Tag Archives: global warming

by GJEP | 2011-09-23 · 15:31

Blog Post from the Belly of the Beast: In the Bowels of the World Bank

–by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project; North American Focal Point, Global Forest Coalition

… the Indonesian military is getting money through climate financing for REDD-type projects. The communities that live in the forests–some of them Indigenous to the area, some of them relocated there in the 80s–are being invaded by heavily armed forest rangers, paramilitaries and police; and are forced to leave at gunpoint while their homes are burned to the ground.

Benoit Bosquet, Coordinator of the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, defends the bank's role in "forest conservation" in Indonesia, where forest-based communities have been forcibly evicted at gunpoint. Behind him is a photo of one such eviction. Photo: Petermann/GJEP

Today commenced the fall meetings of the World Bank in Washington, DC. The Bank has long been known for its strong-arm tactics to force countries in the Global South to turn over their resources–whether natural resources or poor peoples’ labor– to corporations based in the Industrialized North.

While the Bank is notorious as a major funder of fossil fuel projects, devastating large-scale hydroelectric projects and deforestation projects, they have now become one of the leaders in the effort to use “market-based” schemes for climate mitigation. They are the world’s carbon brokers.

Indeed, one of the items on their meeting agenda is climate finance–pumping money into various developing countries to supposedly undertake climate mitigation programs that will predominately benefit countries in the north, by enabling them to maintain business as usual and avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Appropriately, there was a civil society session this morning on the impacts of climate finance for REDD projects in Indonesia. Indonesia is a global focal point for climate action because of the massive climate emissions that have occurred there largely as a result of the burning of primeval peat forests for conversion to oil palm plantations. But even the climate mitigation programs come with a high price, and Indonesia provides a stark case study of the devastating social and ecological impacts of REDD (the scheme to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

But in order to participate in the workshop, it was first necessary to navigate the World Bank’s ridiculous security process.

It became obvious quickly that the Bank is quite paranoid about security. Now why, I wondered sarcastically, would an institution whose mission is ostensibly about poverty eradication need blocks and blocks of metal barricades and legions of police surrounding it?

Perhaps it has something to do with all of the people around the globe who have suffered under their severely unjust policies. Maybe they never quite got over A-16, (April 16, 2000) when thousands of activists descended on DC to blockade all of the streets surrounding the World Bank in a massive condemnation of the Bank’s dirty dealings.

But on this day, there were no protests, yet I still got the run-around by numerous unfriendly security officers and police, directed this way and that until I finally managed to find the registration building.

Once there, I explained for the fourth time that I was only there for one workshop and just needed a day pass. “We’re not giving out day passes today,” the desk jockey muttered. I had not encountered such surly, robot-like people since the Manchester, New Hampshire jail after a group of us were arrested in January 2000 for occupying Al Gore’s NH campaign headquarters in support of the U’Wa people of Colombia, whose lands were threatened by oil drilling by Occidental Petroleum. (Al had a lot of stock in Occidental).

Frustrated, irritated and thoroughly disgusted, I was ready to give up and make the trek back uptown when I saw a separate registration area for CSOs (civil society organizations). Okay, I thought, one more try.

I won’t go into the details, but suffice it to say, I talked my way into an official access badge. Then after navigating yet more metal barricades, police officers and a metal detector, I finally arrived at my destination: the workshop on the impacts of REDD and forest “conservation” in Indonesia. It was horrifying.

Global Justice Ecology Project has been exposing the impacts of REDD on communities in Chiapas, Mexico and California as the result of a sub-national REDD carbon offset deal between the two states. Indigenous communities in the jungle of Chiapas are threatened with displacement for “forest protection” projects, and being subjected to intimidation tactics such as the withholding of medical services to try to force them to leave.

But what is happening on the ground in Indonesia is even more extreme. As one panelist pointed out, the violence happening to the people in the forests is even worse than the violence that occurred under the Suharto dictatorship.

While the dictatorship no longer exists, the military still maintains most of the power in the country–and now that the forests have suddenly increased in value because of REDD (because the carbon stored by the trees now has value), people who live in the forests but do not have official title to their lands (which is about 80% of the people in the rural areas) are being violently evicted for “conservation” projects.

In the 1980s, a program was initiated in Indonesia called the Transmigration Program. It moved 2.5 million people off of the heavily populated islands of Bali and Java and onto other islands, leading to tremendous land conflicts. In some areas, the ratio of migrants to locals was 2:1. This, the speaker explained, is exactly what is now happening under REDD. Massive population displacement.

In a nutshell, the Indonesian military is getting money through climate financing for REDD-type projects. The communities that live in the forests–some of them Indigenous to the area, some of them relocated there in the 80s–are being invaded by heavily armed forest rangers, paramilitaries and police; and are forced to leave at gunpoint while their homes are burned to the ground.

All in the name of conservation.

I spoke briefly with the panel moderator, a woman native to Indonesia, about our work in Chiapas and what we had found there.

“Yes,” she replied. “What we see in Indonesia is not unique. It is happening all over with these REDD projects.”

And what is the point of all of this suffering and misery and violence? To provide corporations in the industrialized north with the opportunity to avoid reducing their pollution by “buying” carbon stored in some distant forest thereby “offsetting” their emissions.

So, in other words, impoverished rural and Indigenous peoples are being confronted with unspeakable violence to allow companies in the North to continue to poison and pollute poor communities near their facilities in the North.

Benoit Bosque, of the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (the Bank’s program to help design and fund REDD projects in tropical and subtropical countries) spoke and tried to deflect this intense critique by explaining that REDD was extremely complex, but we shouldn’t give up. “These conflicts are about an accumulation of past mistakes. We cannot let fear of mistakes prevent us from taking bold steps forward.”

Yeah, tell that to the Indigenous Peoples being thrown off of their ancestral lands…

His callous reply received a lot of indignant responses from both the audience and the panel, who pointed out that the World Bank’s track record of enforcing even its own safeguards is terrible. “Consultations have been window dressing. Demands must be made for accountability with World Bank partners or don‘t make them partners. Don’t give them funding!”

At that Benoit bid his adieu before there were any more confrontations about the Bank’s role in funding violence against forest dependent communities.

For these reasons and many, many more, organizations and Indigenous Peoples’ groups around the world are condemning REDD. For more information on this, go to: http://noredd.makenoise.org/. To learn more about GJEP’s work in Chiapas and California on REDD, go to http://climate-connections.org/category/chiapas-2/. To view our photo essay from the community of Amador Hernandez in the Lacandon Jungle, click here

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Filed under Biodiversity, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, False Solutions to Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD

Tagged as biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Justice, forests, global warming, human rights, indigenous peoples, indigenous rights, indonesia, REDD, world bank

by GJEP | 2011-09-14 · 13:35

Texas wildfires: More evidence of climate change

Note: We have been following the Texas wildfires for quite sometime. Tomorrow, September 15, Dr. Neil Carmen from the Texas Sierra Club will be interviewed on Los Angeles’ KPFK radio’s Sojourner Truth with Margaret Prescott to speak on the devastation that is happening in Texas. We will rebroadcast the interview here on this blog, but you can listen live tomorrow at 7 am Pacific/10 pm Eastern/14:00 GMT.

Dr. Carman is a plant scientist with a background in plant genetics. Since 1996, he has been speaking and writing extensively on the potential biological hazards of genetic engineering to both the public and policy makers. He works for the Sierra Club on air quality issues in Texas, and has helped stop several coal-fired power plants. He is also a volunteer scientist with the Sierra Club’s national Genetic Engineering committee and is a Steering Committee member of the STOP GE trees Campaign.

-The GJEP Team

Cross-posted from the Baker Institute Blog. Insight an analysis from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. (Photo below from ego TV )

Six of the 10 largest wildfires in Texas history occurred in 2011. This year’s wildfire in Bastrop County set a somber state record for destruction: the highest number of homes lost in a single fire in Texas history.

Although it’s too soon to determine the total amount of insured property losses caused by Texas wildfires,2011 is projected to be the worst in state history according to a spokesperson of the Insurance Council of Texas. The cost may exceed $150 million. The previous cost record was set in 2009, when fires caused more than $100 million in insured property damages statewide. In fact, Texas is currently dealing with its third yearlong wildfire season since 2005 — and its most severe. Others were in 2008 and 2009.

No one can dispute that the Texas wildfire epidemic of the past six years, culminating in the most severe this

year, is very closely related to the extreme heat and drought that have been plaguing Texas. And the changing Texas climate is not an isolated phenomenon. Extreme climatic events are becoming the order of the day around the world. For examples, most of North America has been experiencing more unusually hot days and nights, fewer unusually cold days and nights, and fewer frost days.

Heavy downpours have become more frequent and intense. Droughts are becoming more severe in some regions, though there are no clear patterns for the globe as a whole. The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially. Outside the tropics, storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are becoming even stronger.

It is folly to attribute an extreme climate event such as the current severe drought in Texas to any single particular cause. However, increased greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere definitely cause an increase in the heat energy and water vapor content of the atmosphere, thereby increasing the probability of an extreme climate response. Carbon dioxide occurs naturally in the atmosphere and is necessary for life. However, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide that we are experiencing now is directly ascribable to human activities. There is enough of this greenhouse gas to account for the changes we are seeing in extreme climate events.

To make a point, I remind you that the global atmosphere contains substantially more carbon by weight (one and a half times as much) than do all of the trees, grass and all other terrestrial plants and animals in the world!

Local weather patterns are generated by energy and water vapor as they are carried around the globe embedded in moving air masses. It is the dynamics of the global distribution in these quantities that determine our climate and weather. Perturbing these movements by changing the composition of the atmosphere by the introduction of greenhouse gases may lead to extreme climatic conditions in different parts of the world, such as the extreme drought and intense wildfires that we are now experiencing in Texas.

It is time to wake up to the fact that our home the Earth is changing, and changing at a rapid rate because of what we as humans are doing.

Ronald L. Sass, Ph.D., is the fellow in global climate change at the Baker Institute and the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor Emeritus of Natural Sciences at Rice University. Now retired, he joined the Rice faculty in 1958 and served as chairman of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department.

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by GJEP | 2011-08-31 · 16:36

Photo Essay from Vermont: The Recovery from Hurricane Irene Begins

As of Tuesday, 30 August 2011, there were still thirteen towns in the U.S. state of Vermont that were completely cut off from the outside world due to the torrential rains of Hurricane Irene. This was because roads like Route 100, which runs north and south through the state, sustained catastrophic damage to its culverts and bridges for many miles. In all, over 200 roads across the state were closed due to wash outs from the heavy rains that pelted the state for nearly twenty-four hours on Sunday, August 28.

Route 100--this and other washed out bridges and culverts cut off the town of Granville, VT from the outside world

Text: Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Photos: Orin Langelle, Co-Director/Strategist, Global Justice Ecology Project

Orin Langelle and I toured a portion of our home state of Vermont on Tuesday, 30 August to witness and document some of the destruction that Hurricane Irene had left in its wake. Though it was downgraded to a “tropical storm” by the time it reached Vermont, its torrential rains wreaked havoc around the state. Where we live, we had been quite fortunate and only lost electricity for twenty-three hours or so. Other parts of the state were far less lucky. During our travels, however, we witnessed the resiliency of Vermonters, who tackled their own loss or the loss of their neighbors, not only with fortitude, but also with humor and a very New England-like matter of fact-ness.

The post-flood clean up effort begins in Waterbury, VT

Our journey began at Camp Johnson in Colchester, where the Vermont National Guard is stationed, to see what an official governmental response looked like. Vermont’s National Guard sustained the heaviest losses per capita of any U.S. state during the occupation of Iraq. Like many Vermont National Guardsmen, the young soldier we spoke with, Nathan Rivard of Enosburg Falls, explained that responding to the needs of his neighbors during disasters like Irene that was the reason he had joined the Guard. The response to the storm was, he felt, the real story in Vermont. “It’s people helping people,” he explained. “Not just the disaster, but how people respond after.”

VT National Guard personnel prepare relief packages

The Vermont National Guard responded while the storm was still raging to help Vermonters caught off guard by the inundation of water. Before the sun was up on Tuesday morning, thirty FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) tractor-trailers had arrived at the National Guard’s Camp Johnson with water, ready to eat meals, blankets, cots and other supplies.

FEMA personnel prepare temporary shelters

Because of the widespread road damage, however, getting the supplies to the people who need them has been extremely challenging. With thirteen towns completely cut off from the outside world, National Guard helicopters have been almost the only way to get help in from the outside—either in the form of medical assistance or basic necessities like food and water.

National Guard medical helicopter

The ability of the government to help over the long term, however, is highly uncertain as the number of natural disasters in the U.S. over the past year has severely depleted FEMA’s budget.

[Note: We asked the VT National Guard what communities in VT were receiving supplies from the Guard so we could document distribution. We were never given that information.]

The People Pull Together

From Camp Johnson, we headed to Waterbury, where Vermont’s state offices are located–and sustained heavy flood damage. Waterbury was submerged under 10 feet or more of water when the Winooski River rose to record flood levels in minutes. Even the state’s emergency management office succumbed to the flooding waters and had to relocate to Burlington—the state’s largest city. When Irene hit Sunday, WDEV (Radio Vermont) stayed on the air all day and night with a generator, despite losing power from the grid and their internet connection. While a commercial station, they remain dedicated to their community. WDEV provided valuable information to residents about flooding damage and impassable roads during the disaster. See Democracy Now! for an interview with the WDEV station owner.

This photo shows the high water mark from the flood in Waterbury

By Tuesday, volunteers and neighbors were pouring support into the community.

At the first house we came to on Elm Street, one of the streets where the flooding had been the worst, a group was sharing stories about the scene on Sunday. Their front yard was heaped with ruined debris. The home’s owner explained to us that the water in the apartment he rented downstairs had been up to his shoulders. He explained that he wouldn’t even be able to start dealing with the damage to the house until the insurance agent arrived—which wouldn’t be until Friday.

But, he emphasized, the outpouring of support had been amazing. Restaurants were donating food to the relief effort, and a bus full of “Youth Build” participants had arrived earlier that day to pitch in. “If you didn’t know there was a flood, you’d think it was a block party,” he explained with a smile.

Inside the house, it was easy to see just how destructive the flood had been. Kitchen appliances were covered in mud, while at one end of what had presumably been the living room, a happy birthday sign still hung. In another room, mud covered baby toys littered the floor.

A Happy Birthday sign still hangs on the wall

Cars did not fare well either during the flood.

Around the corner on Randall Street, the activity of clearing homes of debris and salvaging what could be salvaged was still under way.

Huge dumpsters lined the street and debris was being piled according to type with electronics in one pile, hazardous materials (mostly paint, stain and household chemicals) in another, and everything else going in the dumpsters.

We came across one woman who picked up a white jug and sighed, “this was an antique,” as she poured muddy water out of a gaping hole in its side. “Oh well,” she said. “It’s just stuff, right?” then chucked it into the dumpster. “Bye.”

For some people the loss was clearly overwhelming. Others got to work cleaning what could be cleaned.

Coming up the road we encountered three intrepid children, helping out the best they could by giving out bottles of water. They were very serious about their job, asking everyone they met if they wanted something to drink.

Among the ruins were tarps laid out with items that had been salvaged and washed, drying in the sun. Many people managed to tackle the mess with a positive attitude.

From Waterbury, we headed down Route 100—one of the hardest hit roads in the state. Not far down the road, we came to Moretown, were the Mad River had lived up to its name.

Bridge over the Mad River, severely damaged by the flood

The Mad River, now back to its calm, pristine self, had become a raging torrent on Sunday, shutting down Route 100B and flooding the Village Cemetery.

Workers repair the bridge over Route 100B in Moretown

The cemetery fence was buckling under the weight of the flood debris that was caught in its chain links and many headstones had been flattened—including those of the entire Philemon Family (dating back to 1865) and Bulkley Family (dating back to 1822).

Across the street, another home was half-hidden by debris with a lonely pair of mud-covered rubber boots testifying to the people that had lived there.

Further down Route 100, on the border of Waitsfield and Warren, the Mad River had taken out half of the road.

Nearby, American Flatbread, a unique and very popular Mad River Valley institution featuring an outdoor bonfire, indoor clay flatbread oven and walls covered with Bread and Puppet art, had also succumbed to the raging mud. As we passed, teams of people were pitching in to help clean out the mess.

Our final stop on Route 100, where we could go no further, was at the border of Warren and Granville. The road was washed out. Route 100 further to the south was closed due to water, and Route 125, the only link to the west, was also impassable. This left the towns of Granville, Hancock and Rochester, all located along Rte 100, cut off from the outside world.

At the roadblock we spoke with some electrical workers who were trying to get to the town of Rochester. They had been talking with the road worker at the wash out to see how they might travel south. “We’re based in South Royalton,” one electrical worker explained. “We’ve been trying to get to Rochester all day. They’re without power and we’re trying to get in to fix it. We tried to get to Rochester from the South but couldn’t get in. Now we’re trying to get in from the North, but that’s not working either. We’re going to try some small dirt roads now to see if we can get around these wash outs.”

The Mad River near Granville--not so mad anymore

While the record devastation around Vermont has been catastrophic to many communities, the spirit of collective teamwork that we experienced on our journey gave us a hopeful glimpse of what is possible and the mountains that can be moved when people pull together. As we head into the uncertain future of escalating climate chaos and extreme weather, this spirit may be the one thing that enables communities to come together to find local, small scale, ecologically sustainable solutions to the climate crisis.

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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Natural Disasters, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle, Posts from Anne Petermann, Water

Tagged as action, Climate Change, flood, global justice ecology project, global warming, Hurricane Irene, photos, Vermont, water

by GJEP | 2011-03-21 · 11:30

Global Heating Causes Earthquakes

We uploaded a blog post and composed an Earth Minute putting forward the notion that earthquakes and tsunamis are linked to climate chaos. Here is a post by climate activist Ted Glick delving into the topic more deeply. I hope it answers some of the questions that people have brought to us since we posted it.

–The GJEP Team

___________________

Cross-posted from Grist

By Ted Glick

Number of earthquakes worldwide in 1990: 16,590—-number in 2008: 31,777

-U.S. Geological Society National Earthquake Information

I have to say that when I first started hearing about this possible connection a couple of years ago, I was kind of a skeptic. Part of me reacted, “Hey, we’re already contending with head-in-the-sand people—like the vast majority of national Republican elected officials—who deny that global heating is even happening. Now we’re supposed to carry the argument that it’s causing not just more and more destructive storms, hurricanes, rains, floods, droughts, sea level rise, desertification and agricultural failures but earthquakes and tsunamis?”

But I’ve come to believe that it’s true, and after the devastating Japanese earthquake and tsunami I took some time to research it more carefully.

The first thing I found was a chart of the US Geological Society (USGS) which gave year by year information for earthquakes between 1990 and 2010. I was immediately struck by the statistic above, that the total number of earthquakes in those 20 years has almost doubled.

Indeed, it may have done so, but in 2008, for some reason, the USGS stopped collecting information on earthquakes below magnitude 4.5 outside of the United States.

If one calculates the number of earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 and higher between 1990 and 2010, there’s almost a 24% increase. And reporter William Marsden, writing on March 15^th, 2011 in the Montreal Gazette, reports that, according to USGS data, there were 1,085 major earthquakes in the 1980s, 1,492 in the 1990s, 1,611 from 2000 to 2009, and 247 in 2010 and 2011 up to the recent Japanese earthquake.

Over those 20 years, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have gone from about 350 parts per millions (ppm) to today’s about 390. This is a dramatic rate of increase given that for many hundreds of thousands of years, based on ice core and other data, the level of ppm in the atmosphere was about 280.

All of this information seems to be solid evidence for a position being put forward by a number of geologists, that global heating is related to earthquakes and other geological changes under the earth.

On the About.com website, Patrick Wu, a geologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, is quoted from an interview with the Canadian Press: “What happens is the weight of this thick ice puts a lot of stress on the earth. The weight sort of suppressed the earthquakes, but when you melt the ice the earthquakes get triggered.”

Another geologist, Bill McGuire of University College in London, is quoted as saying, “All over the world evidence is stacking up that changes in global climate can and do affect the frequencies of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and catastrophic sea-floor landslides. Not only has this happened several times through Earth’s history, the evidence suggests it is happening again.”

It’s going to be very rough time for lots and lots of us worldwide in the coming years and decades, but if we do our work well, if we stand up together against the climate deniers and their fossil fuel industry enablers, humanity still has a fighting chance of emerging on the other side with a very different world.

And life is better when you give of yourself for a cause that is right and just, no matter how heavy the odds.

Ted Glick is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network and is a co-founder of the Climate Crisis Coalition, but these views are solely his own. Past writings and other information can be found at tedglick.com.

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by GJEP | 2011-01-25 · 10:31

Earth Minute

If record breaking cold temperatures have you questioning global warming, listen to this week’s Earth Minute with Anne Petermann as she makes the case for Climate Chaos.

Click here to listen!

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Tagged as anne petermann, Climate Change, climate chaos, droughts, earth minute, extreme weather, floods, global warming, KPFK, mudslides, sea levels

by GJEP | 2009-12-12 · 21:00

Post #8 December 12, 2009

Photo essay of the 12 December March in Copenhagen continues after this blog post

Copenhagen Day of Action on Climate Change:

Energy in the Streets; Disappointment in the Negotiations

Late last night a draft text on the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) scheme was released. It was strongly condemned by NGOs from around the world. The text of this agreement gave mere lip service to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and to safeguards against conversion of native forests to timber plantations, not including them in the legally binding body, but rather referring to them in a preamble.

This was no surprise to those of us who have been following REDD since it was formally announced at the UN Climate Conference in Bali, Indonesia in 2007. It was clear then that this was a bunch of greenwash aimed at enriching the world’s most notorious deforesters, while providing the impetus for a massive global land grab directed at the world’s remaining forested lands—most of which are in the territories of Indigenous Peoples.

Thus we were not shocked when, at the Climate Conference last year in Poznan, all references to Indigenous Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples were struck from the text by the gang of four: the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand—who always seem to be the bad guys in these UN negotiations.

Nonetheless, for those of us who have been fighting to stop the rampant destruction of native forests for so many years, the total corruption of an agreement to ostensibly curb deforestation is a major kick in the gut.

So it was with REDD in mind that we joined the massive show of people rallying for real and effective action on climate change at Parliament Square in Copenhagen earlier this afternoon.

March organizers estimated the swarming crowd at 100,000. The police said 50,000. The reality being somewhere in the middle, it was certainly the largest protest against climate change ever to have taken place. And when coupled with the marches and protests in more than 100 other countries around the world, it was massive indeed.

Orin and I can attest to the impressive crowd as we crossed through it en route to find our allies in the “system change not climate change” bloc, on the exact opposite side of the square. After 15 or so minutes of squeezing through the crush of the crowd, we managed to find our way to the coffee cart where several of our friends were waiting in an impossible queue for something warm to drink. After waiting for what seemed like forever, with coffees finally in hand, we and our friends made our way in the direction of the “system change not climate change” sound trucks, which were to lead the bloc, but not before one of our German comrades warmed everyone’s coffee with a dollop of whiskey. “To help warm you up on the inside,” he explained.

Another U.S.-based colleague and I remarked that we had certainly never experienced THAT before at a U.S. protest!

We found the Climate Justice Now! bloc with our allies, and ran into Melissa, a woman we had met fifteen years before during the struggle to save the ancient redwoods in California. She had worked with Judi Bari, our friend and colleague who had been blown up by a pipe bomb in 1990 for trying to stop the rampant logging of some of the oldest and most majestic trees on the planet—the 100 meter tall, 2,000 year old redwoods, being felled for hot tubs and outdoor furniture. Melissa was passing out stickers that elicited naughty giggles in nearly everyone who read them. They read “fck, fck, fck the system,”—a direct response to the very mainstream “tck, tck tck” campaign initiated by some of the larger NGOs.

The march consisted of numerous blocs, spread out over several kilometers. Orin and I made our way to the very beginning of the march, where the Indigenous Peoples’ delegation was leading the way. Orin photographed their delegation and we then gravitated to the side where we documented each bloc as it passed, waiting for our allies with the System Change bloc. The images he captured during the hour or more that the march flowed by are captured in the photo essay included here.

After an interminably long time, toward the end of the march we finally spied the sound trucks with the green banners that signified the beginning of the System Change bloc. We connected with some of our allies and photographed them moving by. After they had passed we walked toward the back of the bloc to see what else we could find, and just as we did, a mass of police vans moved in and blocked the street, cutting off a section of the march. Another cluster of police vans cut them off from the back. We tried to move in to take photos of the situation and document the preemptive roundup, but were roughly shoved back by police who quickly taped off the area. We watched the stand off for 40 minutes or so, alerting some of our allies to the alarming situation.

Hundreds of march participants flooded back to the scene of the round up, and we could here pounding drums along with the chant, “Let them go! Let them go!” echoing through the corridor of tall brick Danish buildings. They were not let go, and at last report, an estimated 700 had been arrested.

We unfortunately had to leave before the conclusion of the standoff because Orin had lost his official UN press credentials somewhere in the crush of people. Without them he would be unable to participate in the protests and other events planned inside the Bella Centre in the coming week. So we needed to get them replaced before the registration desk closed for the night. We found a running metro that delivered us to the Bella Centre. We managed to avoid the incredibly long line of unaccredited people shivering in the frigid Danish air through some evasive action that took us inside to the press accreditation line and resulted in Orin procuring a new badge in record time.

In the security line for the metal detectors, we bumped into another colleague who recounted to us her experience with nearly getting nabbed in the roundup. She told us she sensed something was up and literally ran ahead, just missing the advance of the police vans. She continued with the march, she told us, to the very end at the Bella Centre, but was prevented from entering the UN premises, even with her accreditation badge, because she was with the march. “So I climbed the fence,” she told us. “I was just too cold to wait any longer.”

So much for their security…

The metro ride back toward the hotel was hellish. The metro arrived at the Bella Center stop already crowded. We and about four others managed to smash ourselves on, thinking not one more person could possibly fit. We were proved wrong about 2 stops down where another half dozen people forced their way into our end of the car. By the time we got to the Christianshavn stop, we couldn’t stand it anymore and retreated to the street to find a bus. This stop was only a few blocks from where we had stood when the black bloc had been surrounded, and the police lights were still blazing. Realizing quickly that this meant no buses were to come, we waved down a cab and zoomed back to the hotel to sit down, finally, warm up and to complete our computer work for the day.

This is not the last, but the first big action this week. Tomorrow there is an action planned which intends to shut down the Copenhagen port, to call attention to the massive greenhouse gas emissions caused by the shipping industry. Nearly every day next week some action is planned and will reach a crescendo with the “Reclaim Power” action on Wednesday—the day that the high level ministers arrive—which is intended to occur both on the inside of the Bella Centre, as well as on the outside, with both sides to meet for a “Peoples’ Assembly” to discuss real and just solutions to the climate crisis.

The big challenge of that day is the fact that the UN Climate Secretariat has announced that they are severely restricting the access of NGOs to the Bella Centre—only allowing access to a privileged handful of “observers.”

Some of us believe that this signals the end of the UN Climate process. It has truly become the World Carbon Trade Organization and is behaving as such through meetings behind closed doors and absolute restriction of participation to only those chosen few, and their complicit, bleating, sheep-like media.

Now it is time for the people of the world who want to stop the oncoming train of climate catastrophe to stand up and “Reclaim Power.” We will be reporting from the Reclaim Power protests in Copenhagen this coming Wednesday.

Wish us luck.

Reporting from the streets of Copenhagen,

Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project