This is a beautiful piece, as beautiful as a piece narrating the destruction of native forests and the displacement of indigenous peoples can be. The Music and the imagery mix really well. Find more video’s like this one at dailymotion.com. I want to recommend watching their State of the Forest series, here is a link to one in the series entitled “ecological disaster”
[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3554339&w=425&h=350&fv=]
Comments Off on My Forest’s Tears – a Music video (Dailymotion.com)
Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Copenhagen/COP-15, Indigenous Peoples
By Shannon Gibson
Pittsburgh, PA–A week of protests against the G20 Summit and the Pittsburgh International Coal Conference culminated today with several thousand activists marching to the beat of multiple bands and mass chants calling for the dismantlement of the G20 and reclamation of the streets for the people.
Starting outside the downtown area and taking a 4 mile route, the march included three rallies. At the mid-point rally, Jihan Gearon of the Indigenous Environmental Network (and a part of the New Voices on Climate Change tour by the Global Justice Ecology Project) echoed the crowd’s sentiments that at the G20 “Green has become the new Green”, meaning that leaders of the G20 have now tagged the current climate crisis as the basis for tomorrow’s next profit-making schemes.
Gearon along with other activists from the Global Justice Ecology Project and the Mobilization for Climate Justice spoke out and carried banners in protest of the false solutions of market-based mechanisms for rectifying climate change, such as carbon trading and carbon offsets (a major asset of the U.S.’s Waxman-Markey ACESA bill), proposed by the leaders at the G20.
As protestors marched peacefully, they were flanked by hundreds of police forces dressed in full riot gear wielding batons, tasers, pepper spray and rubber bullet guns. They were also joined by combat ready National Guard troops. While police blasted marchers the day before with sound cannons (also known as Long Range Acoustic Devices – LRADs) and tear gas/pepper spray, today’s march occurred without incident or arrest.
Earlier this week, two protest groups, Seeds of Peace and the Three Rivers Climate Convergence, filed a lawsuit asking for an emergency hearing into allegations that Pittsburgh police harassed them in the run-up to the G20. Suits may arise out of incidents that arose between police forces and students at the University of Pittsburgh late Thursday evening.
Comments Off on Pittsburgh G-20 Recap
Filed under Climate Change
Be sure to watch Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/ today (23 September 09) as Anna Pinto, our New Voices on Climate Change speaker from India, was invited onto the show to talk about the impacts of climate change on India, on climate change and migration, and for her opinions on the international climate negotiations. In addition to the piece with Anna, they also covered:
1. New York, where UN climate mtgs took place–featuring a YesMen stunt
2. Pittsburgh, where the G20 Meetings are about to occur–Anna Pinto from CORE in India spoke, as did Jules Lobel, a University of Pittsburgh law professor representing Three Rivers Climate Convergence and Seeds of Peace spoke about the severe civil rights abuses occurring in Pgh.
3. Ted Glick, from Chesapeake Climate Committee mentioned October 24 as an international day of action and highlighted November 30, as a day for massive civil disobedience on climate change being organized by the Mobilization for Climate Justice–on the tenth anniversary of the WTO shutdown and one week before the historic UN Copenhagen Climate Conference.
Check it out!
Comments Off on New Voices on Climate Change on DN!
Filed under Climate Change
FROM THE MOBILIZATION FOR CLIMATE JUSTICE
22 September 2009
Actions Spreading Across the U.S. Against Corporate-Driven Climate Policy
Pittsburgh, PA–As groups protest the Pittsburgh International Coal Conference days before the G-20 arrives in the city, additional actions against U.S. climate policy and the fossil fuels industry took place on both the east and west coasts.
In New York City, Climate SOS, New York Climate Action Group and Rising Tide North America protested what they called “a greenwashed U.S. climate agenda” at the opening of NYC Climate Week. Activists distributed their version of the ACESA (American Clean Energy and Security Act) bill to event attendees and media in the form of fake $2 trillion bills [1] which subtly depict a collusion of prominent Green NGOs (NRDC, the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund among others) with corporate backers of the bill (BP, Shell, Dow, and others). Climate SOS organizers Dr. Rachel Smolker and Dr. Maggie Zhou engaged ceremony patrons with a pointed critique of the bill’s corporate-friendly implications.
Meanwhile on the west coast, the Mobilization for Climate Justice also took action in San Francisco against Chevron and the corporate-driven U.S. climate bill. Activists blocked four lanes of traffic with a parachute-shaped banner which read “Climate Justice or Climate Chaos.” “If Congress wants to protect the public interest, they would never consider adopting the current climate bill (ACESA) that was written by big oil and energy corporations in the first place,” said Carla Pérez of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project. “Cap and Trade legislation coupled with direct subsidies to oil, coal, nuclear, bio-fuels and incinerator industries will only serve to add hundreds of toxic smokestacks in our backyards, she added.”
Back in Pittsburgh, climate activists met in Schenley Park to set up the climate convergence–a space to talk about issues related to climate change and climate justice. Part of this effort includes the New Voices on Climate Change program of Global Justice Ecology Project. Anna Pinto, from CORE in India, who came to the U.S. for a speaking tour as part of the New Voices on Climate Change program [2] , explained why opening space to discuss climate justice is so important. “Climate justice is not abstract. It’s practical, it’s about survival. It’s about need against greed,” Ms. Pinto explained. “Is it worth it to have three cars today to have your children die of horrible diseases tomorrow? Both the United States and Indian governments are pandering to the greed of industrialists and financiers rather than enabling ordinary people to provide for their needs,” she concluded.
Indigenous Environmental Network‘s Jihan Gearon, another New Voices on Climate Change participant, added her view on the centrality of climate justice within the discussion of climate change in the U.S. “From extraction to transportation to refinement to distribution to consumption to storage, Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately impacted all along this road of destruction. The end result is contaminated and diminished food and water resources, forced removals, increased rates of illness and gridlocked economies,” she explained.”
Global warming and climate change pose yet another serious threat. The land of the Indigenous people in the arctic is literally melting under their feet, disrupting the lifecycles of the plants and animals they depend on, and forcing coastal and island communities to abandon their homes and traditional lands. What happens to a culture when the land and environment it stems from no longer exists? Even more frightening is that the proposed solutions to climate change, such as carbon trading, nuclear power, and ‘clean’ coal technologies, will only exacerbate the problems we face,” she added.
The repression experienced by indigenous and marginalized communities around the world due to climate change and the fossil fuel economy is today being echoed in Pittsburgh as a result of the same G-20 countries that are the main drivers of climate change. Activists with the Three Rivers Climate Convergence and Seeds of Peace have been harassed and arrested numerous times over the past few weeks in the build up to the G-20 meetings later this week.
Protests across the U.S. demanding real, effective and just action on climate are expected to continue throughout the fall, to culminate on November 30th with massive non-violent civil disobedience actions nationally and internationally.
November 30th is significant as it is both the tenth anniversary of the historic shutdown of the WTO (World Trade Organization) meetings in Seattle and exactly one week before the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, where world leaders will meet to hammer out a new global agreement on climate.
Activists are joining together around the world to ensure that any new agreement on climate is devoted to real and just action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and not focused on corporate-controlled, profit-oriented false solutions to climate change. Massive protests are being organized by the international network Climate Justice Action to occur during the UN meeting in Copenhagen, which some activists have begun to call “CorporateHaven” due to the overwhelming influence of industry in the climate debate.
Contact:
Orin Langelle, Global Justice Ecology Project +1.802.578.6980
Ananda Lee Tan, Mobilization for Climate Justice West Coast +1.415.374.0615/+1.510.883.9490 ext. 102
Hallie Boas, New Voices on Climate Change Coordinator +1.415.336.6590
Rachel Smolker, Climate SOS, +1.802.735.7794
Abigail Singer, Mobilization for Climate Justice Co-Coordinator, +1.828.280.3462
Notes:
[2] The New Voices on Climate Change speaking tour is co-sponsored by Global Exchange, Speak Out and the Mobilization for Climate Justice. Its goal is to highlight and amplify the voices of people and communities impacted by climate change, the fossil fuel industry and profit-driven false solutions to climate change.
Comments Off on Actions Spreading Across the U.S. Against Corporate-Driven Climate Policy
Filed under Climate Change
Pittsburgh, PA, September 20, 2009–Jihan Gearon from the Indigenous Environmental Network and Co-Coordinator of the Mobilization for Climate Justice speaks on false solutions to climate change and the impacts on Indigenous Peoples. Global Justice Ecology Project‘s Anne Petermann and Anna Pinto from CORE (Center for Organizing, Research and Education) in India also presented on the climate justice panel in the lead up to the opening of the International Coal Conference and meeting of the leaders of the G-20 to be held this week in Pittsburgh, PA.
The event is part of Global Justice Ecology Project’s New Voices on Climate Change fall tour. The New Voices tour is co-sponsored by Global Exchange, Speak Out and the Mobilization for Climate Justice with support in Pittsburgh from the
Comments Off on New Voices on Climate Change Speak at Peoples’ Summit
Filed under Climate Change
by Orin Langelle, Co-Director and Strategist from the Global Justice Ecology Project
Dennis Brutus, poet, scholar and famous anti-apartheid activist, shot in the back by the white controlling regime of South Africa, who served time with Nelson Mandela at Robben Island, recently encouraged that we should all ‘Seattle Copenhagen’. This is in reference to actions a decade ago when activists shut down the World Trade Organization negotiations in Seattle.
He is on the mark, as the Copenhagen UN climate talks scheduled for this December have been hijacked by corporations. Copenhagen is no more than a CorporateHaven for trade talks by corporations.
But what does “Seattle Copenhagen” mean? Well to those who understand our history, it is obvious. But to tell you the truth, I was thousands of miles away when tens of thousands of anti-corporate globalization activists, labor unionists, environmentalists and anarchists halted the march forward of the trade model of neoliberal capitalism in Seattle: a harbinger of modern day resistance.
So where was I when this historic moment occurred? Why wasn’t I in Seattle, where in the words of friend and songwriter, Jim Page, “Didn’t we shut it down?” For what it’s worth, I was with other solidarity activists in the Selva Lacandona of Chiapas, Mexico visiting indigenous Zapatista communities of resistance, that had declared their autonomy from Mexican governmental authority. That resistance resonated around the world on New Years day in 1994–the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect–when the indigenous resistance movement (EZLN) said “¡Ya Basta!” (enough!) and took control of most of the state of Chiapas, including the municipal offices in San Cristobal and other major cities, freeing political prisoners while while taking control of their land.
Another cry heard from campesinos and indigenous in a resistance movement many years earlier in Mexico was, ‘Tierra y Libertad’.
Tierra y Libertad. Land and Freedom. It all boils down to who controls the land and what it is used for.
But I digress. Back in 1999, after we dodged the Mexican military on the way out of rebel territory, we returned to San Cristobal (a city of intrigue with many different foreign service observers embedded in the secrecy of obscure hostels and bars) on the day after the shut down in Seattle. Our Mexican colleagues from the above ground resistance in San Cris saw us and waved the front page of the leftist La Jornada daily newspaper in front of us that showed a photo of U.S. police pointing weapons and spraying tear gas at protesters in Seattle. Our friends exclaimed, “It’s about fucking time you people in the United States did something for the rest of the world and got off your asses!” We smiled. Sometimes in this corporate dominated world something happens that you can really smile about.
Okay, so I’m not a seasoned Seattle veteran. However, two weeks prior to Seattle, a team of us went to Toronto, Canada where one of the first Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) ministerial meetings took place. The FTAA is a neoliberal scam designed to expand the disaster of NAFTA and control production, land and people from Alaska all the way to Tierra del Fuego–encompassing all of the Americas. At the Toronto Convention Center where the trade ministers were meeting we unfurled at 600 square foot banner decrying, “Stop the FTAA!” To us, unfurling the FTAA banner was a warning shot over the bow of a runaway capitalistic death ship headed for oblivion. To us, the reformist notion of rearranging the deck chairs of this Capitalist Titanic is intensely absurd.
So we fired a warning shot with the words, “Stop the FTAA.” Was it was heard? Well that’s a matter of bizarre existentialist thought. Seattle was indeed shut down. Afterwards did the WTO continue? Sort of– but then in Cancun, Mexico a Korean farmer committed suicide on the barricades during the 2003 WTO ministerial in Cancun There the cry was “WTO kills farmers.” Where does the does the WTO flounder now? Ten years after, in Geneva, on the tenth anniversary of the WTO shutdown and a week before the Climate talks in Copenhagen, a limp attempt will be made to revive it.
Did our struggle against the FTAA succeed? Yes, but… A Miami Model, named for the city that in November of 2003 hosted the FTAA ministerial meeting and saw the police unleash extreme violence against activists. The Miami Model of repression, still practiced by the U.S. government today, basically denies the right of protest in the U.S. (unless you consider protest an expression “permitted” and/or behind razor wire and cages). The almost-stop of the FTAA has produced the rash of bilateral trade scams that former U.S. trade representative (and co-author of the Neoliberal blueprint “Project for a New American Century”), Robert Zoellick, now World Bank President, has fostered.
So get ready for CorporateHaven. This possibly is one of final gatherings where all the players with stakes in their neoliberal trade games will come together again to conduct their high stakes gambling with all of life on earth to squeeze out every final dollar. As the planet burns, the questions haunts, “which side are you on?” To me it doesn’t matter if we shut the ‘self appointed governmental-corporate leadership’ out of the climate negotiations or shut them in–what matters is that we take responsibility to ensure the Earth is inhabitable for all with justice. That is our challenge and that is our struggle.
It really boils down to who controls the land and what it is used for, doesn’t it? Remember, CorporateHaven is only a symptom of the bigger problem. It is this bigger problem that must be shut down. We don’t need to go to Copenhagen to solve the big problem, CorporateHaven is in your own backyard.
For more information on what North American activists are planning for the road to CorporateHaven, please visit the Mobilization for Climate Justice http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/
For more information on Global Justice Ecology Project please visit http://globaljusticeecology.org/
Comments Off on Let’s Seattle CorporateHaven!
Filed under Climate Change, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle
Yesterday the Copenhagen Municipality excluded from its “Accommodation meeting” some of the people that have been working for one year now. All of us, from the Climate Collective, who have been working hard to create a solid infrastructure for international activists that are coming to COP15 in December, are not welcome any longer.
Comments Off on Sign Petition for Right to Sleep in Copenhagen during COP15! http://www.petitiononline.com/cop15cph/petition.html
Filed under Climate Change
Burlington,VT—Global Justice Ecology Project‘s New Voices on Climate Change fall tour was launched on Monday, September 14th at the University of Vermont. The tour will travel from New England, to the G20 in Pittsburgh, to Appalachia, the midwest, southeast, Quebec and the final leg of the fall tour will culminate on November 30, 2009 in the West Coast. November 30th is the 10th anniversary of the WTO Shutdown in Seattle, and is a key organizing date for climate actions around the world this year.
The New Voices tour is co-sponsored by Global Exchange, Speak Out and the Mobilization for Climate Justice.
Hallie Boas, Coordinator of New Voices on Climate Change stated, “We launched the New Voices tour to raise awareness about the root causes and implications of human-induced climate change.” She continued, “The tour is intended to inspire and empower audiences to be aware of real community based solutions to climate change already being implemented all over the world and to build the U.S. movement for climate justice, while educating people about the particularly pivotal role of U.S. climate policy in preparation for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this December.”
The first speaker on the tour is Anastasia Pinto [1], Executive Director of CORE (Center for Organizing, Research and Education) in India. Ms. Pinto is traveling throughout the northeast U.S. and speaking on climate change, gender justice and Indigenous rights. Her tour will finish at the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, September 24-25.
“Climate change and false solutions to climate change are having an especially great impact on women and indigenous peoples in the so-called developing world, including my home country, India,” stated Ms. Pinto. “If we are going to have any hope of stopping the climate crisis, we must join together to take strong action,” she concluded.
Other sections of the tour feature Jihan Gearon [2] from the Indigenous Environmental Network Faith Gemmel, [3] an indigenous organizer for REDOIL, Camila Moreno, [4] from Terra de Direitos, a Brazilian NGO, and the final speaker of the fall tour is Fiu Mataese Elisara, [5] an indigenous Samoan activist.
Anne Petermann, Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project stated, “There are actions planned around the U.S. and all over the world on November 30, the day the tour ends. This is also one week before the beginning of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. World leaders are gathering there to discuss creating a new global agreement on climate change. People are mobilizing globally to demand these meetings take real steps toward dealing with the climate crisis and do not merely focus on pro-corporate, profit-oriented false solutions. The New Voices tour is part of this mobilizing process to ensure that the Copenhagen climate talks must not become the CorporateHaven climate talks,” she continued.
FOR INTERVIEWS PLEASE CONTACT:
Hallie Boas, Global Justice Ecology Project (West Coast Desk), New Voices Coordinator, +1.415.336.6590
Orin Langelle, Global Justice Ecology Project Co-Director, +1.802.482.2689/mobile: +1.802.578.6980
Reede Stockton, Global Exchange, International Climate Equity Campaign Manager, +1.415.575.5559
For more information please visit New Voices on Climate Change.
NOTES to Editors:
[1] Anna Pinto is the Secretary and Programme Director of CORE (Centre for Organisation, Research and Education), an indigenous peoples’ policy research and advocacy organization based in the North East of India. Anna has been an active member of the Indian Women’s Movement for over two decades. She will speak about the intersection between climate change, gender issues and indigenous rights. Anna will tour the Northeast U.S. in September to help mobilize participation in actions and events that will take place in Pittsburgh during meetings of the G-20. While the leaders of the twenty richest countries meet about the financial crisis and the climate crisis, activists representing diverse movements will convene in Pittsburgh to expose the common root causes of the financial crisis and the climate crisis and link them to war as well as the other crises we face: including food, water and biodiversity. For more on Anna: Click Here
[2] Jihan Gearon, is Diné (Navajo) and African American. She is Tódích’ií’nii (Bitter Water) clan, and her maternal grandfather is Tl’ashchí’í (Red Bottom People) clan. Jihan’s family is from the community of Old Sawmill and she grew up on the eastern part of the Navajo reservation in Arizona. Jihan is the Native Energy Organizer at the Indigenous Environmental Network, a member of the Steering Committee of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative and on the Coordinating Committee of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Jihan will be speaking about the impacts of climate change and fossil fuels on poor communities and communities of color in the United States; and about the intersection between the financial crisis and the climate crisis and connections with the struggle for environmental justice in the U.S. She will be speaking in the industrial Midwest on a tour beginning in Pittsburgh during the G-20 talks at the end of September and ending in Detroit one week later. For more on Jihan: Click Here
[3] Faith Gemmill is a Pit River/ Wintu and Neets’aii Gwich’in Athabascan from Arctic Village, Alaska, and is a campaign organizer for REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands). Faith previously worked on behalf of the Gwich’in Nation for over ten years as a representative, public spokesperson and Gwich’in Steering Committee staff to address the potential human health and cultural impacts of proposed oil development and production of the birthplace and nursery of the Porcupine Caribou Herd which is located within the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Faith continues as a public spokesperson, press and tribal liaison and human rights advocate with the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC). She will be touring through mountaintop removal coal mining country in the Appalachians to build bridges between the communities suffering from coal mining and those suffering from oil extraction.
For more on Faith: Click Here
[4] Camila Moreno is a lawyer and researcher with Terra de Direitos, a Brazilian NGO working on peasant and indigenous land rights. She has worked for years in support of the struggles of indigenous and peasant movements in Brazil. Camila will be speaking about the links between deforestation and climate change and the impacts on forest dependent indigenous communities, as well as the impacts of monoculture tree plantations (including genetically engineered tree plantations) developed for the production of agrofuels (biofuels). She will be touring through the Southeast U.S. during the first week of November to speak to communities where genetically engineered eucalyptus tree plantations have been proposed for the manufacture of cellulosic ethanol. For more on Camila: Click Here
[5] Fiu Mataese Elisara-La’ulu is the Executive Director of the Ole Siosiomaga Society (OLSSI). He came to the organization after spending over eight years (1993 – 2001) with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Samoa, six and a half of those years as Assistant Resident Representative (1996 – 2001). Fiu was given overall responsibilities for the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and environmental programmes throughout much of his eight years with UNDP Samoa, and was closely involved with the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and other environmental partners, including OLSSI, in the implementation of environment programe around Samoa and the Pacific Island countries. For more on Fiu: Click Here
Comments Off on New Voices on Climate Change North American Tour Launched!
Filed under Climate Change, Independent Media, Media
