COP 15 COPENHAGEN, THE SUMMIT ON CLIMATE CHANGE sponsored by the UN, held in the capital of Denmark between December 7 and 18, 2009, has been concluded, with little glory and much sorrow.

With three weeks to go, it was already known that the most important decisions would be deferred for next year, because China and the United States, the two most polluting countries in the world, so decided. In this way the fate of the Summit was already cast and there was little hope to reach an agreement that would commit countries to carbon dioxide reduction quotas that could replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012. But In return, they promised that a political platform of the Summit would come out that would serve as a basis for constructing binding legal commitments in 2010. The ice-water bucket was that this did not materialize either.

As analysts that we are, it occurs to us, by way of methodology, to imagine ourselves located somewhere outside the Earth to try to build an extra-planetary vision that would allow us to discern what is really happening with our fellow “earthlings” and why they turned the summit (and the Planet) into a reedited tower of Babel.

Remember that the biblical tower was built by humans in order to reach heaven. Then, according to the Bible, God created languages and dialects so that men and women could not understand each other. He put a brake on them to prevent them from concluding the work with which they intended to cross the celestial kingdoms without their consent.

Maybe something similar is happening to us right now. This, which at first glance seems to be serious, we should not take it lightly. Now, who does not wish to share this theological vision, we invite you to analyze the question through scientific-based reasoning.

We hear often talk about ecological balance, but do we really stop to reflect on it? Imagine that there were only two species on the planet: foxes and chickens, and that at some point the birds managed to expand exponentially. At that time the foxes would enjoy an abundance of food never seen before and then begin to reproduce and fill vast territories with their huge populations. Its growth, at the expense of the hens, would cause them to diminish almost until extinction, producing a dramatic decrease in foxes shortly after due to the shortage of their only food and the population level of the birds would return to normal. Nature, through biodiversity, is responsible for recovering the balance and the cycle repeats itself over and over again, guaranteeing the survival of the species for millions of years and in the process evolution takes place.

The human being has expanded on Earth at an unprecedented rate in the last ten thousand years. We have cleared many species and endangered many thousands more. We have polluted the atmosphere, poisoned the waters and debased the soil. We are about to derail the weather and produce a monumental imbalance, difficult to imagine even for the most fertile minds. If we fail to avoid it and create through our ingestion the mechanisms of recovery of balance, nature will do it for us. But it will be at a very high cost, both for us and for the other species and the planet itself. Humans are the foxes of the example at the time of greatest expansion, and perhaps we are at the doors of a drastic population decline and even the extinction of our species.

Returning over the tower of Babel in Copenhagen, the spectacle we witnessed there is pitiful. It was like a circus with several tracks, where each group took their stage and presented their show simultaneously, looking for their natural audience. Each one spoke but no one listened to the others. The powerful locked themselves in and made the decisions in private, avoiding their responsibilities to humanity and history. His attitude seems to foreshadow Kyoto’s history and the road to disaster. It was proven once again that the only animal that stumbles twice with the same stone is the human.

Nor did the populists and demagogues who lived their moment at the summit and did not miss the opportunity to steal a camera for their personal purposes. In Copenhagen they presented themselves as great environmentalists but upon returning to their countries they continue to tolerate the indiscriminate extraction of centenary trees, or announce having reserves of fuels to burn for a thousand years, or allow the storage of highly toxic substances in their territories or drive overcrowding in mega cities by multiplying almost-tastes for the poor even in the green areas, expanding the belts of poverty in an unstoppable way, with all their environmental and social perversions.

At COP15 each spoke their own language, but the stridence’s were not with the languages theselves. The differences in languages that were heard there were not like those of the biblical Babel. There they spoke in capitalist, socialist, communist, emergent, third-world languages. The violent ones, the supporters of the north, the south, the pacifists, the greens, were expressed, but they did not understand each other as in the original Babel. Perhaps humans now end up like those men and women who could not build their tower to heaven, because some force will stop us and prevent us from concluding our conquest of the Earth.

Here, from our armchair on the Moon, we observe alarmed our inability to reconcile positions. Perhaps the Babel effect is not a fortuitous issue, but a kind of codification that we carry internally, something that nature designed to prevent us from continuing to expand at the expense of biological diversity, so necessary for balance and essential for the maintenance of life on our hitherto lush blue planet.

Sandor Alejandro Gerendas-Kiss