Category Archives: Posts from Anne Petermann

by | 2011-07-06 · 10:30

Wrap Up Blog Post from IUFRO Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference

Arraial d’Ajuda, Bahia, Brazil (Part I of II)

by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

In this blog post and it’s follow up part two, I discuss the main presentations of IUFRO’s Tree Biotechnology Conference which occurred in the final stretch of the conference.  Steve Strauss, tree geneticist and industry proponent, gave two presentations during this time, which I describe below.  They provide an excellent substrate for developing the analysis as to why genetically engineered trees (GE trees) are a bad idea.

Steve Strauss Defends GE Trees at the UN CBD in Rome. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Steve Strauss Presentation #1: “Field Trials of GM trees in the US and a Peek at Global Regulatory Burdens (“in the eyes of scientists”)

Strauss started this presentation on regulation of GM trees by stating that regulation in the US is problematic because there are no laws specifically governing GM trees.

He then provided a little background on GE tree field trials in the US:

Over 1995-1999 there were 100 field trials in the US

Over 2000-2004, there were 200

Over 2005-2009, there were 300

From 2010-now, there are 50 (so far—on track with previous rates)

In 2007 there were 60 GE poplar field trials, 40 GE eucalyptus and 60 pine

In 2011, poplar and eucalyptus are the leaders

The average size of the the field trials in the US:

GE poplar: 15 acres

GE eucalyptus: 30 acres

He explained why the GE eucalyptus test plots are so much larger by pointing out that “the GE eucalyptus are pre-commercial, which is why ArborGen is taking a careful look at them in large plots.”

He further explained, “In the US, once it [a GE tree] is deregulated [commercially released], its not tracked any further, unlike Europe.”

Which is one of the reasons that Global Justice Ecology Project and the STOP GE Trees Campaign are working so hard to stop the deregulation of GE trees in the US—because any social or ecological impacts of the large-scale release of these non-native genetically engineered tree clones would be tracked only by industry—if at all.  The impacts of opening Pandora’s Box would be unmonitored.

Strauss’s next presentation happened during the section of the conference dealing with biosafety, oddly enough.  It was called, Transgenic Biotechnology in Forestry: What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been (I think Jerry Garcia would be rolling over in his grave…)

Here are a few select tidbits from Steve’s opening remarks:

1) The problem of gene flow is a huge problem. 

Yes, right.  Got that.

2)  Scientists are giving out too much information for the public to understand/digest it.

Really?  The whole notion of “Confidential Business Information” when it comes to companies manufacturing GMOs, is that they don’t have to publicly disclose much information for fear someone might steal it or use it in some way that is detrimental to the interests of the corporation.  Too LITTLE information is the problem.

3) There is no real difference between GMO and non-GMO.  Its about the technique, not the transgenic aspect of the process.

Ummm…  Huh?  As renowned geneticist David Suzuki points out in the film A Silent Forest: The Growing Threat, Genetically Engineered Trees,  “If we take a gene out of one species and put it into an entirely unrelated species—we’ve never done that before and it’s absolutely bad science to say that we can use [traditional breeding] to predict what will happen with [genetic engineering], it’s just lousy science.”

Strauss went on to describe why genetic engineering makes him happy:

• The history of GE crops has been very positive–except for maybe a little too much RoundUp.

A little too much RoundUp?  Try herbicide resistant weeds taking over and forcing farmers to rely on increasingly toxic weed killers.  Oh, and the productivity levels touted by corporations like Monsanto about their GE crops haven’t panned out either…

• Virus resistant papaya in Hawaii has been a huge success.  “GM papaya has made it easy to be an organic papaya farmer in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any thanks from them yet.” 

Whoa…  Maybe this is because organic papaya farmers in Hawaii were virtually wiped out by GMO papaya, which contaminated over 50% of non-GMO papaya on the big island of Hawaii.  In addition, while the transgenic trait was successful at knocking down the ringspot virus (at least for now), it also had the unanticipated consequence of making the GMO papayas susceptible to black spot fungus requiring applications of fungicide.

• We have seen unexpected mutants, but the occurrence has been low.

Oh, good.  Only a few unexpected mutants.  I feel SO much better…

• RoundUp ready trees grow 20% faster

Didn’t we just discuss the whole thing about too much RoundUp not being a good idea?

He next described the anti-GMO movement starting in the 1990s, and explained that it was disruptive to society.  (He lost me on that one…)

In this vein, he suggested reading the paper by Ron Herring called “Persistent Global Cognitive Rift on Biotechnology.”  (Sounds like someone has large word envy…)

He went on to call the anti-biotech movement “crazy” with “no credibility”.

Following that, he recited the history of eco-vandalism against GE tree research which started 1999 with the destruction of low-lignin GE poplars in England, which was the same year that IUFRO had a forest biotechnology conference in Oxford.  There was a newspaper article published at the time called “Frankenstein’s Forest.”  He then discussed the vandalism against the field trials and labs in the pacific northwest in 2001, and the public protest we did against GE trees at a conference on the topic at Skamania Lodge in Washington state.  He claims anti-GMO activists were invited to participate but declined.  I don’t remember getting an invitation…

He next complained that the regulatory system is a jungle, and is keeping a lot of research down.  He accompanied this point with a slide of his “Forest Biotechnology: Strangled at Birth” article that he wrote following the 2008 UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Bonn in which he complains about the success of Global Justice Ecology Project winning a decision by the UN body cautioning countries about use of GE trees.  He said these international regulations [which are strictly voluntary, by the way] are making national regulations harder.

Then he mentioned an action alert that had been sent out on Tuesday July 1st which caused him to get, “hundreds of spam emails jamming up his in box” and put a quote from it up on the screen:

“There is the real possibility that new genes spliced into GE trees will irreversibly contaminate forests, or that the trees themselves will invade wild forests. Forests on private land, national forests or national parks, will be changed forever.”

“Gene flow,” he reiterated, “is a big problem.  Genes will get out.  There is no question, pollen moves far.”

Alright then, if that’s the case, shouldn’t GE trees NOT be released into the environment, because they will irreversibly contaminate forests with unpredictable impacts?

Wrong.  Strauss continued, “we need to engineer genetic containment to deal with it.”  Then he asked, “is imperfect sterility useful?”  And answered his question by saying, “we can reasonably safely deploy imperfectly sterile trees, even if the trees have been engineered with traits that make them more competitive than native trees.” He conceded, however that, “Ultimately, we will need  a failsafe containment system, but this will take time.”

Right.  But in the meantime, let’s barrel ahead with commercial large-scale release of these impossible to contain GMO trees, pretending we know what the [bleep] we’re doing.

Then he made a brief reference to the GMO rice legal outcome (see our blog post on the topic), and said that the threat of contamination will lead to lawsuits that will stop development.

One would hope so…

He then gave his interpretation of the way the GMO issue plays out in the mind of the public:

Anti-GMO vs. GMO corporations =

• Left/ socialist vs. Right/ Capitalist

• Transparency & Openness vs. Secrecy & Competition

• Open Source/ Sharing vs. Patents and Private Property

• Non-profit vs. Corporate/ profit-making

• Natural vs. Techno.

“The common message is: ‘I don’t like Monsanto,’” he said, to big audience laughter.

But, he said, this perception is wrong.  Science is not a capitalist, closed model, it is a social and democratic model.

Yeah, right.  Unfortunately, what he failed to mention is that science is often bought and paid for by corporations that plan to use it to make lots of profits, and that this science tends to say whatever that corporation wants it to.  As one graduate student from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul explained, “[Our] working hypothesis is that GMO and non-GMO eucalyptus trees are exactly the same except for the GMO traits.”

And guess what?  All of his slides had the name and logo for “Futuragene” on them…

Finally Strauss concluded with “In a nutshell, it’s a religious/ideological issue,”  showing an issue of the publication ECO that Global Justice Ecology Project had co-produced with the CBD Alliance at the 2008 UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Bonn calling for the total ban on genetically engineered trees globally.

He then segued into the Forest Stewardship Council’s refusal to certify GE trees because there is not enough science.

He used these two points to illustrate his disdain for the ‘precautionary principle’ [that is, the principle that a product or a technology should not be deployed until proved safe]. He said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Stay tuned for IUFRO Tree Biotechnology 2011 Wrap Up II Coming Soon to a blog near you.

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by | 2011-07-01 · 17:16

Blog Post for Friday: Eucalyptus Time!

From the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference in Arraial d’Ajuda, Bahia, Brazil 

Eucalyptus plantation. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

This morning was devoted to eucalyptus.  Hybrid eucalyptus followed by genetically engineered eucalyptus.  There was an interesting tension between researchers working with non-GMO clonal hybridization techniques of eucalyptus—such as we saw on our Veracel field trip on Wednesday—and those using transgenics; in other words, inserting genes from other species into the eucalyptus to try to get it to express very specific traits more quickly.

The second speaker of the day was from Brazil and explained in great detail the history of eucalyptus hybridization in Brazil, toward greater production.  This process had begun in the 60s, he explained, when they were getting 6 tons of pulp per hectare per year; to the projected production for 2015 when they expect to get 16 tons of pulp per hectare per year.

But in addition to increasing production, they are also altering wood quality and wood density, and even breeding for freeze tolerance.  The speaker, Teotonio de Assis seemed quite proud of the achievements made with these hybridization techniques over the past decades.  Indeed, a full-grown tree in seven years is something (something very destructive, but we’ll get into that later).

But then came Ziv Shani of Futuragene Ltd.  Futuragene is based in Brazil and Israel.

His presentation was called Eucalyptus Time! and emphasized why NOW is the time for genetically engineered eucalyptus.

First he started with the statistics.  There are currently 19.6 million hectares of eucalyptus plantations worldwide.  Brazil leads the pack with 4.7 million of those hectares, followed by India with 4.3, China with 2.6, South Africa with .58 and Thailand with .5 million hectares.

And because industry has perfected the standardization of the production methods for propogating clones of eucalyptus, now it is the time to genetically engineer them.  “The time is ripe!” he said enthusiastically.

And in this way, he expounded, eucalyptus can be developed for specific “off-takes.”  By this he meant different products such as ethanol, bioenergy, bioproducts, etc.

Then he showed two slides, one, a quaint pastoral painting depicting some people lying around in a field, which was supposed to represent organic farming practices.  The other was serious, mechanized, industrious and represented “modern” industrial agriculture.  In 2011, he argued, we have 7 billion people on the planet.  “We need industry.  We need large scale agriculture; AND we need to keep living on this planet.”

We need, he said, “to enhance the product while preserving today’s resource for tomorrow.”

He apparently has not seen the analysis of the long-term downward impacts on productivity of the so-called “green revolution” and the use of biotechnology in agriculture.  Or about the “new menace” of herbicide tolerant weeds, resulting from the repeated heavy applications of Monsanto’s RoundUp on their roundup ready GMO crops—now requiring farmers to use even larger amounts of more toxic herbicides (just as was predicted by silly anti-GMO naysayers like us fifteen or twenty years ago…).

La Via Campesina has done some excellent work pointing out that small-scale organic and natural farming methods can feed a lot more people than the worn out soils of the GMO and industrial monocultures which require heavy inputs of petroleum-based fertilizers (which also contribute to climate change, by the way) and other chemicals.

But he had not heard of any of this, or if he had, he was keeping it to himself, so he continued, this time dragging out some of the tired old arguments about GMO trees that we have been countering for a decade.

1)    Increasing the productivity of eucalyptus trees will grow more wood on less land (ArborGen’s motto) and therefore protect native forests.  No it won’t.  It will mean that eucalyptus is even more profitable, creating increased incentives for landowners to convert their forests to eucalyptus.  Plantations grow where native ecosystems once stood—whether forest or grassland.  As demand for wood increases (like for the ethanol, bioenergy and bioproducts he mentioned earlier), the forests will be cut down and replaced with “high productivity” plantations.

2)    GMO trees can reduce the need for chemicals.  Sure.  You don’t need to apply insecticides to insect-resistant GMO trees, because the entire tree is a pesticide.  Every bit of it, from the leaves to the roots to the pollen.  Oh yeah, and the insecticide then enters and wreaks havoc in the soils, gets into the water, and blows around in the wind in the pollen, so that wildlife and people can inhale it and have the pesticide directly enter their bloodstream by way of their lungs.  Good plan.

3)    GMO trees will help us with climate adaptation.  Nothing will help our forests with climate adaptation except halting climate disruption by curtailing the emission of greenhouse gases.  And ensuring that native forests are maintained in large interconnected tracts so that species can migrate and adapt as needed to the changing climate.  Plantations are not in the equation.  In fact, plantations store only about ¼ the carbon of native forests, so expanding plantations actually worsens climate change.

But as our intrepid tree engineer pointed out, “Industrial production cannot wait 100 years for evolution.”

And just so you don’t worry, Futuragene is working in partnership with the “Tree Biosafety and Genomics Research Cooperative” at Oregon State University.  Well, if its got “biosafety” in the title, it must be okay, right?

Wrong.

The word “biosafety” was added to assuage public criticism and after several GMO tree trials in the Pacific Northwest were vandalized.  It used to be just the plain old “Tree Genetic Engineering Research Cooperative”  Or ‘Tree Jerk,’ as it was affectionately called.

The leader of this enterprise will be presenting tonight and tomorrow, so I will wait to tell you more about the history of Tree Jerk.

Back to Mr. Futuragene.  One interesting factoid that he pulled out was that the entire research process just to identify and perfect one GMO tree trait is around $20-$40 million.  And for this reason, he explained, “partnering” with academia (i.e. using unpaid or poorly paid graduate students) to make the venture more economical is critical.

And his final bold assertion: “The future sustainable forest will be a biotech forest!”

Wanna bet…

This was when there were rumblings in the crowd from the non-GMO eucalyptus breeders who took offense to his casual dismissal of their craft.

Kinda like watching the right wing Republicans argue with the leaders of the Tea Party…

Whether GMO or not, eucalyptus plantations are destructive.  But rapidly increasing their productivity (and hence their need for fertilizers, ground water, herbicides, etc) will cause even more severe impacts.  And engineering them to be cold tolerant (such as they are attempting in the US) will enable their production in new regions meaning the loss of even more forests at exactly the time when we need our forests more than ever.

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by | 2011-06-30 · 13:25

Photo Essay from the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference Field Trip Hosted by Veracel

On Wednesday, July 29th, around 200 participants divided into 4 groups toured various facilities owned by pulp company Veracel.  This photo essay explains what we learned on the field trip.

Photos and commentary by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project (Exception: the last two photos are by GJEP Co-Director/Strategist Orin Langelle)

First Stop: Veracel Forest Preserve where children and visitors are “educated” about the importance of eucalyptus pulp and the “greenness” of Veracel.  Note that the human figure in the poster is exhibiting total dominance over the trees.

On the way into the forest preserve, children and visitors are presented with a native forest monster and representations of some of the scary wildlife that live in forests.

Veracel forest monster

Scary forest raptor

On the way through the 6,000 hectare forest preserve (80% of which is forested), a mixture of formerly logged lands and primary forest, participants were treated to a canopy rope bridge and photo shoots with 4 large trees we encountered on the path.  Most of the forest contained very young trees.

canopy rope bridge

one of the four big trees

The primary Mata Atlantica forest once stretched over much of the eastern edge of Brazil.  Large swaths of it have been eliminated and replaced with eucalyptus plantations.  Veracel took us next to the tree nursery where they propogate the 17 million eucalyptus clones they produce annually.  Henry Ford would have been proud.  The nursery was a very efficient assembly line operation.

Taking Cuttings to propagate new clones

"Clonal Garden"

Assembly line for clones 1

Assembly line for clones 2

Assembly line for clones 3

All the happy clones together

The next step for these clones, of course, is to be transformed into large-scale monoculture eucalyptus plantations.  Veracel harvests 11,000 of these 7 year old eucalyptus trees every day for their pulp mill.  Virtually the entire timbering operation is heavily mechanized to employ the fewest people possible, and uses an assortment of chemicals, from a petroleum-based hydrophilic polymer that is planted with the seedlings, to glyphosate-based herbicides that are applied to keep out competition plants, to the insecticides used to control “pests.”  In this way, Veracel can maximize its potential for profits.

The eucalyptus plantation

The mechanical harvester rapidly gobbles up the trees

The jaws of the harvester up close and personal

This employee, clearly bored, awaits his cue to show the visitors how the mechanized planter works

After a couple of tries, they were finally successful in showing how the mechanized planter works

The result. Note the petroleum-based polymer gel at the base of the seedling

Despite several quotes from Rachel Carson, John Muir, Emerson and other naturalists posted at the nature preserve, the plantations rely heavily on chemical applications.  The guide informed me that the trees get three applications of toxic herbicide over their 7 year life span.  As a result, the plantations of non-native trees are devoid of understory plants or biodiversity.  Social movements in Brazil call them “green deserts” for this reason.

the ground beneath the plantation is barren of other life forms

Rachel Carson quote in the Veracel forest preserve. Too bad they don't listen to her.

The ultimate purpose for the clones:

massive pile of eucalyptus chips at the Veracel pulp mill

From standing trees to boiled, bleached pulp in one day

The reason Veracel needs to greenwash their image: their giant stinking, polluting pulp mill

The stench of the pulp mill. "It smells like money".

Veracel's vision for the future: Make more money!

One of the obstacles, according to Veracel, of their achieving maximum productivity, is people breaking into their plantations.  On the way to the plantation, we passed what appeared to be an MST (Landless Workers’ Movement) encampment–black plastic shelters with a red MST flag flying high over them.  Indeed, elsewhere in Brazil, the MST as well as indigenous Tupinikim and Guarani populations, have taken over eucalyptus plantations and found better uses for the land.  In the case of the MST, as encampments for landless peasants.  In the case of the Indigenous Peoples, as a retaking of their ancestral lands from which they were forcibly removed when the timber company was given the land for plantations.  The cases we had previously documented were on Aracruz Cellulose land in Espirito Santo, but it seems to be occuring here in Bahia as well.  Below are photos from the encampments in Esprito Santo:

MST encampment in former eucalyptus plantation. The sign says "Eucalyptus plantations are not forests". Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Indigenous community re-takes traditional lands, removes eucalyptus plantation. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Eucalyptus plantations have been such a smashing success in other parts of the world, that now GE tree company ArborGen is trying to engineer them to be cold-tolerant so that the joy of eucalyptus plantations can be spread to new and untrammeled lands.  In the United States they hope to sell half a billion GE cold tolerant eucalyptus trees annually for plantations from Texas to Florida.  They’re invasive? Flammable?  Dry up ground water and worsen droughts?  So?  What’s your point.  They will make a lot of money for a few powerful people.

To learn more or to sign our petition to the US Department of Agriculture opposing GE eucalyptus in the US, click here

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by | 2011-06-29 · 20:03

Wednesday Blog Post from the Tree Biotechnology 2011 Conference: Which Side Are You On?

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Today was the conference field trip sponsored by Veracel—the pulp giant of Bahia, Brazil.  Over the course of the 11 hour field trip I snapped about 350 photos—of everything from their greenwash “forest preserve” to their stinking smoking pulp mill, to their eucalyptus nursery assembly line, to their endless eucalyptus plantations and everything in between.  They were just as friendly as can be…

Now, However, it is going on 8:30pm.  So I will save my blog post and photo essay from this little treasure trove until tomorrow.  For now, some thoughts that demanded to be written down on Monday night—2 nights ago.  I hope you enjoy this little rant of mine.

—–

Monday, June 27, 2011

Thoughts have been pouring through my head this evening, and so I decided to try a little “Breakfast of Champions” Vonnegut-style stream of consciousness writing.  Course it won’t have his cool pictures.  Though I can at least draw an asshole *.  But its hard to write stream of consciousness with this new computer whose keyboard is ever so slightly smaller than the one I am used to—which had a problem with the key with ? and / on it.  It kept falling out at the most inopportune moments.  One doesn’t realize how much one counts on the ? and / key until it falls out.

So I am here in this little “hippy” tourist town of Arraial d’Ajuda (don’t ask me to pronounce it) on the coast of Bahia, Brazil.  I am here to monitor and learn from a conference of tree geneticists, tree engineers and foresters gathered from the far reaches of the planet—many to practice their English, as they listen to highly technical presentations by native English speakers reciting their powerpoints as though they were a sports announcer describing a horserace.

The one thing I have most enjoyed about this place is the nights when I can enjoy the dark and secret hammock of my balcony next to the beach resort where the conference is being held.

It is peaceful out there on the terrace and the wind makes light ruffling noises with the palm fronds that reminds me of the sound of rain dripping from maple leaves after a downpour.

The simple things are what thrill me now.  The quiet secret escapes.  At one time travel was thrilling—the newness of it all, the adventure of not knowing what came next.  Well, that wore off a LOOONNGGG time ago.  Now the idea of sitting in stale overcrowded airports or big surreal metal tubes that hurtle through the sky at some ridiculous velocity is just not something I look forward to anymore.

And this is my…hmmm…fourth, fifth time to Brazil? Which is all well and good but truth be told I’d rather be in Chile.  Even though I barely understand a word of the heavily accented Spanish there and the taxicab drivers are most unpleasant, the people there—the Mapuche people—are amazing.  We went there after our first trip to the bizarre and incomprehensible world of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) in Buenos Aires—where we first made the argument to UN delegates that GE trees should be banned globally.  We brought over a Mapuche representative named Lorena to testify to the delegates about the impacts that tree plantations and their associated toxins were having on rural Mapuche communities—and how this would only worsen with GE trees.  And we formed a partnership with them to stop GE trees.  But we haven’t been back in a while.  Too long.

But that trip to Buenos Aires was when we got a real taste for how the UN actually works.  The reason that GE trees were permitted in carbon offset forestry projects, we found out, was because Norway had tried to get them banned.  Brazil and China objected strenuously, and hence, since they could not be banned, they were de facto allowed.  Welcome to the UN FCCC, boys and girls.

We then brought our demand to ban GE trees globally to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-8) in Curitba, Brazil in 2006.

The demand got surprisingly far considering it was our first time there.  We caught the industry off-guard.  They would not allow that to happen again.  When we confronted them a second time at the next CBD in Bonn (COP-9) in 2008, they would be there with their hench men, the PRRI—pro-industry scientists posing as public interest researchers—who would present intervention after intervention about why GE trees were the best thing since sliced bread and would surely be the salvation of the world’s forests (despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary).

Industry even wheedled their way into the delegations of governments.  GE tree company ArborGen got themselves on the official delegation of Brazil.  As these UN meetings are based on consensus decision-making (or so they say), when Canada, New Zealand and Brazil formed a block to reject any decision to restrict GE trees, the best we could get was a reaffirmation of language from the previous COP warning of the dangers of GE trees and urging countries to adopt precautionary measures regarding GE trees.

But because the decisions of the CBD are all voluntary in their complicity and the number one driver of GE trees—the US—isn’t even signed onto the CBD (just as they are the number one producer of greenhouse gas emissions but are not signed onto the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement; and just as they are the biggest consumer of all things crap on the planet yet will not sign on to commitments to end child labor, or landmines, or basically anything that doesn’t totally suck…) Wonderous place this ole U S of A.

And all so the rich can get richer and the poor poorer, the planet and all of its inhabitants continue to suffer. Meanwhile so-called “scientists” natter on endlessly about their findings on how the now believe they now have evidence that environmental conditions and/or environmental changes contribute to genetic changes in various lifeforms.  Holy crap.  Ecosystems, web of life, hello?  Oh, but the web of life was covered on the first night by the main speaker.  He presented it as a paradox.  He said,

1) we all know everything is connected to everything else.

2) If this were true, evolution would be impossible

3) Therefore we need to understand genetic interactions.

What the…

I have to admit that he lost me on that one.  From an ecological standpoint there can be no evolution without first the premise that everything is interconnected.  What would drive evolution otherwise?  Species evolve according to the stresses or changes in their environment–because there are inherent connections between and among those species and their environment.   It ain’t called the web of life for nothin’.

Then you add onto that cellular knowledge, instinct and intuition—oh and life itself—the unmeasurable aspects to species interactions and behaviors—and, THAT my friends is the great paradox of reductionist thinking in the natural world.  The natural world is the opposite of reductionist, the opposite to compartmentalization.  It is encompassing, it is diverse, it is unpredictable and wild.  It will never conform to the maps and equations and mathematical models that are imposed upon it.  It may tolerate them for a while, but ultimately life will break free of the shackles of human thought limitations and do its thang.  Anyone who doubts this has not been paying attention to the history of the rise and fall of empires throughout human history.  They rise, they devastate or eat up their natural surroundings in the pursuit of their lust for more, more, more.  Then they exceed the limits of their ecological boundaries, cannot adjust, and pass from existence.

Can we, as the present race of dominant humans, change this trajectory?  Can we redirect our meager existences to shift the dominant paradigm to one that is harmonious with, rather than in constant conflict with, the non-dominant-human world?  Now is the time to find out.  There is no time to lose.

As the old Wobbly slogan demands, “Which side are you on?”

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by | 2011-06-28 · 16:12

Tuesday Blog Post: To GM Chestnut or not to GM Chestnut, That is the Question

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

More analysis of the presentations at the opening night of the Tree Biotechnology 2011 conference in Arraial d’Ajuda Brazil.

The logo of the conference, I should mention, is quite interesting.  It is a tree made out of double helixes.  There is a brown double helix as a curvy trunk, and bursting forth from its top is a spiral of green double helixes.  It reminds me of a dandelion head being blown by a child.  The scientists assembled here like to think they can manipulate the DNA of trees just as easily as the artist used them to make this logo.

On Sunday night, following the presentation by the CEO of event co-host Veracel, the hour long keynote presentation was given by Ron Sederoff, a veteran tree geneticist from North Carolina State University.  He started off by describing how appropriate this gathering was in 2011—the International Year of Forestry.  This was a perhaps Freudian slip.  2011 is the UN declared International Year of Forests—not the year of the industry that has become fabulously well to do at their expense.  Though, with the UN being more and more controlled by business, it might as well be the International Year of Forestry.  Especially since the UN doesn’t even have a proper definition of forests.

Ron’s first encounter with GE trees, he recalled, was a science symposium organized by timber multinational Weyerhaeuser back in 1984.

He spoke at length about just how far the science has come in the past 25 years, but also stressed just how much further it has to go to really be practically useful.  This was echoed by a young woman I overheard during one of the breaks, who said “It seems like no matter how far we get, we still have the same distance to go.”  This subtle vibe of frustrated pessimism hung like a thin fog over many of the breaktime conversations, when people left their powerpoints behind and talked candidly about where they felt their work was going.

In noting the different things he and his fellow tree geneticists and tree engineers had learned over the years, Ron included the “unanticipated difficulties in public acceptance.”

This one struck me. Really? I thought.  My god, there was so much opposition to genetically engineered crops from the beginning, with people pulling crops in the US and Europe, and the EU banning the import of GMO foods or seeds.  Then on the other side, there were the active radical environmental campaigns to protect forests through the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s.  Our organization in the 1990s was involved in both the anti-biotechnology movement and the forest protection movement, so our launch of the campaign to stop genetically engineered trees in 2000 was a natural step—especially when we learned that no one else had yet taken up the cause (which was mainly because no one had heard about GE trees yet).

I find it hard to imagine that Ron and his colleagues did not foresee massive public opposition to their Frankentree designs.  We understood it instantly.

He then launched into a list of hurtles yet to be conquered.  1) Most gene functions remain unknown; 2) Pleitropy is still to be defined; 3) feedback control is limited; 4) the science is confounded by redundancy and lethality; and 4) there are multiple levels of regulations.  He added another question to be answered: to what extent does diversity depend on new genes, or merely new interactions between old genes?

About the direction of sequencing DNA he quoted a colleague who said, “it’s the wild west out there.”  This is another theme that has been repeated through the week.  While I think they mean it to say that its in a stage where anything is possible, it could be taken in a much different way.  I could imagine Ward Churchill, for example, having a field day with the idea.  Probably discussing Manifest Destiny as the common thread—the imperative to conquer this country from coast to coast irrespective of the consequences; with the imperative to create, as Ron called “The I-Tree Video Game”– a computer program that could be used to determine what gene needs to be changed (what switch needs to be turned on or off) to get a particular desired result. He described a systems theory approach where: “to the extent that [plants are machines], they can be described by the behavior of their components and consequently in mathematical models, which can then be used to make predictions.  In this way you could make the tree do anything you wanted it to, just by running the computer program.

But probably the most enlightening part of the keynote was the discussion of genetic engineering with regard to restoring threatened species like the American Chestnut.  Don went back to describe the dense stands of chestnuts, and their great economic and social value. He described the consequences of the Chestnut blight (a fungal infestation), which, he said, killed 4 billion trees and was “the greatest ecological disaster in the US.”  I’m not sure I agree with that assessment, but it certainly had extensive ramifications, including the replacement of the vast stands of chestnut in the Southeast with stands of pine and poplar.

The pine plantations of the Southeast have themselves been ecologically disastrous.  But the native forests throughout the east survived and adapted to the loss of the chestnut, though they are now struggling with new diseases and pests, which, like the chestnut blight, were imported from afar.  The native hardwood forests of the southeast—the ones that have survived the onslaught of loblolly pines—are some of the most biodiverse forests on the planet.

And they have a new exotic threat to worry about.  ArborGen’s cold tolerant GE eucalyptus (which they plan to sell by the billions for planting in the US South) came from a hybrid created in Brazil [eucalyptus, mind you, are native to Australia] that was sent to New Zealand for genetic modification, then shipped to the US for outdoor field trials.  I think some important lessons were lost somewhere along the way…

Eucalyptus Globulus was imported into California in the middle 1800s.  It now has invaded vast regions of the state and California spends millions annually on eucalyptus eradication due to its propensity to exacerbate wildfires.  But sure, plant billions of GE cold-tolerant eucalyptus across the South, what could it hurt…

But back to the American chestnut.  Ron anticipated that GE chestnut trees (engineered to resist the fungal blight) would be the first forest tree to apply for regulatory approval for release into forests in the US. [I don’t know if he hadn’t heard of ArborGen’s pending request to deregulate their GE cold tolerant eucalyptus trees in the US, or he was saying that GE chestnuts would receive permission to plant within wild forests, rather than plantations.]

His argument for allowing the unregulated release of GE chestnuts was that there would be, “little ecological damage compared to what’s already happened.”  Hmmm…  He said that quite confidently for someone who only a little while earlier had talked about how little is known about how manipulated trees relate in a forest setting.

A forest ecosystem is wildly complex and biodiverse, with little known about the natural interactions between soils, fungi, insects, understory plants, wildlife and trees.  What is known, however, is that mychorrhizal fungi are instrumental in nutrient uptake in trees, creating symbiotic relationships with and between tree species.  Adding to the mix a tree engineered to resist fungus could indeed create some serious problems.

Pandora’s Box [of GE trees] must remain closed.  Besides, there has been quite a lot of progress with non-GMO chestnuts.  He didn’t mention those.

But Ron was quite determined.  He said, “If GM chestnut can’t get approved, I don’t think any GM tree can get approved.”  Interesting point…

Stay tuned for more tomorrow, when we all go on a field trip to the operations of Veracel.  Fun, fun…

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by | 2011-06-27 · 14:30

Brazil Tree Biotechnology Conference Post #1

by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

After seemingly endless hours in airports and on airplanes, I finally arrived at the Porto Seguro airport in Bahia Brazil, and from there, ferried across to Arraial D’ Ajuda in the state of Bahia, Brazil, where  the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO—pronounced Yew-Fro) is hosting a conference called “Tree Biotechnology 2011” along with co-hosts Embrapa and Veracel.  Veracel is one of the largest timber companies in Brazil—created from a merger of StoraEnso, a very controversial Swedish-Finnish timber company and Fibria, a Brazilian timber firm.

Last night (Sunday) was the official opening of the conference and the keynote speech by Ron Sederoff, a veteran forest geneticist from North Carolina State University.  But before Ron’s speech, the CEO of Veracel presented some background for why the conference was being held in Brazil—the first time the conference had been held in South America.

He started off by impressing the audience with the economic importance of the timber industry in Brazil. He explained it generates US$7.5 billion in exports while still being a “low-carbon activity that generates green jobs.”

Brazil is currently the fourth largest producer of pulp in the world, producing 8% of the global total. China is second at 12% and Canada third at 10%. But the global runaway leader is the United States, at 27% of the global total.

This notorious accomplishment has come at a high price in the US.  One in five acres of the forests of the Southeast have been converted to pine plantations—over 40 million acres.  Nearly 6 million acres in the region are clearcut every year just for paper.  New demands for wood-based bioenergy are expected to result in another 40 million acres of biodiverse forest lost to plantations. Timber plantations also mean toxic chemicals.  Between 1990 and 2000, more chemicals were used on the plantations of the US South than the rest of the world combined, contaminating water and causing illness.

Not to be outdone by the U.S., the Veracel executive explained that he expects production of pulp in Brazil to triple in the next 10 years.

In 2000, he explained, Brazil’s output was 7,200,000 tons, and by 2010 it was almost 9,800,000 tons.  Bahia, the state where Veracel is based and where this conference is being held, produces 2,247,000 of those tons.

Our conference agenda includes a day long field trip to see the wonders of Veracel’s glowingly “green” operations on Wednesday.  That should be interesting indeed.  Their pulp mill is located, according to the CEO “in the middle of the forest,” which, he said, was exactly the idea—to be near the resource base, a “mosaic” of “planted” and “natural” forests.  Of their over 200,000 hectares of forest holdings, he said, 100,000 is “preserved” forest.  I am a bit unclear on how one “preserves” forests in the midst of plantations.  Perhaps in mason jars…

However it is done, Veracel will undoubtedly apply for REDD credits for it (that is credits [i.e. money] for storing carbon under the auspices of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation scheme of the World Bank and UN).  A win-win!  Money for cutting down forests and money for not cutting down forests.  In the words of Tina Vahanen, of the UN REDD Secretariat “REDD will be extremely beneficial for forestry.”

But back to the topic at hand.  What all of these dizzying statistics ultimately mean, is that the area of land covered by tree plantations in Brazil is rapidly expanding.  Where will this expansion take place?  That is a good question.  It will require vast acreages of land. Land will need to be converted from its current form (as forests, agricultural lands, ranch lands) into industrial-scale timber plantations.  In the cases where land that is not forested is used, it will likely result in what is called “indirect land use change,” where the former uses of the land move into and hence destroy biodiverse forests.

But let me make one thing crystal clear.  There is no such thing as a “planted” forest.  There are forests, and there are timber plantations and one bears no resemblance to the other; not ecologically; not in terms of carbon storage capacity (forests are rich in carbon, plantations are not), not for biodiversity, and not for the ability to provide for the needs of forest dependent communities.  Saying a plantation is a forest is like saying a corn field is a prairie.

This intentional confusion causes many problems.  It allows expansion of industrial timber plantations to be called “reforestation” “afforestation” or even “sustainable forest management,” and clouds the ability to determine exactly how much forest is being lost every year.  With the global focus on reducing deforestation as a means to curb climate change, one would think that accurate calculations of forest loss would be important.  Maybe so, but not to the UN or the World Bank—the biggest promoters of REDD.  To add insult to injury, there have even been proposals to “reforest” the Amazon with non-native eucalyptus plantations.

And looming on the horizon, somewhere off in the distance, is the spectre of plantations of genetically engineered trees; trees genetically transformed to make them more easily (and cheaply) manufactured into the product of choice: paper, electricity, liquid fuel, chemicals, plastics, textiles, lumber.  You name it, they’ve got somebody working on GE trees for that exact purpose.

And all of this is sold as “green.”  After all, trees are a “renewable” alternative to fossil fuels!  In fact, in his presentation on what’s coming up in the next few years, our Veracel Executive listed “climate change, the Green Economy” and Rio+20” in the same bullet point.

This is what many environmental, human rights and climate justice organizations have been warning about—that the upcoming conference in Rio de Janiero (in June 2012)—the 20 year follow up to the original “Rio Earth Summit”—will use the ever-worsening climate crisis as the excuse through which to push the so-called “green economy.”  The green economy is merely the same old failed economic system in a pretty new green wrapping and essentially means the commodification of all life on earth in the service of maintaining business as usual for as long as possible beyond all natural limits.

And it was on this note that the conference “Tree Biotechnology 2011” kicked off, here in the state of Bahia, Brazil.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more fun and games.

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by | 2011-05-20 · 12:02

REDD Rage: Organizing to Stop the Network of Death

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project, North American Focal Point, Global Forest Coalition

All Photos by Orin Langelle/GJEP

During a workshop on REDD, a woman from Bolivia in traditional dress explained that in Spanish “red” means “network,” and that REDD was the “Network of Death.” “What Indigenous Peoples really need,” she said, “is a network of life—one that is opposed to REDD, but supports peoples’ traditional ways.  We must form this network,” she insisted. “We need a global network of Indigenous Peoples opposed to REDD.”

In the midst of the first week of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in Manhattan, the Indigenous Environmental Network and Land is Life hosted a workshop on REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) titled “REDD: Seeing the Forest for the Trees.” The event took place on the evening of Wednesday, May 18th at the UN Church Center across First Avenue from the massive, imposing UN building—a shock to see with its floors of missing windows covered by tarps (it is under construction). The event was co-sponsored by Earth Peoples, Global Forest Coalition and Global Justice Ecology Project.

Tom Goldtooth of IEN explains the fundamentals of REDD

Participants trickled into the room steadily and by 7:30 the room was packed to capacity with Indigenous Peoples from across the globe who had come to learn more about the hotly contested topic known as REDD–the UN and World Bank programs designed to supposedly reduce emissions from deforestation through the use of market-based strategies involving trading in carbon offsets and so-called ‘payment for environmental services.’

Tom Goldtooth, the Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), opened the event with a greeting followed by a stripped down description of what REDD is, why it is important to Indigenous Peoples, and what the assumptions are that underlie it.  He explained the problem this way, “Imagine that the Earth is a bathtub, and carbon is the water.  The bathtub is overflowing.  Our Mother Earth cannot absorb any more carbon.  We have to turn the water off.  We have to stop emitting carbon—we have to stop it at its source.  REDD does not do that.”

He went on to explain how REDD has been explicitly designed to use Indigenous Peoples’ forested lands—especially in the South—to “offset” the carbon emissions of the North, which means that Northern companies will be allowed to go on polluting communities in the North, and worsening climate change.  He invoked Casey Camp, an indigenous elder from the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma, who lives in a community heavily impacted by the fossil fuel industry.  He quoted Casey as describing REDD as a gun being held to the heads of her people.  Because REDD will allow the pollution to continue, REDD means her people will continue to die.

After Tom spoke, the video “Lives of the Forest,” was shown.  The film is a recent creation from “Conversations with the Earth,” a project of Land is Life.  It depicts Indigenous Peoples from Southeast Asia and the Pacific speaking out about their traditional life in the forest, which is either threatened by or has already been lost to REDD-type projects.  Some explained how the government had intervened and taken their ancestral lands away to supposedly protect the forest, but that in the process, their way of life, their very culture, had been lost.  They questioned how the government could protect the forest if the people making the decisions about it don’t live there, or even know how to live in the forest.  The film ended with a powerful montage of the speakers in rapid succession demanding “No R-E-D-D” “NO REDD!”

Pablo Solón speaks out against REDD and the Green Economy

The film was followed by a surprise guest—Pablo Solón, the UN Ambassador from the Plurinational State of Bolivia—who further elaborated the fundamentals of REDD: “They will tell you, ‘oh, we just want to give you money and you don’t have to do anything.  We just want to use the carbon in your forests.’  Oh, okay, sounds great.  But then they will produce a piece of paper and say, ‘all you need to do is sign here’ because, you know, they are going to want some security for their investment.  And suddenly, before you know it, you do not have control over your forests anymore.”

He then put REDD into the context of the larger emerging theme of the “green economy,” to which he was candidly opposed. “I have just returned from a meeting of Ambassadors about the Green Economy,” he explained.  “Everyone wants to be green.  Even when they’re killing you they want to be called green.  So now we have this green economy.  They want to commodify not just the forests, but everything.  They want to apply the laws of Capitalism to the laws of Nature.” He then frowned seriously and said emphatically, “No!”

Solón was followed by a succession of Indigenous Peoples from Latin America who spoke passionately about the dangers and impacts of REDD.  One spoke about how REDD was already dividing Indigenous communities, because some people in the communities wanted the money that was being offered while others wanted to retain their traditional way of life with the forest.

A woman from Bolivia in traditional dress explained that in Spanish “red” means “network,” and that REDD was the “Network of Death.” “What Indigenous Peoples really need,” she said, “is a network of life—one that is opposed to REDD, but supports peoples’ traditional ways.  We must form this network,” she insisted. “We need a global network of Indigenous Peoples opposed to REDD.”

Another speaker from India explained that in his country the government was already taking money for REDD-type projects, but instead of protecting forests, they were developing industrial monoculture tree plantations and calling it “forest regeneration,” even though these tree plantations meet none of the needs of the local communities—for food, medicines, shelter or even water, that had always been provided by forests.

At the very end of the evening—several minutes over the scheduled end time—I added two more pieces of the problematic REDD puzzle.  “I attended the World Forestry Congress in 2009,” I explained.  “And while I was there, Tiina Vahenen, from the UN REDD Secretariat, explained to the auditorium full of timber executives and foresters that ‘REDD would be very beneficial for forestry.’  Not forests—forestry.  Ms. Vahenen told them that REDD would be worth $45 billion for the timber industry and insisted, ‘the forestry sector cannot afford to lose this opportunity.’”

“So REDD gives the timber industry money for their standing forests; they get profits for cutting them down and selling them; then they get more money from REDD for replacing the forests with monoculture timber plantations.  In addition,” I continued, “because of a decision made by the UN Climate Convention in 2003 in Milan; under REDD these tree plantations can even include GMO trees, also called genetically engineered trees.”

On that note, Tom concluded the event, thanked everyone and we quickly cleaned up and reassembled the room while key organizers congregated to discuss next steps of how to move forward with creating a global network of Indigenous groups and communities opposed to REDD that would support Indigenous peoples and give them tools and information to empower them to stand up against the great pressure being put on them by countries, the UN, the World Bank, funders and other Indigenous groups, to buy into this dangerous and false solution to climate change called REDD.

As one participant from Tahiti explained, “This is all well and good, but while REDD is going forward, we will be drowning with the fishes.”

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by | 2010-12-18 · 12:08

Lunacy at the Moon Palace: Aka: The Cancun Mess(e)

By Anne Petermann, Global Justice Ecology Project Executive Director

Mexican RoboCop Poses for Photos in Cancun. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Global Justice Ecology Project Co-Director/strategist Orin Langelle (on assignment for Z Magazine) and I arrived in Cancun for the UN Climate Conference the day after U.S. Thanksgiving to a hotel infested with Mexican federales.  “You’ve GOT to be kidding me,” was our immediate reaction.  We dodged their chaotically parked armored vehicles and jeeps to enter the hotel, where we found hoardes of uniformed officers armed with automatic weapons everywhere we went. The breakfast room, the poolside, the beach, the bar.  Walking out of our room (which was surrounded on both sides federales) I literally bumped into one.

Most of them were mere youths who, judging by the way they carelessly swung their weapons around, had not had sufficient gun safety courses…  Orin nearly collided with the barrel of one at breakfast one morning—its owner had it lying casually across his lap as he ate as though the deadly weapon was a sleeping cat.  When we were walking around that first day, we happened upon the bizarre scene above.  A photo shoot of fully armed robocops posing in front of a giant fake Christmas tree.

Absurd?  Yes.  But not nearly as absurd as the events that unfolded at the Moon Palace—home to the UN Climate Conference (COP16)—over the next two weeks.

Once upon a time at these climate talks, organizations and Indigenous peoples’ groups roamed freely.  They could wander around at will—even into the plenary, where the high level ministers were negotiating the fate of the planet.  No more.  The open range is now fenced off.  What precipitated such a radical change?  The overreaction of those in power to that strange and wondrous thing known as protest.

Reclaim Power March in Copenhagen. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

The UN Climate Secretariat and their security enforcers view protest as a bull views a red cape.  They go blind with rage, lashing out at whomever is in their line of sight.  When hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Indigenous peoples and Party delegates marched out of the UN Climate Conference at the Bella Center in Copenhagen in December 2009, the Secretariat responded by stripping every participant of their right to participate in the talks.  But before the protest even started, entire delegations of Friends of the Earth and other groups that had committed the sin of unpermitted symbolic protest earlier in the conference were barred outright from entering the Bella Center.

Since then, the UN Climate Secretariat has been scheming and conniving how to control these rogue factions and cut off any protest before it can begin.  At the interim UN climate meeting in Bonn that I attended last May, they had a special meeting to discuss “observer” participation in the climate COPs.  As a spectacular indication of the absurdity to come, when Friends of the Earth prepared an intervention (a short statement) for this meeting to emphasize the importance of observer participation to the UN Climate Conferences, they were prohibited from reading it…

So in Cancun, the UN Climate Secretariat contrived an elaborate set of demobilization tactics to curtail any potentially unruliness.  In addition to the highly visible force of federales, they devised a complex obstacle course for conference participants.

Anyone not rich enough to stay on the luxurious, exclusive grounds of the Moon Palace resort and (highly toxic) golf course—in other words, developing country parties, most NGOs, Indigenous Peoples and social movements—was treated to a daily bus ride from their hotel to the Cancun Messe (no, seriously, that’s what they called it) that lasted anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how badly the federales had bottlenecked the highway. Once in the Messe, we had to go through a security check point and a metal detector, pass through a building and emerge from the other side to wait for a second bus (bus #9) to take us on another 20-25 minute ride to the Moon Palace.  Then in the evening, the process was reversed.

The Moon Palace itself was split into three sections—the Maya building, which housed the plenary session and the actual negotiations, the Azteca Building, where those not permitted into the negotiations (that is, most of the NGOs, IPOs and all of the media) were allowed to use computers and watch the proceedings on a big screen.

The media were given their very own building—the Nizuk building, which was yet another 10 minute ride from Maya and Azteca.  As you might imagine, it was virtually empty, as most of the media based themselves out of the Azteca to be closer to the action.

I had the pleasure of being a guest on Democracy Now! on the morning of December 9th, which meant finding my way to Nizuk, where the show was filmed live daily at 7am.  I left my hotel at 5:15am to catch a 400 peso cab to the Cancun Messe (no cabs allowed to go to the Moon Palace), then catch a bus to Nizuk.  I got there with 20 minutes to spare.

Democracy Now! and the other live broadcasts (their neighbor was Associated Press and around the corner was Al Jazeera) were filmed outside on the balcony.  While Amy Goodman interviewed me, her hair whipped in the gusty breeze.  A loud generator hummed nearby.  I wondered what they would do if they got a big rainstorm. (By the way, if you’d like to watch that interview, which was all about REDD [the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation scheme], click here)

But all of this nonsense was a mere inkling of what was to come.  One of the first real tests of the Secretariat’s demobilization strategy came on Tuesday December 7th, when Global Justice Ecology Project hosted a press conference that turned into a spontaneous march.  Our press conference was scheduled on the day that La Via Campesina (LVC) had called for the “1,000 Cancuns” global actions on climate, one of which was to be a mass march in Cancun itself.  The press conference morphed into another “1,000 Cancuns” protest inside the very walls of the Moon Palace.

GJEP had made the decision to turn the press conference over to LVC, the Indigenous Environmental Network and youth so they could explain the “1,000 Cancuns” actions in the context of the silencing of voices occurring in the Moon Palace. UN Delegates from Paraguay and Nicaragua also participated to express their solidarity with the day of action.  I moderated the press conference and introduced it by invoking the name of Lee Kung Hae, the South Korean farmer and La Via Campesina member who had martyred himself by plunging a knife into his heart atop the barricades in Cancun at Kilometer Zero during the protests against the World Trade Organization in 2003.  At that time, it was the global justice movement.  Now it is the climate justice movement.  But really it is the same—the people rising up against the neoliberal oligarchy: i.e. the elite corporados bent on ruling the world and running it into the ground.

Mass action against the WTO in Cancun in 2003. Photo: Langelle/GJEP

Back in 2003, Robert Zoellick was the U.S. Trade Representative who tried to force bad trade policies down the throats of so-called “developing countries” during the meetings of the World Trade Organization.  Today he is the President of the World Bank, and is trying to force bad climate policies down the throats of the developing world under the umbrella of the UNFCCC, aka the World Carbon Trade Organization.

Writing this blog post from San Cristobal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas brings to mind one of the most hopeful attacks on this neoliberal paradigm—the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on January 1, 1994—the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect.  The Zapatistas took up arms against NAFTA saying it would be a “death sentence” to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.  Indeed, in order to be accepted into NAFTA, Mexico had to re-write Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.  Article 27 was implemented to protect Mexican communal lands and came out of the Mexican Revolution led by Emiliano Zapata in the early 1900s.  But communal lands and free trade do not mix.  Edward Krobaker, Vice President of International Paper, re-wrote Article 27 to make it favorable to the timber barons.  Then it was NAFTA, today it is REDD—but the point is the same—it’s all about who controls the land.  The Zapatista struggle was and is for autonomy, which has been an objective of Indigenous communities for centuries.

But I digress.  Back to the press conference.  Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s charismatic Ambassador to the UN was supposed to be one of the speakers at the press conference but got tied up and could not get there.  Activists from Youth 4 Climate Justice requested to speak after yet again being denied an official permit to protest, and later turned the press conference into a spontaneous march. If they would not be given permission to protest then they would do so without.  Democracy is a messy thing.

Tom Goldtooth of IEN Speaks to the Media. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

The youth delegates marched out the press conference room chanting “No REDD, no REDD!”  The rest of us joined them but stopped on the front steps of the building when Pablo Solon suddenly joined the group. In the midst of a media feeding frenzy, he proclaimed Bolivia’s solidarity with the LVC march happening in the streets. Behind him people held banners from the press conference.  Following Solon’s speech, Tom Goldtooth, the high-profile Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and one of the most vocal Indigenous opponents to the highly controversial REDD scheme, spoke passionately to the crowd.  When he was done, the youth delegates resumed their chanting and marched toward the Maya building where the negotiations were occurring.

Then UN security moved in.  They had to contain this anarchic outbreak before it spread through the halls and infected the delegates. The three youths, deemed to be the leaders of the unrest, had their badges confiscated and were loaded onto a security bus to be removed from the premises.  Other observers, not understanding the nature of this bus (it looking like all of the other buses), got on believing it would take them back to the Messe where they could then take yet another bus to join the LVC march.  This included three people accredited to participate by Global Justice Ecology Project.  They were removed from the UN grounds and dropped off.

The UN also stripped Tom Goldtooth of his accreditation badge for the terrible crime of giving a powerful interview to a hungry media.  Another of our delegates was de-badged for filming and live-streaming video of the spontaneous protest onto the web.  Another lost his badge merely for getting on the wrong bus.  Others for the outrageous act of holding up banners.

We did not learn that Tom and others had been banned from the conference until the next morning, when they attempted to enter and the security screen beeped and flashed red.  Alarmed and outraged, representatives from Friends of the Earth International, the Institute for Policy Studies, and I took the bus over to the Moon Palace to meet with NGO liaisons Warren and Magoumi.

The encounter was immensely frustrating.  We staunchly defended Tom Goldtooth and his right to speak publicly to the media.  We also defended the right of our delegate to film the protest.  I also spoke up in defense of the three de-badged youth leaders, explaining that this was their first Climate Conference and they should have been given a warning (as was the norm in Copenhagen) that if they continued the protest, they would lose their accreditation.  In one ear and out the other…  Magoumi responded that the youth’s delegation leader should have informed them of the rules, and besides, she pointed out, if someone was committed murder, would they get a warning that if they did it again they would get arrested? (Really… that was her response!)  Our retort that chanting and marching could hardly be equated with murder was waved off by Magoumi as though we were a swarm of gnats.

In the end, Tom got his badge back after pressure was put on the UNFCCC by country delegations.  But he lost one whole day of access to the talks.  Several of the other delegates never got their badges back.  Security had deemed them “part of the protest,” and there was no opportunity for appeal.

For GJEP, the repressive actions of the Climate COP had to be answered with action.  We were prepared to put our organizational accreditation on the line.  Someone had to stand up for the right of people to participate in decisions regarding their future.

Occupation of the Moon Palace. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Six of our delegation (including our Board member Hiroshi) were joined by four more youth delegates plus representatives from Focus on the Global South and BiofuelWatch to occupy the lobby of the Maya building.  We locked arms in a line, blocking access to the negotiating rooms.  All but three of us wore gags that read “UNFCCC”.  Those of us without gags shouted slogans such as, “The UN is silencing Indigenous Peoples!” and “The UN is silencing the voices of youth!”—in both English and Spanish.

Warren and Magoumi were on the scene in a flash and I heard them directly behind me trying to get me to turn my attention to them.  Magoumi was tapping my shoulder while robotically saying over and over, “Anna…Anna…Anna…Anna…is this you ignoring me Anna?  Anna…Anna…” (not sure why she insisted on pronouncing the silent “e” in my name.)  When I continued yelling slogans, she changed tactics and walked directly in front of me.  “Anna, come on, let’s take this outside.  We have a place where you can do this all day long if you want to.  Anna…Anna…Anna…”  I have to admit to being slightly rattled by having to do my shouting directly over Magoumi’s head, but fortunately, she is quite short.

GJEP Board Member Hiroshi Kanno is Manhandled by UN Security During GJEP's Occupation of the Moon Palace. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

The scene had become another feast for the media, but after about 10 minutes, I could sense them tiring of the same old shots, so it was time to move.  As soon as we made a motion toward the door (arms still locked), security was on us in a flash and used pain compliance tactics on the two people who bookended our interlocked line—including our 73 year old Board member Hiroshi.  Surprise surprise, once we got outside we were not escorted to their designated “protest pit” where permitted protests were allowed to occur, as Magoumi had promised, but rather forced onto a waiting bus and hustled off the premises.  Jazzed with adrenaline, we all felt pretty damned good about what we had just done and the coverage we got—even when the UN security guard on the bus pointed out that if we had done that protest in Germany we would have been arrested.  “You’re lucky this is Mexico,” he sneered.  Indeed I have been threatened with arrest by German police for holding up paper signs protesting genetically engineered trees outside of a UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Bonn.  German police have even less sense of humor than UN security.  None-the-less, those of us on the bus felt elated for taking action—for standing up for the voices of the voiceless.

You can view Orin’s photo essay from the Moon Palace Occupation by clicking here

Democracy Now! covered the silencing of voices at the Climate Conference in a feature that included our action and a youth action that followed later in the day.  During the latter, the media nearly rioted when a Reuters photographer was grabbed and beaten by UN security on one of the buses.  DN! ran the feature on Monday, December 13th following the end of the talks.  You can watch that coverage here

I have not yet heard from Magoumi or Warren if Global Justice Ecology Project has lost its accreditation to participate in future UN Climate COPs.  Or if any of us will be allowed to enter its premises in the future.  But those conferences are such energy-sucking, mind-numbing, frustrating clusterf#*ks that if we are not allowed back in, I can’t say I will have any regrets.

Next year’s climate COP will take place in Durban, South Africa, where the UN will face off with the social movements who, against all odds, brought down Apartheid.

Now THAT will be something…

African Country Delegates Protest Unjust Climate Policies in Copenhagen in December 2009. Photo: Langelle/GJEP-GFC

Signing off from San Cristobal de las Casas, near Zapatista rebel held territory in Chiapas, Mexico.

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