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=]
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Copenhagen/COP-15, Indigenous Peoples
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.
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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/
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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.
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Filed under Climate Change
