Category Archives: Corporate Globalization

by | 2011-08-03 · 13:12

Bubble-wrapping nature against corporate greed

Note: This blog post was written by Meera Karunananthan of the Council of Canadians about the strategy meeting on the Rights of Nature held this past weekend in San Francisco.  GJEP Executive Director Anne Petermann was one of the attendees.

–The GJEP Team

BY MEERA KARUNANANTHAN 

Cross-Posted from Rabble-CA, AUGUST 2, 2011

As an environmental justice campaigner in North America, sometimes I feels like I am operating in a bubble.

I am in San Francisco in the midst of a national “debate” on the U.S. debt, in a bubble at the Global Exchange headquarters where environmental activists have gathered from across the country to discuss the need for a paradigm shift with regards to our relationship with the environment.

Three months after the launch of the book The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, by the Council of Canadians, Global Exchange and Fundacion Pachamama, a meeting took place in San Francisco this weekend to discuss next steps including joint strategies for the climate talks in Durban and the Rio + 20 Earth Summit in 2012.

Convened by Global Exchange, the meeting brought together representatives from organizations working to advance the rights of nature in communities around the world. Among them, la Fundacion Pachamama, an organization that played a central role in making Ecuador the first country to officially recognize the rights of nature within its constitution.

While Natalia Greene of Pachamama talked about the challenges of implementing this ground-breaking legislation, the rights of nature has created the space for communities to demand greater protection for the environment in a country with powerful foreign oil and mining interests. Although the Ecuadorean government has been inconsistent in its recognition of environmental rights, communities like the Waorani have been successful in keeping Brazilian oil giant Petrobras out of the Yasuni rainforest, one of the most biodiverse forests on earth by getting the government to establish a “no extraction zone” within an area containing rich oil deposits.

Constitutional change seems light years away in countries like Canada and the United States.

As the U.S. corporate media scrambles to determine who won the national debt debate in Washington, there is little doubt about who is losing. The wealthiest Americans will see little change, while the rest of the country deals with trillions of dollars in cuts to social programs or “entitlements” as the Republicans refer to them.

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In the midst of these discussions on how to protect corporate profits while slashing programs to protect vulnerable segments of society, the case for communities to develop strategies against corporate destruction of the environment is even more poignant.

There have been 125 municipal ordinances recognizing the rights of nature that have enabled communities to stand up to corporate destruction of their land, air and water. Most recently, Pittsburgh stopped hydraulic fracturing by passing a community bill of rights. It is what, Ben Price of the Community Environmental Legal Defence Fund refers to as stripping corporations of their privileges. CELDF and Global Exchange have worked with communities across the United States to challenge corporate-friendly policies at the state and federal levels.

Rights of nature and water

Applied to water, the rights of nature approach calls for the protection of natural cycles of lakes, rivers, aquifers against harmful human activity. Many of the municipal ordinances have been used to protect surface and ground water from irreversible damage through hydraulic fracturing, groundwater extraction, toxic sludge spreading and other large scale industrial projects. In addition to ordinances banning harmful activities, there have been bills promoting sustainability enabling community to set forth policies promoting food sovereignty and self sufficiency. Santa Monica’s bill of rights has enabled water recycling and grey water use, which would otherwise be illegal according to state law, says Shannon Biggs of Global Exchange.

Last week, the Council of Canadians and its allies celebrated the one-year anniversary of the official recognition of water as a human right at the United Nations General Assembly. In our work to see this right implemented in national legislation, we will stress the need to recognize the human as a component of the natural world. Water is fundamental to all life and beyond human consumption; it is central to the rights of all other species to exist and flourish. As we have emphasized on numerous occasions, the right to water and sanitation will need to take into account the sustainable use of watersheds to ensure the protection of lakes, rivers, aquifers and the species that depend on them. We reject anthropocentric approaches and shortsighted measures to address water and sanitation needs like desalination which poses a threat to oceanic life.

Market mechanisms

Much of the discussion focused on the tensions between market mechanisms that call for the environment to be regulated by pricing mechanisms and the rights of nature paradigm. An earth-centred approach does not allow corporations to pay to pollute or abuse the environment. In recent years, corporations have partnered with environmental NGOs to promote such strategies as water offsets enabling multinationals like Coca Cola to gain PR points by destroying the environment in one part of the world while promoting conservation efforts elsewhere, proclaiming themselves “water neutral.” Water offsets, carbon trading and other market mechanisms have attempted to artificially quantity environmental damage by downplaying the impacts of damaging local ecosystems.

Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project refers to this as “corporations trying to maintain business as usual by co-opting green discourse.”

So perhaps the strategy is not to step outside the bubble to attempt dialogues with those who will continue to strengthen the mechanisms of global capitalism that are responsible for the environmental crisis, but to expand and strengthen our bubble. To create bubbles in the form of no extraction zones, local bills of rights and municipal ordinances that keep corporate greed out of our communities.

Meera Karunananthan

Meera Karunananthan is the national water campaigner at the Council of Canadians.

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by | 2011-08-02 · 10:30

Mother Nature has rights, say speakers

Note: I just returned from a strategy meeting in San Francisco on ways to use the “Rights of Mother Earth” as a tool for advancing justice and opposing false and market-based solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.  Natalia Greene, of Fundación Pachamama, quoted below, was one of the participants.  While there are a lot of divergent opinions on the best ways to utilize this tool, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, has been using it to marked success in stopping fracking in Pennsylvania.  CELDF assisted the Congress of Ecuador in creating their new constitution, which recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples and Nature, and strips corporations of the rights of personhood.

–Anne Petermann, for the GJEP Team

Cross-Posted from The Saint Albert Gazette, Alberta, Canada, July 30, 2011

Local youth hear about Earth’s legal rights

By Kevin Ma |

In Ecuador, Mother Nature can take you to court.

It’s right in the country’s constitution, says Natalia Greene, who spoke to about 200 local youth at the University of Alberta this week, and it’s one of the many ways that indigenous knowledge can help us protect water.

“Nature is a slave right now,” she says.

While there are laws that ban pollution, those laws all treat nature as an object to be used by people. In 2008, her country became the first in the world to explicitly recognize the rights of nature in its constitution — an idea that came from Ecuador’s indigenous population.

Nature is like a plane, she says, and if we keep taking parts out of it, eventually it will crash.

“We are a part of nature,” she says. “If we don’t respect nature, we’re not respecting our rights.”

Aboriginal lessons

Greene is an environmentalist with the Fundación Pachamama in Ecuador, a group that helped rewrite the country’s constitution in 2008. She was one of many speakers in Edmonton this week to take part in the Global Youth Assembly, a youth conference meant to promote justice and human rights.

Ecuador is home to the Amazon rainforest and the Galapagos Islands, Greene says, and puts great value on its biodiversity. Recent deforestation and oil spills have caused the nation to rethink the nature of development.

Ecuador has about 14 different nationalities, many of which have close relations with nature. When Greene and other negotiators spoke to indigenous groups during constitutional talks, they realized that these people viewed nature as a person — a concept foreign to Western law.

“The judicial system we had developed with had forgotten nature,” she says.

Canada’s aboriginals have a similar view of nature, notes Danika Littlechild, a lawyer from the Ermineskin Cree Nation near Hobbema who specializes in water governance. The Cree word for “water” is “nipiy,” which is short for a phrase that means “I am life.”

“When you say ‘water’ in [Cree], you know it is alive,” said Littlechild, who also recalled one meeting where the elders actually brought water from a local water body to act as a representative of nature at the negotiations.

Nature goes to court

Ecuador decided to give nature the highest legal protection possible by putting it in its constitution, Greene says. The constitution makes specific reference to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, and says that nature is subject to all the rights outlined in it. It also allows any resident to take the government to court on behalf of nature if he or she feels its rights have not been defended.

The first big test of this law came in the case of the Vilcabamba River last March, Greene says. A company had been building an illegal road by the river for three years, and had dumped so much rock into it that it had actually changed its course, causing floods. When a local group took the government to court over its inaction, the judge ordered the company to get the permits needed for the development and to repair the harm it had done.

The law hasn’t chased investors out of Ecuador, Greene says, as all it does is ask them to develop responsibly. But the government has been backsliding on it lately, as it was seeking mines and oil development for money to fund social programs.

About 100 American communities have now recognized the rights of nature, she notes, including Pittsburgh. She encouraged delegates to lobby their own governments and get the conversation about nature’s rights started.

“We need to have people understand that we are part of nature,” she says.

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by | 2011-07-19 · 14:02

Sustainable Development, Not ‘Green Economy’

Source: IPS

By Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Jul 15, 2011 (IPS) – With less than a year to go for the Rio+20 Summit, civil society in Latin America and the Caribbean is mustering its strength to defend the principles of sustainable development, as opposed to the model of a “green economy”, which it views as only benefiting the business interests of big companies.“The green economy is the new international environmental vogue, but it has lost all vestiges of the concept of sustainable development and has taken another direction,” Maureen Santos, an expert on international issues at the Brazilian Federation of Agencies for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), told IPS.”It’s an attempt to shore up the present system that is in crisis,” she said.

The Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development will be held Jun. 4-6, 2012 in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, marking the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit which took place in Rio in 1992.

The goals of the Rio+20 conference are to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.

The conference will focus on building a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, and an institutional framework for sustainable development.

“Putting a price on nature is no solution, because it isn’t a commodity,” Katu Arkonada, a researcher at Bolivia’s Centre for Applied Studies on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CEADESC), told IPS. “The green economy must not distort or divert the basic principles of sustainable development. It is a mistake to say that people will only look after goods if they have a price-tag and an owner and generate profits.”

The first Earth Summit led to a series of international treaties, like the conventions on climate change and biological diversity, the Sustainable Development Commission, and what is known as Agenda 21, an action plan for U.N. agencies, governments, companies and non-governmental organisations in every area in which people have an impact on the environment.

However, two decades later, progress towards sustainable development is still slow: greenhouse gas emissions, species loss and environmental degradation have increased, and the planet’s natural resources are being exhausted.

Debate should focus on “the greening of growth, equity in a world of limits, and building resilience to shocks and stresses,” says a study titled “Making Rio 2012 Work: Setting the stage for global economic, social and ecological renewal” by Alex Evans and David Steven.

The authors are academics with the Centre on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, which published the document in June.

Preliminary work on the agendas for the official and alternative conferences is advancing apace, on the part of both governments and civil society organisations. Preparatory meetings for the summit were held May 2010 and March this year at U.N. headquarters in New York.

In January and February 2012, further meetings will take place there to discuss the draft declaration to be adopted in Brazil.

Meanwhile, an international seminar was held Jun. 30- Jul. 2 in Rio de Janeiro to organise the parallel meeting, convened by the Civil Society Facilitating Committee for Rio+20.

Civil society organisations prefer to talk about greening the economy, rather than promoting a green economy. In fact, these definitions are already a cause of dissension between industrialised countries and developing nations.

“The debate on the green economy is very diverse. Latin American positions are very fragmented,” said FASE’s Santos, who is also a member of the Brazilian Network for Peoples’ Integration (REBRIP).

Governments and social organisations from the region will plan for the Rio+20 Summit at the Regional Preparatory Meeting for Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held Sept. 7-9 at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile.

The session’s tentative agenda includes a report on preparations for Rio+20 and debates on progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and the key topics of the summit, as well as analysis and approval of the regional declaration.

“The two key challenges of sustainable development are, on the one hand, to overcome poverty and inequality, and on the other, to restore the balance of the Earth. Both goals are intrinsically linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other. Human beings and nature are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development,” Arkonada said.

The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation, by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, recommends investing 1.9 trillion dollars a year in green technologies over the next 40 years, to combat the effects of climate change.

“But the current green economy agenda lacks much real substance. To give it a harder edge, it should be focused more specifically on the issue of growth – above all, the growth path of emerging economies,” Evans and Steven’s study says.

It argues that “emerging economies will account for the majority of additional demand between now and 2030; they are laboratories of the future; they are the model that other developing countries want to follow; and they have the potential to force rich countries to make belated efforts to upgrade their economies.” (END)

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by | 2011-06-11 · 11:05

Report Reveals World Bank’s Role in Fuelling Climate Chaos

BONN [GERMANY], June 11, 2011 – A new report released today by Friends of
the Earth International during the UN climate talks in Bonn this week
shows that the World Bank Group has been increasing its investments in
fossil fuels and promoting corporate-led false solutions to climate
change, including carbon trading, that serve to deepen rather than
alleviate the current environmental crisis.

The report, ‘Catalysing Catastrophic Climate Change’, follows widespread
concerns voiced by developing countries about the growing role of the
World Bank in delivering climate finance.

The report shows how the Bank’s dirty fossil fuel financing is on the
rise, locking countries such as India and South Africa into an even
greater reliance on coal. Furthermore, the Bank is driving the expansion
of carbon markets, an escape hatch for rich industrialised countries from
cutting their emissions, whilst causing ecological damage and the
displacement of communities in the global South. And despite negative
environmental, social, and climate change impacts, the World Bank is
significantly scaling up support for large hydropower.

Despite the Bank’s lending for highly unsustainable projects around the
world, it is seeking an influential role in the UN’s new Green Climate
Fund and in mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest
degradation (REDD).

Friends of the Earth International Economic Justice Program Coordinator
Sebastian Valdomir said:

“The World Bank is part of the climate problem, not the climate solution.
Its conflicts of interest, and appalling social and environmental track
record, should immediately disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever
in designing the Green Climate Fund, and in climate finance more
generally.”

The World Bank has been accused of having a conflict of interest with
regards to serving as both the interim trustee of the Green Climate Fund
(fiduciary function) and on the Technical Support Unit designing the fund
(consultancy function). In effect, the Bank would be designing a fund that
is meant to oversee its own activities.

The World Bank’s fossil fuel lending practices and propagation of false
solutions to climate change, such as carbon trading and large dams, should
lead to its exclusion from any role in designing the UNFCCC’s Green
Climate Fund.

Friends of the Earth International calls for climate finance that is
derived from assessed budgetary contributions and other non-market-based
innovative sources – like financial transaction taxes – that is
commensurate with rich countries’ disproportionate role in creating the
problem of climate change.

Policy Analyst at Friends of the Earth United States Kate Horner said:

“The World Bank claims to provide leadership on climate change but, as
shown in this report, it is a major funder of dirty fossil fuel projects,
carbon trading and mega dams. These initiatives deepen poverty and push us
closer to the brink of a global environmental disaster.”

NOTES:
[1] The report shows that in 2010 the Bank hit a new record in terms of
its fossil fuel funding, totaling US$6.6 billion, a 116% increase over
2009. US$4.4 billion of this total was invested in coal, also a record
high, and a 356% increase over the previous year.

[2] The World Bank’s private lending arm, the IFC, approved investment of
US$450 million for the Tata Mundra 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant
in Gujarat, India, which is expected to emit an estimated 25.7 million
tons of CO2 annually for at least 25 years.

In April 2010, the World Bank also approved a massive US$3.75 billion
loan, the overwhelming majority of which will finance the 4,800 megawatt
Medupi coal-fired power plant being built by Eskom, South Africa’s
state-owned power utility. The loan will lead to 40 new coalmines opening
up to feed the Medupi plant and related projects. South Africa is
currently responsible for 40% of all of Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions,
and this loan will add to these emissions.

[3] The World Bank has been increasing investment in large hydropower
since 2003, following a lull in such investment in the 1990s, despite that
dams have already displaced 40–80 million people.

[4] The World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) include a Pilot
Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR), which allows for loans for
adaptation, unlike UNFCCC funds and the Adaptation Fund, which has
recently led to protests in Nepal and Bangladesh.

[5] The English version of the report can be found at:
http://www.foei.org/en/resources/publications/pdfs/2011/world-bank-catalysing-catastrophic-climate-change/
The Spanish version of the report can be found at:
http://www.foei.org/es/recursos/publicaciones/pdfs-por-ano/2011/banco-mundial-catalizador-del-cambio-clima301tico-devastador/

[6] Key findings from the report will be presented at a side event at the
UNFCCC climate talks in Bonn, Germany on Saturday 11 June: 18:15—19:45,
WIND, Ministry of the Environment building.

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by | 2011-06-08 · 15:30

ETC Group on Geoengineering Developments and How to Take Action

There are three important new developments on geoengineering (large-scale intentional manipulation of the Earth systems in an attempt to affect the climate) that we we like to bring to your attention.  What has long been lurking in the shadows of climate negotiations as a wealthy country Plan B has all of a sudden come front and center.  We urge you to pay attention to these developments and intervene where you can.
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1.  Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC gave an interview to The Guardian in the UK on the weekend, stating that “We are putting ourselves in a scenario where we will have to develop more powerful technologies to capture emissions out of the atmosphere”.   Capturing carbon from the atmosphere is geoengineering.  This takes place at a time when Canada and New Zealand are seeking to start a work programme for agriculture in the UNFCCC, looking at modalities for enhancing the amount of carbon that can be stored in soil through techniques like biochar.
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Technologies which capture CO2 from the atmosphere through chemical processes (known as direct air capture) are untested and unproven and recently received a particularly negative assessment from the American Physical Society.   The APS found that the prototype direct air capture technology they assessed was not even economically viable before considering the enormous unresolved issues related to the eventual sequestration of carbon in deep geological formations. .  Other geoengineering methods for CO2 removal include ocean fertilization and liming the oceans, both with potentially devastating consequences on marine ecosystems.   See for example this review on ocean fertilization (which has been under a moratorium since 2008 but which is rearing its head again as a group of universities are intent are re-starting experimentation.
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2. The three IPCC working groups will be holding a joint meeting on geoengineering in Lima, 20-22 June in preparation for the Fifth Assessment report.  The terms of reference for the meeting are here.   The organizing committee of the meeting includes prominent proponents of geoengineering such as American scientist Ken Caldeira, and Canadians David Keith (University of Calgary) and Jason Blackstock (CIGI) and the topics up for discussion include governance and social, economic and legal aspects of the question.   Keith and Caldeira were instrumental in the Royal Society report on goengineering and both testified before Congress and the UK House of Commons in favour of more research.  They both have patents pending, as you can see from the ETC Group report Geopiracy and are involved in a wide variety of initiatives on geoengineering.
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They co-manage Bill Gate’s private geoengineering fund of $4.6 million.   Jason Blackstock was recently described in the Canadian Walrus Magazine as “a young scholar with an almost luminous sense of self-confidence”.  He was the main author of the peculiar Novim report on stratospheric aerosols and has been involved in getting prestigous mainstream foreign policy outfits involved in geoengineering in the UK, Canada and US .   Blackstock is also slated to speak on a panel about geoengineering organized by the Canadian embassy (!) in Sao Paulo Brazil, 16 June 2011.
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3.  The Convention on Biological Diversity is also busy reviewing papers and convening meetings ito follow up on the de facto moratorium on geoengineering activities adopted at COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010.  The first consultative meeting on geoengineering organized by the CBD will take place June 10 in Bonn, on the margins of the climate negotiations.   This mini-workshop will examine the question of how to define geoengineering, its impacts on biodiversity and questions about its governance — an ambitious agenda.  To its credit, the CBD meeting is not invitation only (like so many others: the SRMGI consultation recently held in the UK, the International Risk Governance Council, the Asilomar Conference on Climate Intervention ) and civil society organizations and governments are equally able to attend.
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Furthermore, the CBD is mandated not to do a simple technical review of the proposals but to examine their risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.   The CBD has also created a “liaison group” to oversee its work on geoengineering that will hopefully provide some balance to the discussions thus far that have been dominated by a small group of scientific experts engaged in research, with notoriously low participation from developing countries, social scientists, women, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as other critical voices from civil society.
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On the one hand, it is a positive development that different UN bodies are beginning to discuss geoengineering because any modification of our oceans  and atmosphere will ultimately affect all countries. All countries must therefore be involved in discussions about it.   However, there will also be tremendous pressure exerted by powerful countries who are counting on using this Plan B to move forward with research, public funding programmes and real-world experimentation with inevitable transboundary impacts. The global South and civil society must be clear that geoengineering is not an alternative to the existing and agreed upon priorities of mitigation and adaptation, according to the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Any new multilateral governance arrangement must strengthen the existing moratorium, not weaken it.  That means a strict prohibition of all unilateral experimentation of geoengineering technologies  —  at least until there is a multilateral consensus that this avenue could or should be explored.  So far, international consensus says we do not want to go down this road.  Let’s keep it that way. 
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If you have not yet done so, you can join the international campaign against geoengineering experiments atwww.handsoffmotherearth.org. 

A joint civil society letter is in the works regarding the IPCC meeting. If you are interested to see the letter and sign on behalf of your organization, please contact Veronica Villa: veronica@etcgroup.org. 

From: Diana Bronson, ETC Group

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