By Anne Petermann, December 3, 2013. Source: KPFK Sojourner Truth Radio
Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with KPFK Sojourner Truth Radio each week to produce the Earth Minute and Earth Watch segments. Listen this week for updates on the WTO ministerial in Bali, Indonesia, where water privatization is on the table and peasant movements are rising up against the continued commodification of life and land.
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Filed under Corporate Globalization, Water, WTO
December 4, 2013. Source: La Via Campesina
On November 8, 2013, the strongest super typhoon ever recorded in history, with winds as high as 314 kilometers per hour, slammed into the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan devastated several cities in the islands of the Visayas, leaving in its wake, more than 5,000 dead, more than 1,000 still missing and millions impacted with thousands of families left without food, water or shelter.
The Philippines, a country used to an average of 20 typhoons a year, had never seen a category 5 typhoon so destructive that it flattened entire towns. But with climate change, this is the new reality. Warmer seas and warmer air temperatures combine to produce more violent storms. The climate is changing and as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in its report, “many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia.”
The catastrophic and horrific tragedy however failed to move the developed nations into committing to real climate action. Instead, they moved backwards. Japan, one of the leading emitters, declared that instead of their original pledge to cut emissions by 25 percent, they would increase emissions by 3 percent by the year 2020 based on their level of CO2 emissions in 1990. The Durban Platform, the new global agreement that would apply to all countries and would replace the Kyoto Protocol, is supposed to be agreed by 2015 and implemented by 2020 but the past climate negotiations, including this recently concluded one in Poland, have witnessed developed countries moving further away from real commitments and instead moving towards voluntary pledges and still no specific numbers on targets or cuts.
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Filed under Climate Change, Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples, Natural Disasters, Warsaw/COP-19
Global Justice Ecology Project teams up with the Sojourner Truth show on KPFK Pacifica Los Angeles for a weekly Earth Minute each Tuesday and a weekly Earth Watch interview each Thursday.
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Filed under Africa, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Solutions
Note: Anne Petermann is the Executive Director of Global Justice Ecology Project, and directs the international STOP Genetically Engineered Trees Campaign
-The GJEP Team
December 17, 2012. Source: Clearing the Fog Radio
Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project discusses the recent climate conference in Doha, Qatar which is characterized more as a trade show for corporations looking to profit from climate change than a conference about solutions, and the increasing exclusion of non-corporate voices. She says solutions to the climate crisis are coming from the bottom up.
Ramsey Sprague of the Tar Sands Blockade (http://tarsandsblockade.org/) describes the growing resistance to the Keystone XL Pipeline and the upcoming direct action training camp and action Jan. 3 to 8. Co-hosts Margaret and Kevin will participate in that action and urge you to support it or participate as well. And ecology activist Diane Wilson who is on her 19th day of a hunger strike describes why she is risking her life to hold Valero Oil accountable to her community.
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Filed under Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Coal, Corporate Globalization, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, GE Trees, Green Economy, Independent Media, UNFCCC
For a week throughout the People’s Summit, Via Campesina, the global movement of peasant farmers, mobilized in Rio de Janeiro to say “No to the Green Economy” and to reinvigorate the process of building new alliances thanks to plenaries, social movements’ assemblies, street demonstrations to show the real needs and aspirations of our peoples.
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Filed under Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Land Grabs, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, Solutions
Cross-posted from La Via Campesina
Read by Henry Saragih, international coordinator of La Via Campesina at the opening of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20
June 20, 2012, Rio de Janeiro
Mr. Chair, Heads of States, Your Excellencies and esteemed representatives, we have been debating the future of the planet and humanity for the past two years. It is clear that sustainable agriculture is essential to the discussion on sustainable development.
Our constituencies include: farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, agricultural workers, youth and indigenous peoples. They are often among the most affected by multiple crises, in particular women and young people. They also hold the solutions for sustainable development in their hands.
In order to be able to implement systems that nourish our people and sustain our planet, institutional change is necessary, particularly in the area of participation and empowerment of the most vulnerable, the majority of whom reside in rural areas. The new path of development entails the empowerment of these constituencies to produce and harvest, this requires the rights to equitable access to land tenure – regardless of gender, marital status, religious or ethnic origins – and to productive resources, including seeds, inputs, trade and markets.
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Filed under Climate Justice, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20
News, pctures and videos on www.viacampesina.org
(Rio de Janeiro, 14 June, 2012) About 3000 people from around the world will mobilize to say NO to the commodification of life and nature at the Peoples Summit for Social and Environmental Justice and in Defense of the Commons.
The peoples Summit is a space for discussion, debate and construction of alternative proposals by the global civil society, social movements and peoples collective organizations. La Via Campesina has been actively participating in the construction of this activity in order to denounce the false solutions of the same failed economic model that is now being dressed in green under the name “green economy”. La Via Campesina is instead promoting peasants sustainable agriculture as a true solution to the global climatic and environmental crises.
The delegation of La Via Campesina will participate in various plenaries as well as the global mobilization that will take place on the 20th of June concentrating at the junction of the roads Av. Rio Branco and Av Presidente Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. La Via Campesina has been actively participating in the planning of the Peoples Summit that will take place as a parellel activity to the UN conference on Sustainable Development or Rio + 20. This meeting marks the twentieth aniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio 92 or Eco 92).
The most important political space in the Peoples Summit will be the Peoples Permanant Assembly that will organize around three main themes: The denouncement of the structural causes of global poverty and environmental crisis as well as the new forms of the reproduction of capital; Peoples real solutions and new paradigms; and the agendas, campaigns and mobilizations of anticapitalist struggles after Rio +20.
La Via Campesina is an international movement that brings together about 200 million peasants, small and medium-sized producers, landless, rural workers and indigenous people from around the world. LVC advocates sustainable small scale peasant’s agriculture as a means of promoting social justice and dignity. The organization brings together more than 150 organizations in about 70 countries of Africa, Asia, Europe and America.
Link to document – La Via Campesina’s position on Rio+20
To facilitate interviews with peasants from different continents we have available a list of spokespersons of La Via Campesina as well as the overall agenda of the Summit.
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Filed under Corporate Globalization, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20
Note: Anne Petermann and I went to our first UNFCCC COP (Conference of the Polluters) in 2004 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. One of my first observations was that this was a bizarre trade show–from ‘clean coal’ to ‘clean nuclear’ to a clean way to get fucked. Smile. I was not impressed. Well, going into the exhibition center was more exciting than the plenaries packed with, for the most part, suited charlatans. Fast forward to Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancún and now all the way to Durban, South Africa; and guess what?–the 1% have been and still are in control (for now). But one of the good things that has happened over these years is that the resistance has risen from a couple of handfuls of us to thousands. It is evident to GJEP that the COP process is nothing more than the rich figuring out how to make more money off Mother Earth and her inhabitants under the guise of addressing climate change. So this photo essay, with text by Anne Petermann, is my parting shot to this entire unjust, racist, classist, land-grabbing COP crap. No to the next meeting in Dubai and yes to mobilization for the Peoples Summit during Rio +20. GJEP will continue to support the social movements, Indigenous Peoples and those who struggle for justice. Please enjoy the trade show photos and note that the last two photos in this series show the discrepancy between the 1% and the 99%. Orin Langelle for the GJEP Team.
All photos: Langelle/GJEP Captions: Anne Petermann
“Ohm…no Fukushimi…Ohm…no Fukushima…”
What the World Bank said…
“We magically transform ancient tropical forests into biodiesel plantations!. Birds love ’em! (F*#k the orangutans).”
People need nature to thrive–which is why we have to protect nature from them!
“Screw you anti-capitalist NGO bastards. Market-based schemes like the CDM are the best solution to climate change! So what if they don’t reduce carbon emissions. Piss off.”
How the 1% live. The pretentious Southern Sun Elangeni Hotel in Durban was host to the World Climate Summit, 3-4 December, which was a high-level and high-security event where business, finance and government leaders met to celebrate the glory of their green-ness with events like “The Gigatonne Award” for whatever company’s PR campaign was the biggest pile of “green” manure.
The following week the corporate conference sponsors offered side events for UN government delegates on the theme of “Advancing Public-Private Partnerships for REDD+ and Green Growth” i.e. how to ensure profit-making as usual in the face of ecological collapse and rising public outrage.
How the 99% live. This tent was where the delegation met that came to Durban with La Via Campesina, the world’s largest peasant organization. Their slogan, Small Farmers Cool the Planet, confronts the myth that governments and the UN will take care of climate change for us and promotes the idea that bottom up, small scale, community-controlled and bioregionally appropriate solutions are what is needed. The building behind the tent was where La Via slept and ate meals–not as pretentious as the Southern Sun Elangeni Hotel, but the people were real.
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Filed under Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Carbon Trading, Climate Change, Climate Justice, Corporate Globalization, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Geoengineering, Land Grabs, Nuclear power, Photo Essays by Orin Langelle, REDD, UNFCCC
