw bouquets of flowers with drips of water under a soft rain, gently flickering candles, and messages of solidarity and grief.
By the time I met the People’s Pilgrimage at Choisy-le-Roi, I was riding the metro regularly and walking through its crowded halls and platforms, like almost everyone else. I went to the equally crowded Champs Élysées holiday market, where throngs of people ambled amidst spectacular Christmas lights toward the glowing Arc de Triomphe—which made the denial of the pilgrims’ passage seem ridiculous. Indeed, members of the People’s Pilgrimage were not afraid of terrorists, but they feared the police. Due to the state of emergency in Paris, armed authorities were free to detain and question anyone at will. Yeb Saño’s allusion to Filipino martial law during the times of Marcos was not so far-fetched.
In many important ways, the real tension between climate justice and climate security was summed up by the massive differences between the homeland security expo and the People’s Pilgrimage: transformation versus fear, solidarity versus the status quo.
On that bitter cold and foggy morning in Choisy-le-Roi, Yeb Saño told me he saw a world “clamoring for change and transformation.” We were on the southern outskirts of Paris near Mountrouge, the place where the police had found an explosive belt discarded in a garbage can, presumably from one of the escaping attackers. Given everything going on, the organizers wanted us to proceed in small groups. As we walked along the Boulevard de Stalingrad, you could tell Yeb was more bemused than irritated by the situation, but it was a little of both. There were bare trees in front of us, their branches stark against the cold gray sky. Wet leaves were flattened to the sidewalk as we walked at a fast clip. The organizers wanted to get to central Paris in less than three hours.
“I want to be candid about it. I don’t know what’s legal or what’s not legal with the martial law here. But if they arrest me for being a pilgrim, then they can do so. I have five cameras pointed at me,” Yeb said, “to capture the moment.”
Yeb, weighed down with a black winter jacket and a black hat, moved like a person who had been walking for a very long time. He said that the journey he was on was not just political, it was also spiritual.
“It allows you to learn so much about yourself, what you are doing in the world and how you must respond to things that are happening in the world,” Yeb said against the sound of cars and buzzing motorcycles.
A.G., wearing a heavy orange winter coat, walked next to Yeb. Both brothers had on glasses. The former climate negotiator said that a pilgrimage “changes you.” You begin as one person and you end as another. Along the way you create strong bonds with the people you walk with, “bonds that will stay there forever.” The whole ritual of pilgrimage, Yeb said, went back to ancient times, when “there were no planes.” He laughed as if to say, how can we begin to fathom such a world. It was “a ritual that every person goes to be transformed.”
We walked through the cold streets, past multistory concrete apartment buildings; some of the balconies had clustered Christmas decorations and hanging wreathes, evidence that we were entering the festive season. We passed old cars and a construction site separated from the sidewalk by corrugated metal walls that were tagged with graffiti and put together like rows of crooked teeth. Walking with Yeb and A.G., I didn’t forget how deadly these sharp-edged metal sheets had become during Haiyan. Just to be careful, we stopped at every intersection and waited for the lights to change for us, even if there was no traffic, and even if traffic was stalled and other pedestrians were crossing during the opportunity. Each decision we made was a political one, a strategic response to the state-induced fear that slowly crept into your head.
“I’m a law-abiding rebel,” Yeb joked.
Yeb said that the 1,000-mile pilgrimage helped him realize the convergence of all the ideas and experiences he had been absorbing for a long time. It wasn’t about viewing the world in strict black-and-white terms, he said. Rather, the journey “gives you a bigger sense of connectedness with others that pushes you to fight for a world with no borders, with no prejudice, with more harmony and caring.”
Sometimes, he said, you begin a journey with a negative outlook that we are up against something “really, really vicious.” But then you realize it was the “real people”—the people you met along the way, the people in the communities, the people who gave you their beds so you could sleep at night—who “give you hope.”
“Solidarity is not an alternative, it is not an option, it is our only chance,” Yeb told me. “Our only hope of ever moving forward and confronting this climate crisis.”
Indeed, climate change doesn’t know human political boundaries, it doesn’t only occur in one bounded territory and not impact another. However, as Reece Jones wrote in Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, “while climate change is global, its solutions are bounded by state borders and limited by the concept of private property.” There are two things that Jones underscores. One is that borders create “pools of exploitable resources, with rules on extraction and access that differ across territories.” The second is the damage “absolute state sovereignty over environmental decisions”4 does to our collective world. In other words, each country pursues its own interests brings first and foremost, and for countries like the United States, these have been more often than not beholden to a poisonous fossil fuel industry. Trump’s “economic nationalism” is a forceful demonstration of this point. As mentioned earlier, on March 29, 2017, President Trump, “flanked by company executives and miners, signed a long-promised executive order . . . to nullify [former president Obama’s] climate change efforts and revive the coal industry, effectively erasing whatever gains the United States had made in the international campaign to curb the dangerous heating of the planet.”5
The problem of global warming doesn’t call for the further fortification of borders between countries, between people, or between the rich and the poor. If anything, it calls for a dissolution of those borders. As Yeb passionately stated, what we need most is cross-border hospitality and grassroots solidarity, even with all the messiness.
As we continued walking toward the center of Paris, I was reminded of an annual pilgrimage called the Migrant Trail Walk, a 75-mile, seven-day walk through the Arizona desert, from the border town of Sasabe to Tucson, in commemoration to people who have died crossing. There was a meditation that went along with the walk that I have done on four occasions. Day after day, you would just keep walking even when you felt the pain, the strained muscles, the sweltering heat, the endless chafing between the legs, the burned eyeballs (yes, one year I burned my eyes). Although it was nowhere near the pain experienced by those who are crossing without enough food, without enough water, and in fear of the Border Patrol and criminal predators, the pain was still there. There was always a part of the walk where I ceased to be only myself and became part of a bigger whole, the bigger community that was walking. All you had to do, every day, was take a step forward, along with everyone else, toward a collective goal. During every walk, there was a point, whether it was day three, day four, or day five, when I would feel a deep solidarity with all those who have walked in these places, those who have lived and those who have died. It becomes a holy journey through an intensely policed landscape and a vast unmarked graveyard.
I sensed the same spirit from Yeb Saño as he spoke to me. He was on a holy journey. A journey that had begun not in Rome but at the moment he experienced a sort of transcendental intervention in Warsaw, and then broke from the script. One of the big takeaways, as we walked toward the center of Paris, was the exact opposite of the Milipol conclusion: an innate belief in the goodness of others. This was one of the ultimate tension points between climate justice and climate security.
“Pilgrims benefit from the goodness of others,” he says, “we couldn’t have done this pilgrimage without people embracing us.”
In an article in News Deeply, humanitarian Paul Currion quoted the 20th-century Norweigan explorer Thor Heyerdahl: “Borders? I have never seen one, but I have heard that they exist in the minds of some people.”6 Currion laughed at the assertion, given the unprecedented number of borders and border walls we have in the world right now. He highlighted a number of them, including Turkey’s new “smart border” with Syria, which had a tower every 1,000 feet with a three-language alarm system and “automated firing zones” supported by hovering zeppelin drones. Currion wrote, “It appears that we’ve entered a new arms race, one appropriate for an age of asymmetric warfare, with border walls replacing ICBMs,” the intercontinental ballistic missile. The vibrant buzzing corporate world making a mint selling techno-borders across the globe is the bread and butter of Milipol. The idea of strangers being friendly, extending hospitality, breaking bread together, offering a bed, seemed radical in this context, yet nothing could be more ancient.
Hardened militarized borders are a recent development of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Now this “global classification system,” as April Humble of the Secretariat of the Earth League described the worldwide border regime, determining who does and doesn’t receive hospitality, has become institutionalized. In the 21st century, border walls have become a perfectly “reasonable” way to express xenophobia without having to admit to it. It was “reasonable” to treat someone with contempt rather than kindness, with dismissal rather than respect, to use violence, based on the way a person looks, the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the money they don’t have.
As we walked toward Paris, we passed gigantic colorful murals that took up entire sides of buildings. We also passed huge billboards; in one place the digital screen was advertising the climate summit, right in front of a McDonald’s. Yeb told me about his children—Yanni and Amira—11 and 8 years old—who understood “the climate issue very well,” and when they were asked about Yeb’s work, said, “He is doing it for us.” He talked about the deep homesickness he has felt for them as he walked, but then said: “Homesickness is a great sign of being human. Humanity, it’s something you get in touch with on a journey like this. And that’s what we’ve lost, our civilization has lost their humanity.”
We entered the city center and crossed the Seine. The Notre Dame cathedral was in the distance, an ancient display of beauty in the still soft morning light.
“I would to say that it is through every small act of caring, through every small act of kindness and love, that we build a future that is safe, peaceful, harmonious, and free from climate change,” Yeb said. “This is the kind of mindset that we must embrace, so that we are able to work together. This movement must be strengthened and built despite, DESPITE, our world leaders.”
When Yeb declared that was he was going to fast that day in Warsaw in 2013, he didn’t know that thousands of people, all across the world, would fast with him. It was an action meant to express solidarity with the plight of the people of Tacloban who, like Albert Posadas, were eating rice boiled in filthy yellow water and were forced to skip meals. Then, for a year, on the first of every month, people fasted. In 2015, during the 365 days leading up to Paris, one person somewhere on the globe fasted, every single day. One day, the entire country of Tuvalu, an island that is sinking to the sea, refused food in solidarity with those adversely impacted by climate change across the globe.
At the end of the pilgrimage it was hard to believe that the man who came to the corner waving the paper and asserting that terrorism was the real issue knew why the people there were hugging each other, or that they were close to capping off a 1,000-mile, 60-day walk from Rome. It was unlikely that the man knew that A.G. Saño, contemplating the headline he insisted we read, planned for his own death during a typhoon and, after he survived, gathered the bodies of the dead. Despite the fact that Paris was the focal point of the media world at that moment, there were no media outlets or television cameras, just a handful of small documentary filmmakers with handheld cameras. Through mainstream eyes, this significant moment was occurring off the grid of history.
There were plenty of news outlets, however, in Paris, set up in the Place de la République under white tarps. This was the area targeted by attackers two weeks before. I watched news pundits from NBC speaking to the cameras every single day, prattling about U.S. politics and the sudden spike in stateside xenophobia about refugees, with a monument giving an austere look to the backdrop. They didn’t cover the surveillance, weapons, and homeland security convention that took place directly after the attacks. They didn’t cover the arrival of the People’s Pilgrimage in Paris amid the state of emergency. They missed the true conversation about the future of the world between climate justice and climate security. And they would miss it the next day, too, when the police started to swing their clubs at the climate justice activists converging on Paris.
In front of me was a line of heavily armored police. They had helmets on. They were banging their shields loudly with their clubs. They were marching slowly but surely toward us. They were pushing us away from the Place de la République in central Paris. Behind the long, impassable line, I saw a coagulation of white police trucks with blue stripes. In the distance, plumes of tear gas wafted around the bronze monument of Marianne, who was holding aloft an olive branch, while simultaneously leaning on a tablet engraved with the words “Droits de l’homme,” the “Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen.” Around the monument the piles of flowers and burning candles left by thousands of people in commemoration of the people killed in the attack were being crunched as the police marched forward in the plaza, pushing people out. As they swung their billy clubs into the bodies and bones of the climate justice activists, you could hear the sound of glass and crunching candles under black combat boots. In front of me the police continued to march, banging on their shields. Soon the line of police would charge, sprinting at full speed to where I had just been standing. I ran with a massive jolt of adrenaline.
A few hours before I ran from the French National Police, I watched NBC take down its tarp in the Place de la République where the climate activists were gathering on the day before the summit. Despite the fact that the climate march was banned by the French government because of the state of emergency, 11,000 people from all corners of the globe filled the plaza, first with shoes and signs, and then with defiance. And even though these activists were going to march, and subsequently clash with police, the day before what people were calling the most important climate conference ever, NBC was packing its cameras and microphones in boxes and heading to the next hot story. The climate justice activists filled the plaza and spilled onto the streets all around, extending up Voltaire to the Bataclan. A group of mourning angels—with wide, white wings—walked solemnly by the cordoned-off Bataclan, where the sidewalks, like those near the other attack sites, were strewn with flowers, some wilted in the rain, with flickering candles and commemorative messages for the 80 people killed at the concert that night. A sign advertising the Eagles of Death Metal still ominiously hung over the vintage venue as an eery reminder. Another young man held a sign that said, WE NEED LANDSCAPE. The NBC departure was even more baffling since, on this day, 178 heads of state from around the world were arriving, including President Obama, who would leave a bouquet of flowers in this very spot. The police presence was building up, and you could feel the tension in the cold air.
Later, the banging of billy clubs against plastic shields was surprisingly loud, jolting, and the rhythm felt increasingly ominous. I was in a random group of people, many of them climate activists, some of whom were taunting the line of cops as we backpedaled. Behind them was a quaint autumn scene; the barren trees leading up to the plaza had shed most of the orange leaves that lay on the street. A grey sky behind the trees made them look like bones. I was with another journalist, David Schwenk. I was there to witness and document a defining political moment, and now multiple issues were converging.
From behind the police line a cop emerged carrying a bullhorn. He barked several times in a loud metallic voice, “Dispersez-vous.” Even I understood that one. I still didn’t know what would happen. Then they charged at us hard and fast.
They charged running at full speed, like runners in a track meet. Journalist or not, I knew I had to run. It didn’t matter why any of us were there; our mere presence meant that we were doing something wrong. I turned quickly and blindly, camera in hand, and sprinted away. I never thought I’d find myself in the streets of Paris running away from cops. My mind raced back to the Milipol expo. The very same French National Police that I had watched demonstrate to businesspeople how to take down assailants were now charging at ME.
As I ran I realized that I had arrived at the true climate summit. The police were in full combat mode, and activists, journalists, whoever gave a shit about the climate was being violently disciplined. In the plaza the authorities brought out their clubs and swung at anyone in their way; and there is footage of the police smashing an elderly man directly in the knees, sending him crumpling to the ground. Paris was in a state of exception. The state could do anything. It could assault you and nothing would happen. So I ran. This was the other moment when I was truly scared in Paris, a good week and a half after the metro train stopped and we sat for a moment in pitch blackness.
It was as if the everyday world of border zones had arrived in Paris. You weren’t quite sure what you did wrong, but that didn’t matter. Likewise, it didn’t matter if your house was washed away or engulfed in a mudslide. It was a version of a “constitution-free zone.” It didn’t matter if you lost your beloved in a terrible howling hurricane, or in heat so hostile that your world had become uninhabitable. It didn’t matter if your crops dried up in a drought. In the security business, all those are “threat multipliers,” and you are part of the threat. The true climate war is not between people in different communities fighting each other for scarce resources. It is between those in power and the grassroots; between a suicidal status quo and the hope for sustainable transformation. The militarized border is but one of many weapons deployed by those in power.
In addition to banning all protest, France preemptively placed 24 climate activists under house arrest. The French interior minister said this was done to prevent them from demonstrating before the summit, just as the Philippine forces did during martial law. Amnesty International accused the French government of abusing the state of exception. France accused three of the arrested of belonging to a “radical opposition movement.” The French government called lawyer Joel Domenjoud, for example, a member of the legal team for a coalition of protest groups planning the march, the “principal leader of the ultra-left movement.”7 He arrived home to find his apartment building crawling with cops from the first to the third floor.
Alleen Brown of The Intercept wrote on November 30, “Paris was supposed to be a launching point for activists to build a more coordinated international movement in the coming months and years against the systems that produce climate change.”8 Yet, on this day, the launching point was met with walls of police.
Just when I thought I was going to be engulfed by those walls and battered by clubs, the sprinting police stopped. They grabbed one activist, who struggled mightily, and pulled him into their lines.
Later it was revealed that we were hardly alone. Solidarity with the protesters in Paris was expressed across the globe. More than 600,000 people in 175 different countries marched around the world to call for a strong climate deal. In Melbourne and in London they numbered 60,000 and 50,000, respectively. Los Angeles, Vancouver, Ottawa, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and Manila, to name some of the many places. As Yeb said during the walk into Paris, there was a grassroots “clamor” for change and transformation.
IT IS GOING TO COME FROM THE PEOPLE, THE GRASSROOTS
The next day, I went to Le Bourget, where the actual United Nations summit was happening. It was cold, but the security guards wouldn’t let us anywhere near the negotiations. The shuttles kept exhaling impeccably dressed people, and the highly fortified negotiation zone sucked them in. Those with access moved with the confidence of the included. The agreement that world leaders and diplomats were about to hash out was no doubt one of the most important international agreements ever to be put into words. Perhaps the deepening climate crisis could be averted, and civilization would evolve to be sustainable and just.
According to David Ciplet et al. in Power in a Warming World, there was an unsaid mandate that tied negotiators to the status quo so that “governmental representatives, who were structurally dependent on private sector profitability, may anticipate resistance from powerful business and related interests at home to initiatives that threaten established industries.”9 The same authors also note, and this merits repeating, that people in the 48 least-developed countries were five times more likely to die from climate-related disasters than the rest of humanity, while accounting for less than 1 percent of the emissions that contribute to global warming.
As Andreas Malms wrote for Jacobin right before the Paris summit started, each year the climate conferences (COPs) produce a “tidal wave of bureaucratic logorrhea. . . . As COPs have degenerated into annual exhibits in the latest innovations of officialese, no tangible measures other than the construction of various vacuous carbon markets have materialized; CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have not declined, not leveled off, not increased a little more slowly, but soared by 50 percent.”10 Malms continues by saying that ever since Copenhagen, when spontaneous demonstrations erupted in the center of the negotiations and climate movement activists threatened to turn it into a “People’s Assembly,” authorities had begun to ban climate movement people and demonstrations from negotiation grounds and started to patrol venues with soldiers and police. This, according to Malms, was happening well before the attacks of November 13, 2015.
In front of Le Bourget, soldiers in full battle gear were deployed on a small hill that had a sweeping view over the surrounding landscape. One was crouched and staring out over northern Paris, seemingly on the lookout for possible incoming threats. No one without authorized access was going to get past them.
There was at least one survivor from Typhoon Haiyan on the grounds, but A.G. Saño wasn’t among those authorized to attend. He could not talk about the urgency, the shaking walls in his hotel room, how he expected to be killed. Since he wasn’t allowed entrance, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed him outside the exclusion zone. While the accords were called a “triumph” of diplomacy—and there are important ways that they were—the indigenous were inadequately represented, and neither the poor nor the people on climate’s front lines were represented at all. There were no plans made for reparations to be offered for loss and damage. There was no concrete proposal to provide shelter and assistance for people displaced.
A.G., at the end of the interview, looked at Goodman and said, “Well, to be brutally honest, I don’t really care about what’s happening in the COP, because if the world leaders really cared, it won’t take 20 years. It won’t take 20 years. They’ve been talking since the 1990s, but what’s really happening?” He explained, “I’m a person who would rather believe in the bottom-up process, where you can make change from below.”11