A New Year Indulgence

Happy New Year! May your 2024 horizons be wide, your beer always cold, and may no pebble find your shoe. Much love for the next turn around the star. 

-RP (1.1.24)

New Year Elephants, Addo, South African

Please forgive my most hard-to-shake New Year’s indulgence… not wine or whisky, not gambling or gluttony, and not regrettable and ill-advised NYE liaisons; but yet another ‘hot’ take reflecting on the state of the world, our climate, politics, development and infrastructure. I refuse to litter it with emoji bullet points in the popular style, so the words will have to do.

Amidst the stumbles on climate in Dubai; amidst the unspeakable eviolence in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan; and amidst my own stumbles in work and health and relationship; my persistent reflection this year is one of failure, and of what we do afterwards. 

For me, this past year has been liminal; a pause and intake of breath after the trials of the previous, to step off into the next season full of vim and vigour. It has also afforded the opportunity for a bit more reflection than usual. Spoiler alert: my lessons have been to take comfort where you can find it, even in the unlikely places; to keep searching for your small point of purchase from which to lever your efforts at change; and cliched as it may seem, to use the discomfort of failure to see the world anew, to find new uses for the parts that lay broken.

Having returned, three years ago, from the comfortable efficiency of Australia to the relative chaos of South Africa, I am well-used to criticising our government and ruling party for its incompetence, its corruption, its laziness… and yet, these past weeks it has provided me with real solace. 

However in the face of the our collective, unimaginable failure to protect life through the multilateral processes of the United Nations, South Africa has shown a clarity of moral purpose (not-withstanding its previous falterings with international warrants under the International Criminal Court) in bringing a claim against Israel for its failure to uphold its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and requested the International Court of Justice to indicate provisional measures. I do not seek to dwell on this conflict and its depth and complexity, but South Africa’s stance is an object lesson in leadership when faced with failure. Our country has the rare capacity to reach into its own past of Apartheid and its own modern institutions of non-racialism and religious freedom, to occupy unique territory free of the claims of either anti-semitism or to risk becoming an apologist for terror. 

I take comfort from this, not just because it makes me proud to be South African (it does), but also because it shows how leadership, even from small players, can stand in the breach, as powerful interests seek to subvert global governance. We need leadership on all manner of global environmental challenges, but most especially on climate right now. 

What appears clear after Dubai is that the UNFCCC processes will grind forward, but with insufficient momentum to avoid catastrophic impacts on many people. It’s going to take leadership beyond the expediency of national interest to move nearly as fast as science demands that we do. It’s hard to imagine that it can happen at all. 

And yet we see that leadership is possible. That principled stands can be taken. That nations can stand opposite their powerful friends, yet act in good faith. My country has shown, repeatedly, that it is possible for even the most flawed among us (and lordy, are we flawed!) to show surprising courage in the storm.

But what of ourselves, individuals swept up in these great global currents? 

We mere mortals, (butchering Archimedes) looking for our little place to stand, such that our lever, as it is, may nudge the world forward… We aspirant do-gooders with our identity wrapped up in Impact, desperately shaping how we are perceived to have outsize influence on affairs. At COP, it ran rife, with breathless despatches from the front lines updating followers with little more insight than they could have read on any wire service in any country. So many there, simply to be seen to be there. In the race for the hot take, the cut-through, the kudos, we can willfully blind ourselves to the interrogation of our own motives and influence. 

This past year, I have failed to have the impact in my work that I had hoped to have. 

It’s easy to find external reasons (excuses) why things didn’t pan out as I hoped... easy to frame a story as to why it’s actually a good thing, an opportunity… easy to imagine how life circumstances contributed to not landing the critical, influential bon mot at the perfect time to win the room. But really, it was a failure, and mostly all mine. I have failed before - failed to sway an exec from coal, failed to commit fully to a risky growth venture, failed to convince a sceptic to higher ambition… each time learning (I hope) and taking the lessons into the next arena. This one, thankfully,  isn’t catastrophic. And there is a phoenix from the ashes, built on the lessons of this journey. . 

And what of those lessons? 

Well, to find your place to place your lever, it really helps to be standing close by. We are social creatures, and we must connect as people if we are to influence well. I am grounding my practice in its place much more in 2024 and onwards. 

Also, perhaps even more so, the lesson of keeping going, keeping playing, to dustily get up again. The lesson of “The Man in the Arena”, reminded in ink on my right arm:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Getting up again. Also staying grounded. Taking the lessons and re-fashioning them into new tools. Finding my place. 

This has meant connecting meaningfully back towards Asia and the Pacific, and even more so, into Africa. After years looking mostly to the Global North, I am finding my feet again in the South. It has also meant connecting more meaningfully with projects again after a season of seeking corporate influence. And it has meant imagining different career pathways - finance, mining, government… and then choosing to stay in the world of the built environment intentionally because it remains a pivotal arena: bridging the buildings and infrastructure that shape our human world.

There is so much to look forward to in 2024, even as the world threatens to burn around us. I hope we can all find the reflective time to test our own efforts, motivations, successes and failures. I hope we can all find our place to stand, and to fashion our lessons into the right levers to nudge the world.