Linwood Pendleton on how Indigenous wisdom and local knowledge can reshape the world’s response to climate change.

Thirty years ago, the United Nations challenged the political leaders of the world to do something about global warming. The politicians responded as politicians always do: they convened meeting after meeting, talked endlessly and---of course---agreed to keep on meeting. Rinse and repeat, year after year, even as the warming and its impacts became more obvious and more consequential.

Why? Effective global governance is largely a joke in a world organized around nation-states and characterized by dramatic inequality of power and by great power tension. Sweeping, top-down proposed solutions to global challenges inevitably fail. Sadly, there is no reason to expect a different outcome from the upcoming COP 30 in Belém, Brazil…but the beat goes on.

Like frogs in slowly boiling water, are we condemned to a future of cascading ecological disasters? Is there a better approach?

Linwood Pendleton, founding executive director of the Ocean Knowledge Network, thinks there might be. Although he has spent more than his share of time trying to make the global system produce better outcomes, he is increasingly persuaded that the better possibilities come from indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and science. There are solutions, he insists; we are just looking for them in the wrong places.