As I write on the last day of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), what have been called the "Hopenhagen" talks are jarring to a close. They have been described by the mainstream and alternative media as a disaster, a blueprint for how international talks on substantive issues like climate change should not be conducted. This is quite a feat because by all accounts the organizers of the summit have done a masterful job of keeping alive the brand of the talks as the "summit of hope."

However, the imaging of the COP15 talks did run into some snags.

NGOs clamored for more access and input. Civil action groups from inside and outside Europe got more positive attention than they have had in the past. And representatives from developing nations, fed up with the G-8 negotiating styles of the major powers, caused havoc.

The "Copenhagen Accord" came out of discussions among the United States, China, India and South Africa. Delegates of four major countries hashing out a climate accord doesn't seem that difficult. Each can bring their own plans, their own interests and their own demands to the table in the hopes that an agreement can eventually be reached by the deadline.

Is it appropriate to work through the entangled ways in which human beings have polluted the world's ecosystems through a negotiating style that resembles an application in game theory?

Is this the way in which a problem that implicates us all, and not just the people sitting in the negotiating room, should be approached?

We might approach the apparent failure of COP15 as a failure of state delegates to recognize that what links people is not limited to statist boundaries. Solving transnational environmental problems through national units of negotiation and thinking are not very useful for global environmental problems that have no national consciousness.

The polar ice caps don't care if the deal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is authored by Barack Obama or Gordon Brown.

We seem to have failed to recognize how the statist methods of negotiating are not going to work for environmental problems that transcend the organizing power of states. (I use the pronoun "we," as we are all ostensibly in this together.) I give credit to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who called for people to take back the conference and the world that is supposed to belong to them, and not only to leaders of states — or the corporate sponsors of the COP15.

Read as a cautionary tale, the failure of COP15 lies with the drafters of the Copenhagen Accord, the most powerful states, who are moving toward an unknown environmental future on nationalized roads without taking the time to realize how the climate crisis has brought humankind closer together.

The problem as I see it is that the negotiators fail to recognize how the environmental changes to the planet have united us ﾑ and not always in a way that people find comfortable. It is therefore in our best interests to think about how we can approach complex, entangled problems that implicate us all in methods that don't work on the level of states.

It is hard to see all this, of course, if you follow U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's advice and direct your eyes toward history. Because the fact is that the present crisis that we have produced, which causes the ecologies that we have built to turn on us, has come as a result of the miscalculations that we made in the past.

The writer lives in Japan and is completing his Ph.D. in history.