Attention has never been a moral instrument

I have a friend in Chicago who calls the city home, and last week he told me the sky above it was unlike anything he had seen. The smoke had come down from Canada. Last Thursday the index read 747 on a scale that stops at 500, the worst air of any major city on earth, the skyline went, and the city smelled of a campfire.

We talked about the tariffs. Trump had announced that Canada would be billed for the smoke, the cost being incalculable, he wrote, and therefore added to what Canada already owes in tariffs. The irony was not lost on either of us. We had heard him in September, both of us in New York for the UN General Assembly, when he called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world and a carbon footprint a hoax dreamed up by people with evil intentions. We sat through it in the same room.

Interestingly, in May his government voted against a resolution asking states to act on their climate obligations. 141 in favour, 8 against, and America's written objection said the resolution was troubling because it referred to "so-called obligations". The quotation marks are theirs. The resolution followed an opinion the International Court of Justice delivered a year ago today, unanimously, brought there by Vanuatu, which has been asking since 1991 whether countries that caused global warming owe anything to those left living with it.

So an obligation that does not exist in May exists in July, once the smoke is over your own city. Nothing about the fires changed in between. Only the direction of the wind. This brings me to the point that attention has never been a moral instrument but works by proximity; by whether a thing has reached you and how hard it lands. Money consequently follows that trajectory with real loyalty, and we can discuss at length about how Trump's tune has changed but the fact is we are the same here.

Take Dhofar, which holds more than 70 per cent of this country's biodiversity, much of it growing nowhere else on earth. The khareef is over it as I write, the monsoon that arrives off the Indian Ocean every year with ghayth, that fine drizzle, and a fog that settles on the mountains for weeks, filling Wadi Darbat until the lake spills over the limestone, bringing flamingos down onto the water in a good year, and turning the escarpment green until November takes it back to ochre. It is the most reliable thing we have, which may be exactly why it has never occurred to us to give anything toward it at all. When I ask people what they have contributed to conserving that nature and preserving our natural heritage, for themselves and for those who come after, most go quiet, because the honest answer is nothing, and we both know it while the silence sits there.

The argument over who owes what will reach us eventually. It found Chicago last Thursday, and the question worth asking is whether it arrives here while there is still something to fund, or afterwards, when funding becomes compensation and we are left working out who pays. Trump had that argument available to him inside a weekend. Vanuatu has been making it for 35 years. So let me put a smaller question, and answer it first myself. When did your rials last go toward conserving the environment or the climate? Mine did earlier this month, offsetting a flight. Have you asked yourself the same thing before proximity forces your hand?

Rumaitha al Busaidi

The writer is an environmental strategist and advocate for sustainable development.