EP 6: Climate Change w/ Mary Robinson

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MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: From Georgetown University, this is Seeking Peace. I’m Melanne Verveer, and this is Mary Robinson, the first woman to be President of Ireland.

 

MARY ROBINSON: First of all, I decided to do it proudly and confidently as a woman — that it was actually an advantage to be a woman, that I would do a better job precisely because I was a woman.”

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Mary Robinson has been devoted to tackling climate justice for all. Climate change is affecting every aspect of global society, including the tendency toward conflict. Shrinking natural resources can exacerbate tensions, which erupt in violence, and women whose lives often revolve around gathering water and food often feel the impacts of climate change and shrinking natural resources the most. More often than not, women are left out of the decision-making around resource management, which is something Mary Robinson is working to change.

 

But first, we bring you to Mexico where the population of the nation’s capital continues to grow, as does the demand for water. While access to that resource is diminishing rapidly and climate change is threatening longer dry seasons. Reporter, Sarah Barrett, says, for many women, getting water is an all-consuming and never-ending task.

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SARAH BARRETT, REPORTER: Mexico City is sprawling. At night, you can really grasp how huge it is. Lights spread in all directions and climb up the sides of the mountains. Everyday, it expands a little more. It’s estimated that more than 21 million people live here. Tehuixtla is one of the many neighborhoods up in the hills surrounding the city center.

 

MARIA-ELENA PASANDOVO: Speaking in Spanish.

 

SARAH BARRETT: When Maria-Elena Pasandovo first moved to Tehuixtla sixteen years ago, the only source of water for her and her family was a half-mile trek down a steep hill. She would take her donkey to fill buckets of water at the pump and then turn around and hike back up again. She would have to do this again and again, just to fill one barrel of water, which only lasted about one day for her family. She says it took up a lot of her time, but it was unavoidable, even when she was pregnant.

 

MARIA-ELENA PASANDOVO: Speaking in Spanish.

 

SARAH BARRETT: That’s because her neighborhood of about 1000 people has no running water. The city refuses to lay pipes here because the area’s supposed to be farmland, although that hasn’t been the case for decades. Walking around the neighborhood, we run into Doña Carmen and her donkey, Irma. They are just coming up from a trip to the pump. Doña Carmen has turned the burden of fetching water into a job for herself. People pay her 30 pesos, about $1.50, to get water. She’s available to go down whenever someone needs it.

 

DONA CARMEN: Speaking in Spanish.

 

SARAH BARRETT: She says when there are water shortages, there’s not work for her, because she relies on her neighbors to pay her to bring them water. Sometimes, the city shuts off water to fix broken pipes. That happened last fall, and the shortage lasted weeks. And if there’s no water, that means Doña Carmen can’t bathe either. She says she and her neighbors needs to combine all their water to have enough for a bath. Doña Carmen tells us she has to get moving. She has to go back down the hill again to pick up her kids from school.

 

Mexico City is facing a major water crisis, in part because the city’s population has grown much faster than its infrastructure. The National Autonomous University of Mexico found that in many parts of the city, people spend between 2 and 4 hours by getting water. In some places, it’s as much as 8 hours a day, and this job usually falls on women.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: Women are the ones that have to go to get the water. They are the ones that have to wake up in the middle of the night when the water comes. They’re the ones that have to save water for all the things that have to happen at home, and men don’t care about it. I mean, it’s a women’s job.

 

SARAH BARRETT: That’s Mireya Imaz. She was in charge of the University sustainability program. She says getting water can be a full-time job, but it’s not paid work.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: That’s why we call it gender subsidy — because no one’s paying them. It’s the whole system that relies on them doing this job for free.

 

SARAH BARRETT: Imaz says the water crisis in Mexico City reminds her of a dystopian movie. The government can turn on and off the water delivery however they see fit.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: It is insane! The system is not working, and, in some places, there is no system at all.

 

SARAH BARRETT: Water comes into the city two ways. It is either pumped into the city from eighteen miles away through old leaky pipes or it comes from underground aquifers. And depending on where you live, your access to water can vary widely.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: The distribution is based on power and money, so poor areas receive less water.

 

SARAH BARRETT: In wealthier neighborhoods, water reliably comes out of the tap. People also keep large cisterns full, just in case there’s a water shortage. In some neighborhoods, water comes out of the tap only once or twice a week. It’s called tandeo. It’s basically a water rationing system: depending on where you live, you’re assigned a day and hour when water will come, and you have to be ready to catch it in buckets.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: They have to wake up very early in the morning — 4, 5 o’clock in the morning — just to get the tandeo. That’s when pulses of water get into your house and you have to collect it and be ready because if you’re not ready you’re not going to get it.

 

SARAH BARRETT: And when water does come out of your tap, it might be disgusting. Local news site, La Jornada, has reported on residents complaining about dark brown water flowing from their taps. In a video on the site, a local resident holds up a water bill and says, while it’s not expensive, she’s paying for putrid water. There have been many reports that badly treated water has caused skin rashes and colitis. In other neighborhoods, government trucks bring the water to you.

 

EDWIN: Speaking in Spanish.

 

SARAH BARRETT: That’s Edwin. He’s 12 years old. His family gets water trucks delivered to them in Tehuixtla where Maria-Elena lives. The trucks arrive in the morning, and it’s his job to help with the hoses and filling up the barrels in front of his house. Everyday, they get 2 barrels filled for 22 pesos — about $1. The programs are different across the city. In some neighborhoods, the water delivery is free. In others, you have to get a group of families together to sign up for the trucks.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: Allegedly it’s for free, but also the guys who control the pipes, they control who they give water to or not, so if you pay them you get the water, if you don’t pay them you don’t get the water. It’s the perfect system to get all this corruption going on to make the system work.

 

SARAH BARRETT: If you don’t have enough families to sign up, the government won’t send water, and that can make for tense living between the haves and the have-nots. People sometimes carjack the government water trucks and steal the water.

 

MIREYA IMAZ: Because they’re not sure that if they don’t go into the truck, they’re not sure that this water will get to their house.

 

SARAH BARRETT: So some people choose to ride with the trucks to ensure that they get what they paid for — that’s how precarious this situation is. This patchwork system is not sustainable.

 

Isla Urbana is an organization dedicated to building rainwater catchwork systems. They estimate that there are about 250,000 people who aren’t connected to the city’s water infrastructure, and an even larger number with tandeo. And, As Isla Urbana’s Navani Veratenoreo told me, the city is taking water out faster than the aquifers have time to refill.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO: Speaking in Spanish.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO, via translator: We like to tell people to put it in terms of money. If you have a bank account, and you’re taking out 3 pesos, but only putting in 1, eventually, that account will run out. The grave part of the water situation is that we haven’t even studied how much water we have left.

 

SARAH BARRETT: Mexico City gets a lot of rain. It pretty much rains from May to November, but the city doesn’t harness that water. What’s worse — the city suffers from bad flooding, which sometimes leads to landslides. The sewers aren’t equipped to handle all the water, and so much of the city is paved over that only a fraction of the rain reaches the aquifers.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO: Speaking in Spanish.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO, via translator: On top of that, you have to recognize that because of the quality and state of the water system, we lose approximately 40% from leaks.

 

SARAH BARRETT: Climate change is threatening to make an already stressful situation much, much worse. Researchers suggest there will be longer dry seasons, which means less water will reach the aquifers that are already straining with the ever-growing population. Navani says that’s why they’re dedicated to building rainwater catchment systems. But some people are hesitant about harvesting rainwater. They worry it might not be healthy to drink because of reports of pollution in the city, but you don’t need a newspaper to tell you the air is polluted. Often, there is a thick yellow-grey blanket of smog sitting on top of the city. Navani says it’s like mole:

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO: Speaking in Spanish.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO, via translator: Imagine a plate covered in mole sauce. You gotta wash this plate and, under the faucet, you put a tupperware container. The water that fills that tupper is going to be very dirty and filled with the stuff that was on the plate. But when it fills, you put a new tupper underneath, and the water that fills is going to be practically clean, even though it passed over the plane.

 

SARAH BARRETT: That’s what he says the rains are like. The first rains of the seasons, you don’t collect because the sky is dirty. The roofs are dirty, and it’s cleaning all that mole off the city. But after the first couple downpours, the rain is pretty clean. Navani brushed off some of the leaves to show me how the system works.

 

NAVANI VERATENOREO, via translator: You literally just clean off the gate. It’s very simply — the water goes through here, the leaves stay behind, and then pure gravity brings it all the way to there.

 

SARAH BARRETT: On its way down, the water passes through several filtration systems and into a cistern. Systems like this one can provide water to a family of four people for about 9-10 months. Change is beginning to happen. While I was reporting the story, the recently elected mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, made a big announcement. At a press conference, the mayor announced the city would be launching a program to install 100,000 rain catchment systems. Before Sheinbaum became mayor, she partnered with Isla Urbana to bring rainwater systems to a district off the city’s rainwater grid. Now, as head of city government, she plans to invest 2 billion pesos, or about $104 million, in rainwater systems. She’s starting with the Southern districts, close to where Maria-Elena lives.

 

On one of my trips to Tehuixtla, Maria-Elena shows off the system Isla Urbana installed in her house a few years ago. Isla Urbana offers a sliding scale to make it more accessible to families of lower income brackets. Maria-Elena teamed up with her in-laws to build a 10,000 liter system. Her side of the house is painted light blue and her in-law’s side is bright yellow. She’s become an outspoken advocate for harvesting rainwater. She saves a lot of money and time with the system. She says she wants everyone to try it and to not be afraid of the rainwater. She says without it, Mexico City’s future looks bleak — that we’ll all suffer if we don’t do something. She says water is a human right. Everyone should have access to water no matter where they live.

 

[Music plays.]

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: To see photos from Sarah Barrett’s reporting, go to our website giwps.georgetown.edu/SeekingPeace.

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MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Mary Robinson has held some of the highest positions in the world.

 

In 1990, she became the first woman president of Ireland in 1990.She then served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997-2002; later focusing her work on climate justice, as the United Nations’ Envoy for Climate Change. Today she continues to work to secure global justice for those most vulnerable to climate change.

 

I’ve had the good fortune to know Mary through many of these iterations in her public service and was very eager to talk to her for this podcast.

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MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: So, Mary you have had a very strong commitment to human rights and justice in everything you’ve done. Where did this spring from? How did this passion develop in the life of Mary Robinson?

 

MARY ROBINSON: It came very early because I grew up in the West of Ireland, the only girl wedged between four brothers: two older than me and two younger than me. Of course I had to be interested in human rights and gender equality and using my elbows. And I also recognized that I had few choices as a woman, as a girl growing up to be a woman at that time in Ireland. Except that my parents kept telling me you are equal to your brothers. I really appreciated that they were telling me this but the outside environment wasn’t. It was telling me that I had the choice of getting married quite early, becoming a nun, or being creative, if I had the possibility. I wanted to be a poet. But somehow it just didn’t work out. So I decided to become a nun because I had an aunt, a sister of my father’s, two sisters were nuns — both of them and one of them did great work in India with poor communities and she spoke various languages and she learned yoga, etc. and she used to write these long letters about all the good work she was doing and I thought well that’s for me. And luckily the reverend mother at the time said well Mary we would be very happy if you became part of our congregation but maybe you should go away for a year and think about it. My parents sent me to Paris. Of course that changed everything.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: And you then really immersed yourself in the law, didn’t you?

 

MARY ROBINSON: That’s right. I studied law for four years in Trinity and then I was very lucky to get a fellowship to Harvard. I’m the class of 1968. What a year it was, 1968. First of all when I came to Harvard I was very impressed by the young people who were my contemporaries. Many of them were disputing what they called an immoral war in Vietnam.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, protestors chanting: “End the war in vietnam, bring the troops home now! End the war in vietnam, bring the troops home now! End the war in vietnam, bring the troops home now!”

 

MARY ROBINSON: They were very concerned about poverty in the south of the country, very concerned about the civil rights movement.  I understood at last that young people could actually make a difference and they were making a difference and they were going out there and taking responsibility. And that wasn’t the Ireland of that time. In Ireland, if you were young, you waited. You waited into your 30s and then you waited into your 40s and if you’re a woman you probably didn’t have any role at all.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: They waited forever.

 

MARY ROBINSON: Waited forever. In 1969 I was elected to the Irish Senate at the age of 25. That sort of extraordinary involvement of young people that I saw in that year in Harvard really influenced me deeply.

 

I called for removal of the ban on divorce in our Irish Constitution. I called for the legalization of family planning. I called for the legalization of homosexuality between consenting male adults, which is how we described it in those days. And I called for an end to suicide being criminal law.

 

Family planning in Ireland was… it was ridiculous. The only word I can call it because the law didn’t match the reality.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, Mary Robinson in 1970: “I think that this is not a legal problem, or it ought not be a legal problem, it’s a moral and medical and personal problem, personal responsibility.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: Married women could only avail of the contraceptive pill if their doctor prescribed that they had cycle regulation problems. And we used to joke that it must be the Irish weather that so many women had cycle regulation problems and it was against the criminal law to either buy or sell a condom but it wasn’t against the law at all to use a condom. Then I thought well I’m going to devise an amendment, a simple amendment to this bill, I got two male senators to join me.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, Mary Robinson in 1970: “I propose to have quite a short technical legal bill, which will repeal section 17 of the criminal law amendment act 1935, which makes it a crime to sell or have for sale or advertise contraceptives.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: I became a hate figure overnight.

 

I remember walking down the Main Street in Dublin, Grafton Street, and feeling somebody is going to jump out and say you are a horrible witch, you are a terrible woman. Because that’s the feeling I had.

 

In all that period I realized afterwards that I was learning to cope with having to believe that what I was doing was worth paying a price, And having learned that lesson at a very young age, no criticism later affected me to the same extent. You know, you of course you develop the scar tissue, you develop a toughness in a sense.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: The skin of a rhinoceros, as Eleanor Roosevelt called it.

 

But somehow this senator who kept making her way eventually became a candidate for president of Ireland. How did that happen?

 

MARY ROBINSON: I was very surprised when a former Labor colleague and still a friend, also a lawyer, came to see me and I thought he had a family problem or something and he said the Labour Party was thinking about whom they might nominate to contest the next presidential election. And they thought of me. Now my initial response was no way, no way. I mean I got a good life now doing law and it’s important work. But I was too polite to say no. And I said look let me think about it over the weekend and then I rang Nick and I said you know what do you think of this. And Nick said it’s Valentine’s Day, come to lunch. When I came to lunch, more or less what he said was you know you are the constitutional lawyer. You’ve talked a lot. Have you ever read the provisions of the Constitution about the presidency? And I hadn’t. And I went and I read that. I read that oath of the president. And I thought to myself you know the president of Ireland under this Constitution should  be doing far more and be far more meaningful.

 

[Music plays.]

 

What was striking to me was how, when I began my campaign for presidency I could walk down the street at most times and nobody knew who I was because my reputation was a lawyer, an intellectual, somebody brought cases. It wasn’t of the common people. But what I found when I realized that I was a candidate for the presidency was that I had to open myself up and become much more like my mother. You know I kind of almost model myself on my father who was a very devoted medical doctor all his life, a vocational doctor, and his patience. He had a great human rights approach to medicine. So that was that. But my mother was somebody who was so interested in people and had this great rapport, this great memory, for who she met and didn’t meet that. And I found myself becoming like her and opening up as I went around the country.

 

I became very interested that people were warming to me and and I reached out in particular to those women who would have you know sort of stood at the back or said well I’m only a housewife and I thought this is my constituency now. These are the people I really want to represent.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, Mary Robinson’s inauguration speech: “I was elected by men and women of all parties and none. By many with great moral courage, who stepped out from the faded flags of the civil war and voted for a new Ireland.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: And when I was elected I thanked Mná na hÉireann, which means the women of Ireland. But it was the pejorative way of referring to Mná na hÉireann you know, phewf.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, Mary Robinson’s inauguration speech: “And above all, by the women of Ireland, Mná na hÉireann. [Applause] The women of Ireland, Mná na hÉireann, who instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system. [Applause]”

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: But it’s not just that you won. It’s that you really transformed the office of president of Ireland. But how did you do that? What did you do?

 

MARY ROBINSON: First of all I decided to do it proudly and confidently as a woman. That was actually an advantage to be a woman. And I would do a better job precisely because I was a woman. I said there’s another part of this island that I love: Northern Ireland. And I wanted to help peace building. And this was again you know in 1990 well before Good Friday Agreement, etc.

 

But also internationally I said I want to do something for international human rights, give Irish leadership and I had no idea, no idea what that would mean. And I did have those opportunities because they just occurred.

 

In 1992 I was the first head of state to go to Somalia when there was the famine because of the warlords fighting.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, news reporter:President Mary Robinson’s plane touched down in Baidoa at 10:30 this morning… The first stop was the International Red Cross feeding center in Baidoa. The president moved among the rows of hungry people. She was visibly shocked.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: Just to see first of all the long lines in Somalia of women and also some men holding children some of them you know seven or eight but looked like three or four year olds and then them dying in their arms in some cases.

 

[Music plays.]

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Well and it’s so fascinating to hear you talk about these various chapters in your book of life because the one chapter would clearly lead to the next chapter and influence the next chapter.

 

MARY ROBINSON: Because I don’t plan things you know in that sense.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: But those experiences stay with you and you don’t divorce them from the rest of your life.

 

[Music plays.]

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: So Mary, you stepped down from the presidency to take on the role of the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights.

 

MARY ROBINSON: That was a year where I traveled a great deal including my first visit to China which was both important and of course unprecedented.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, Mary Robinson: “China has human rights problems. Major problems. But it’s not alone in having human rights problems and I was interested at the awareness of and willingness to admit human rights problems by the leadership with whom I spoke here in China.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: You know, nobody on human rights have been to China. I insisted on going to Tibet and eventually the Chinese agreed.

 

I learned a lot from some of the good women who were working with me like for example Asma Jahangir, you know Asma Jahangir and you know Hina Jilani, the two sisters from Pakistan.

 

And what they taught me was how to deal with issues like early child marriage and female genital cutting mutilation. Don’t call them culture, don’t say, you call them harmful traditional practices. You know apartheid was a harmful traditional practice and slavery was a harmful traditional practice and then work within communities.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Some some time later you become the UN Envoy for the war-ravaged Great Lakes region in Africa and at the time I remember a number of the nations had signed on to a pact for security, stability and development, and the whole hope was that this would begin to create that sense of security, real security, stability, and development in those countries.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, news reporter: “The new UN special envoy for Africa’s Great Lakes Region, former Irish President Mary Robinson, arrived in Goma on Tuesday.”

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: And you have this very big task:  representing the United Nations.

 

ARCHIVE AUDIO, news reporter: “Robinson, who assumed this special envoy role last month, is tasked with leading political efforts to bring an end to more than two decades of conflict in the region.”

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: But as part of this role with all of its components, you really put a premium on the role that women have to play.

 

MARY ROBINSON: What I did was I tried to meet as much as possible in every city — in Goma, in Kinshasa, in Kigali, and wherever I was — with civil society and then have a separate meeting with women. It was important because women don’t always open up in a mixed group and men often dominate. So once or twice I actually threw the men out so I could have a meeting with the women.

One of the reasons why I was happy to do the honor to do the position of Special Envoy for the Great Lakes in Africa was that I had been working with a focus on African countries on the economic and social rights, right to health and to food and women, peace, and security issues all over Africa in the years after my time as high commissioner. And that’s what brought me to climate change.

 

[Music plays.]

 

MARY ROBINSON: I never spoke about climate change when I was high commissioner. I learned about it on the ground in Africa. How deeply poor countries and communities were being already affected by climate change. And so I morphed into climate justice, the injustice of climate change. And the need to ensure that because there is an injustice and because we’re all responsible, especially the big emitting parts of the world that built their economies on fossil fuel. We’re all responsible. We have to have a development fairness which is once when we have this clean energy, off grid and on grid, it must get to everyone.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Often that the words climate and justice are not in the same phrase.

 

MARY ROBINSON: And nor is climate and gender and human rights.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Exactly. And you have brought all of those into the climate conversation. So could you tell us how all of that came together for you?

 

MARY ROBINSON: It was an important step, if I may say so Melanne, when you as then the U.S. Global Ambassador for Women agreed to let me persuade you to come to the conference in Durban which was just before we were planning to strengthen gender the next conference in Doha. We were plotting in Durban.

 

And it led to the constituency of women who had been trying so hard and finding it very difficult to get their voices heard. They became very encouraged and we worked to get gender into the Paris Agreement and then the Gender Action Plan and the troika of women leaders on gender and climate took a further important step which was yes we’re at the table. But what about the important voices of grassroots, indigenous who are not able to get to the table. They can get to the outer fringes but they’re not in where the decisions are being taken and they can’t influence the delegates. And now in the last few years we’ve been hearing these voices.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: So we know that women are not just victims of the horrors of climate change but they are active in solving the problems. And we also know even though we may not frequently act on that knowledge that each of us really has to address this issue and yet it is an issue that seems not to be completely embraced even by the women’s movement.

MARY ROBINSON: I think about this a lot because I’m trying to you know focus on getting women leaders to really take, you know, as seriously as anything else, more seriously than anything else, the fact that we are not on course for a safe world for our children and grandchildren.

 

And interestingly when I’m with African women leaders now they don’t need any convincing. They’re absolutely right on top of their agenda. When I’m with Asian women, right on top of their agenda. It’s Europe and the United States. We feel it’s something in the future but it’s not actually affecting us. And there are other issues like #MeToo and equal pay and empowerment. And it’s great that there is mobilization around those issues but we have to get real.

 

[Music plays.]

 

MARY ROBINSON: A year ago I took advice from wise friends and they said Mary if you really want to get, get to more women in particular, get to people generally about climate change, why don’t you do a podcast? To which I ask the question, “What’s a podcast?” I didn’t know.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: And now you’re the Queen of Podcasts.

 

Mothers of Invention tagline: “Hello and welcome to Mothers of Invention! Our new podcast series where we’re celebrating the fact that although climate change is most definitely a man-made problem, it has a wonderfully feminist solution. I’m Maeve Higgins. I’m a comedian and I live in…”

 

MARY ROBINSON: I’m amazed at how well the podcast I’m doing with another Irish woman who’s based in New York, Maeve Higgins, has done it’s called Mothers of Invention. And briefly the tagline is climate change is a man-made problem and requires a feminist solution. And I do ads when I’m talking about it like this, that man-made of course is generic. It includes women. And a feminist solution absolutely it includes men as long as they embrace a feminist solution. And the thing about doing us with a comedian is we are also having fun. You know every time I’m getting so serious she says something terribly funny.

 

Audio from Mothers of Invention: “What we have been sending is shocking. It’s not beautiful bottles that could potentially be recycled. It’s… nappies. It’s soiled stuff. It’s just container after container.” MAEVE HIGGINS: “I blame the babies, I blame the babies! Baby wipes, nappies… we really need to take on the babies.” MARY ROBINSON: “Look Maeve, I dissociate myself from these remarks.”

 

MARY ROBINSON: I don’t know why but I think that that helps. It helps that we’re having fun, that we like each other, and that we’re very serious about what we’re serious about but we’re also prepared to have you know we, we blag off each other as we say in Ireland.

 

MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Well it’s what you said at the beginning of much of your political career which is really speaking to people where they’re living their lives. And I think for all of us today the message of the fact that we all need to be active and climate change is an important one. And your voice has called many of us to action. I speak about that personally.

 

So thank you, Mary Robinson.

 

MARY ROBINSON: I do appreciate very much our conversation.

 

[Music plays.]

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MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Next time on Seeking Peace, we hear from Yemeni women demanding to be part of the solution to the ongoing international conflict there.

 

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MELANNE VERVEER, HOST: Seeking Peace is a production of Georgetown University’s Institute of Women, Peace and Security and Hard Listening Media.

 

Our associate producer is Ali Post. The show is edited by Ibby Caputo and sound designed by Sara Curtis.

 

Our production manager is Sarah Rutherford. And our executive producer is Kate Osborn. Original music is composed by Alison Leyton Brown.

 

This show was made possible by the Compton Foundation.

 

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