Category Archives: Corporate Globalization

by | 2012-09-19 · 15:41

Photo Essay: Occupy Monsanto Actions in St. Louis

Activists from Millions Against Monsanto and the Gateway Green Alliance hang a banner across the street from an industry conference on “biosafety of GMOs.” Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Note: Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director Anne Petermann and Board Chair Orin Langelle were in St. Louis over September 16 and 17 for the GMO-Free Midwest Conference and the Occupy Monsanto day of action.   The events were organized by the Organic Consumers Association and the Gateway Greens Alliance.

Petermann spoke on the first day of the GMO Free Midwest conference on the dangers of genetically engineered trees at C.A.M.P. (Community Arts and Movement Project) near downtown St. Louis.  Langelle spoke against the Green Economy during day two of the GMO Free Midwest conference.  Day two of the conference was held simultaneous to the “12th International Symposium of Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms” at the Millennium Hotel, adjacent to the St. Louis arch.

The second day of the conference and the Occupy Monsanto actions which followed were held in celebration of the one-year Anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

The photo essay below is from the day of activities against Monsanto, both the conference at the Millennium hotel and the three actions that followed.  The actions included a rally outside of the Millennium Hotel, an action at Whole Foods directed at their policy of allowing GMO foods to be sold in their stores, and an protest outside the world headquarters of Monsanto in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

–The GJEP Team

Rich Martin, a Director at the Millennium hotel, in full freak-out mode, threatens to throw out organizers and journalists from the GMO Free Midwest conference for asking questions and attempting to take photos. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP

Irina Ermakova, a leading scientist at the Russian Academy of Scientists presented on the health impacts of GMOs at the 12th International Symposium of Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms.  She then left that event to join the activists at the GMO Free Midwest conference at the Millennium Hotel. Later she took part in the demonstration outside of the hotel in protest of the GMO industry conference.  Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Protesters rally across the street from the Millennium Hotel. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

A mother and her two children protest Monsanto and GMOs outside of the Millennium Hotel. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Mutant corn is turned away from participating in the “12th International Symposium of Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms.” Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Activist from Occupy Monsanto expresses their feelings about Monsanto. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Activist in Guy Fawks mask protests Monsanto during Occupy Monsanto day of action. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Activist in Guy Fawks mask protests Monsanto during Occupy Monsanto day of action. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Protest across the street from the GMO industry conference at the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis, MO. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

After leaving the industry conference, activists went to Whole Foods for an action protesting the fact that Whole Foods carries unlabeled GMO foods. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Eric, an anti-GMO cotton farmer from Texas, protests outside of Whole Foods. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

An activist ties up the line at Whole Foods by asking the clerk whether each of the items in her cart contain GMOs. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

A “superbug” caused by consumption of GMO crops argues with a police officer outside of Whole Foods. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

GMO farmer dressed for duty outside of Whole Foods. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

From Whole Foods, the Occupy Monsanto protest went straight to the source–the heavily guarded headquarters of Monsanto. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Millions Against Monsanto banner at the Monsanto headquarters. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Occupy Monsanto sign. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Protesters line the highway outside of Monsanto’s headquarters. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Anti-Monsanto protester is interviewed by the local media. Photo: Langelle/GJEP.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Genetic Engineering, Industrial agriculture, Pollution

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by | 2012-09-06 · 09:00

Rio Earth Summit: tragedy, farce, and distraction

By Anne Petermann, September 2012.  Source: Z Magazine

As I flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on June 12 for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20)—the 20-year anniversary of the historic “Rio Earth Summit”—I read an article in the Financial Times titled “Showdown Looms at OPEC After Saudi Arabia Urges Higher Output.” The article explained that Saudi Arabia was urging OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to increase their output of oil in order to ensure that the global price of oil would not exceed $100 per barrel in order to “mitigate the risks that high oil prices pose to the global economy.”

The article pointed out that ensuring the health of the global economy requires expanding oil production. This, as we know, will worsen the climate crisis. The takeaway message of the article, therefore, is that the global economy will only thrive by destroying the life support systems of the planet.

At the Rio Earth Summit, this was also the underlying logic of the so-called “green economy” proposals that have polarized and paralyzed the talks since the first preparatory meeting for Rio+20 in May 2010.

According to Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, who wrote about the Rio+20 summit’s preparatory meetings for the Guardian back in March 2011, “Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries…and suspicions are running high that the…‘green economy’ is more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old ‘greed’ economy.”

At the Rio+20 summit, industrialized countries and multinational corporations, accompanied by institutions like the IMF and World Bank, led the push for development of the green economy—that is, to use the very ecological devastation caused by global capitalism to create markets in so-called “environmental services” by turning them into tradable commodities. These new markets would help prop up the global economy in a greenwashed version of business as usual.

“Environmental services,” provided by intact natural ecosystems—which include such things as the storage of carbon, the purification of air and water, and the maintenance of biodiversity—would be given a monetary value in the market, enabling them to be purchased and supposedly protected. In reality, however, it would allow companies to destroy a biodiverse ecosystem in one area, by purchasing the protection of an equivalent ecosystem.

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Events, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20

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by | 2012-07-31 · 16:43

Earth Minute audio: Hydro electric power is not clean or renewable

Today’s Earth minute examines the myth that hydroelectricity is clean, renewable energy, and discusses protests against Hydro-Quebec at the New England Governors’ Conference in Burlington, VT, that resulted in non-violent protesters being assaulted by police.

Global Justice Ecology Project partners with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Los Angeles for weekly Earth Minutes every Tuesday and Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.

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Filed under Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Hydroelectric dams, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Pollution, Water

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by | 2012-07-26 · 10:12

La Via Campesina at Rio+20: The people of the world say “No to the Green Economy”

For a week throughout the People’s Summit, Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers, mobilized in Rio de Janeiro to say “No to the Green Economy” and to reinvigorate the process of building new alliances thanks to plenaries, social movements’ assemblies, street demonstrations to show the real needs and aspirations of our peoples.

Download the article in PDF format.

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, Solutions

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by | 2012-07-24 · 12:40

Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”

The following three pieces, by Anne Petermann, Dr. Rachel Smolker, and Keith Brunner were written in response to Bill McKibben’s new article in Rolling Stone magazine, titled, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – make clear who the real enemy is.”

The System Will Not be Reformed

Response by Anne Petermann

Bill McKibben, in his new Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” does an effective job at summarizing the hard and theoretical numbers that warn us of the devastating impacts of continuing to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves–yet it somehow falls short of its stated goal to help mobilize a new movement for climate action.

While the article is full of facts and figures and the future they portend, it falls into several traps common to US-based environmentalists, which undermine its movement-building objective.

The first and most obvious trap is relying on math to mobilize a movement. Environmentalists, often worried about attacks on their credibility, or afraid they will be labeled “emotional” by industry, tend to focus on statistics, mathematical analyses and hard science to make their case.  Unfortunately statistics like “565 Gigatons or 2,795 Gigatons” do not inspire passion.

While McKibben is focusing on Gigatons and percentages and degrees Celsuis, however, corporations like Shell are running multi-million dollar ad campaigns with TV commercials that feature families having fun, hospitals saving lives, children getting good educations, because of fossil fuels.  Coal = energy security; natural gas = maintaining the American way of life.  And as Dr. Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch points out below, some of these very same companies are moving into the bioenergy realm–wreaking yet more havoc on communities and ecosystems in the name of supposedly “clean, renewable energy.”  They are playing both sides of the field in the effort to ensure Americans do not feel their way of life is in any way threatened–ensuring them that they can have their cake and eat it too.  For while China may have surpassed the US in total annual carbon emissions, the US still leads, by far, the per capita release of CO2 emissions.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Rio+20

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by | 2012-07-05 · 17:00

Audio: The link between Paraguay, Monsanto and deforestation of the Gran Chaco

In this week’s Earth Segment on KPFK Pacifica radio’s Sojourner Truth show, Dr. Miguel Lovera, former National Secretary for Plant Safety of Paraguay discusses the recent Paraguay coup, the link to the expansion of GMO soy plantations and the logging of the Gran Chaco forest, home to the Ayoreo indigenous people.

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with the Sojourner Truth show for Earth Segment interviews every Thursday.

To listen to or download the podcast, click here

To view Orin Langelle’s photo essay of the Ayoreo in the Chaco, click here

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Filed under Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean

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by | 2012-07-03 · 11:17

Green businesses set to lead creation of Rio’s+20 “Future We Want” (yea, right…)

Note: As logic tells us, Capitalism will not solve problems caused by Capitalism; the economic system driving deforestation will not stop deforestation; corporations whose sole purpose in existence is to make profits for their shareholders will not act in ethical ways that risk future profits; and the 1% will not solve the problems for which they are responsible.  Solutions come from the bottom up, not the top down.  The “Future THEY Want” is clearly not the “Future WE want.”  One example: large-scale biofuels and hydropower are NOT renewable energy.  They devastate land, air, water and communities.

Time to get off this train before it barrels off the cliff.

–The GJEP Team

Governments and businesses pledge £330bn during Rio +20 Earth Summit, including plans to eliminate deforestation from the retail supply chain

By Jessica Shankleman

Cross-Posted from BusinessGreen, 25 Jun 2012

It has been impossible to avoid the glut of criticism from green NGOs and politicians left deeply disappointed by the lack of ambition on display at the Rio +20 Earth summit last week.

However, business leaders maintain that that while the so-called “Future We Want” is unlikely to deliver sweeping economic and environmental changes on its own, it could still mark a turning point for the green growth agenda.

Malcolm Preston, global lead for sustainability and climate change at PwC, said that during the summit United Nations leaders effectively passed the baton of responsibility for building the green economy to the business community.

He said the text would only achieve successes if governments worked in tandem with businesses to drive the green growth agenda forward, predicting that as a result of the summit we will see an increasing number of public-private green project partnerships formed over the coming years.

According to UN figures, governments and companies made 692 individual pledges during the summit, totalling $513bn (£330bn) of investment in projects aimed at boosting sustainable resource management. It is the one area where the summit can be compared favourably with the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992, where no corporations were present and few investment pledges were made.

One of the more ambitious pledges was an announcement by the US government to partner with more than 400 companies and brands in the Consumer Goods Forum to achieve zero net deforestation in their supply chains by 2020.

The two parties agreed on Thursday that they would meet in Washington in the next 100 days to discuss how to achieve this goal, which would focus in particular on commodities such as soy, palm oil, paper, and beef that are thought to be responsible for half of the world’s deforestation.

Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, said the agreement showed the importance of businesses and governments collaborating on boosting the sustainability agenda.

“Individually both governments and business have already mobilised significant resources to address the challenge of deforestation but we all recognise that much more can be achieved if we align our efforts and work in partnership,” he said.

Preston added that this ambitious goal would require companies to start this year to meet the demanding target of delivering zero net deforestation by 2020.

“The implications of this commitment are huge as it requires eliminating deforestation in packaging, production, the use of raw materials for the member companies of CGF,” he said, adding that it would also put pressure on countries such as China, which currently have limited demand for sustainable palm oil.

“It’s really pushing towards a segregated supply chain, rather than using certification schemes,” he said. “With the speed that technology is advancing, it is not unrealistic that we will be able to trace it all by 2020, however whether there is sufficient volume so we could achieve these targets is another question.”

The summit also gave the go ahead to the creation of a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are expected to compliment the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. However, it remains unclear precisely what those goals will be.

The United Nations General Assembly is now expected to appoint a group of representatives from 30 countries by September to develop the goals, which are expected to focus on areas such as food, water, and energy.

UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said efforts should now focus on “turning words into action”.

“Rio+20 has shown that there is political ambition for change,” she said. “Now we have to make sure that will is not squandered. We have already started to make headway in the talks held since the text was agreed, such as good progress towards deciding on the themes the SDGs should cover.”

However, Nicholas Stern, chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics, argued the UK should underscore its commitment to the agreement by formally backing the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which requires public and private organisations make green energy commitments by 2030.

The Brazil government, for example, pledged to invest $235bn (£151bn) over 10 years in renewable energy, mainly in hydropower and biofuels.

“The world needs clear time-bound and funded targets and practical action to get sustainable energy to poor people in all continents,” said Stern. “The UK can help show what is possible by working with countries, for example, in Africa, and their utilities and private sector to support action that gets results rapidly.

“The power of the example is the answer to international prevarication and vagueness. It is through actions rather than words that we will be able to create the future we want for ourselves and future generations.”

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Filed under Biodiversity, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Land Grabs, Rio+20

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by | 2012-06-29 · 15:30

KPFK Audio Segment: The link between the Paraguay coup and GMO Soy

Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with KPFK Pacifica’s Sojourner Truth show for a weekly Earth Minute on Tuesdays and a weekly Earth Segment interview on Thursdays.

KPFK’s  weekly “Earth Segment” this week interviewed Dr. Miguel Lovera, Paraguay’s National Secretary for Plant Safety about the link between the recent coup in Paraguay and what has become known as the Genetically Modified Soy “mafia” in that country.

To listen to the segment, click here

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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Earth Radio, Food Sovereignty, Genetic Engineering, Latin America-Caribbean, Political Repression

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