Tag Archives: peoples summit

by | 2013-01-01 · 09:00

2012 Top ten articles on Climate Connections

Note: The following are the top ten articles from Climate Connections from 2012, based on the number of views each story received. Several articles were written by GJEP, or were sent to Climate Connections by the original authors. They are posted in reverse order, from number 10 through number 1.  Our blog received a record 270,000 visitors in 2012 from over 200 countries.

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Happy New Year,

-The GJEP Team

10. Three responses to Bill McKibben’s new article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” (July 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, Rachel Smolker of BiofuelWatch, and Keith Brunner, GJEP Communications Associate

Bill McKibben, in his new Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” does an effective job at summarizing the hard and theoretical numbers that warn us of the devastating impacts of continuing to burn the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel reserves–yet it somehow falls short of its stated goal to help mobilize a new movement for climate action.  Continue reading here

9. Breaking News: Secret US military testing of radiological materials on poor and minority communities (September 24)

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director of GJEP, and Orin Langelle, GJEP Board Chair

During an interview we conducted last week in St. Louis, MO, Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor gave us a long description of research she had conducted into a major military cover up of the use of U.S. citizens as test subjects for military experiments related to the Cold War.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Industrial agriculture, Nuclear power, Oil, Political Repression, Posts from Anne Petermann, Rio+20, Tar Sands

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by | 2012-06-29 · 10:44

Action Alert: Denounce the Murder of Fishermen/Activists in Rio

Repudiation on the murder of AHOMAR fishermen

Please send your signatures to: gabriel strautman

The undersigned social movements and civil society organizations express in this manifest their indignation for the brutal murder of Almir Nogueira de Amorim and João Luiz Telles Penetra, artisanal fishermen and members of Homens e Mulheres do Mar Association (AHOMAR) in the Guanabara Bay. We demand that the State of Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian State to take immediate mesures to investigate the facts and to protect the lives of threatened fisher folk.Almir and Pituca were leaders of AHOMAR, a local fisherfolk organization, in struggle against the social and environmental impacts created by big economic investments that are making artisanal fishing impossible in the Guanabara Bay. Both went missing after going out to fish on friday, June 22nd 2012. Almir’s body was found on sunday, June 24th, tied to the boat, submerged close to the São Lourenço beach in Magé, Rio de Janeiro. The body of João Luiz Telles, Pituca, was found on monday, June 25th, with hands and feet tied in fetal position, close to the São Gonçalo beach.

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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Green Economy, Latin America-Caribbean, Political Repression, Rio+20

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by | 2012-06-25 · 11:31

Rio+20 Peoples’ Summit closes with Declaration and points of struggle

June 25, 2012. One of the opening paragraphs of the Declaration produced at the close of the Peoples’ Summit states:

“The Peoples Summit is a symbolic moment of the beginning of a new cycle in the course of global struggles, which produced a new convergence of the movements of women, Indigenous Peoples, people of African descent, youth, family and peasant farmers, workers, the poor, and traditional communities such as quilombos, those who fight for the right to the city, and religious groups world wide.”

80, 000 people attended the Peoples’ Summit and at least 30,000 mobilized daily in different activities.


The full Declaration has yet to be translated into English (and Climate Connections will publish or link to it when it is), but it closes with these consensus points of struggle going forward:

We are:

  • Opposed to militarization of territories and states.
  • Opposed to criminalization of social movement organizations.
  • Opposed to violence against women.
  • Opposed to violence against LGBT people.
  • Opposed to large corporations.
  • Opposed to imposing payments of unjust financial debt and for popular hearings on them.
  • For guaranteeing the right of the people to land and territory, urban and rural.
  • For free informed and prior consultation and consent, based in the principle of good faith as per Convention 169 of the ILO.
  • For food sovereignty and healthy food, against agrochemicals and transgenics.
  • For the conquest and guarantee of rights.
  • For the solidarity of peoples and countries, chiefly those threatened by military or institutional coups (like the recent one in Paraguay).
  • For the sovereignty of the people over ownership of the commons, against attempts to privatize and commodify.
  • For changing the current energy grid and system.
  • For democratization of the communications media.
  • For a recognition of the historic social and ecological debt.
  • For building towards a worldwide GENERAL STRIKE.

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by | 2012-06-23 · 11:30

Alternative voices from Rio+20

While world leaders negotiate in the Rio+20 meeting halls, thousands of activists have launched ‘The People’s Summit’.

AlJazeera – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil –  “The development – the drilling, mining and damming – is affecting everyone, our communities and the Earth, our home and the only planet we have.”

The piercing voice of 11-year-old T’Kaiya is enough to grab the attention of delegates passing by. With the aptitude of a seasoned speaker, this young delegate from Canada comfortably commanded the following of environmental activists staging a sit-in at the Rio+20 conference.

T’Kaiya is in Rio to represent the Indigenous Environmental Network and to speak out against the controversial tar sands project being planned by an energy transport company, Enbridge, that involves a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific northwest coast of Canada.
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by | 2012-06-22 · 12:00

Rio+20: Impressions from the Peoples’ Summit: forging a global social movement

By Avery Pittman, for Climate Connections

Henry Saragih, General Coordinator for La Via Campesina, and Alberto Gomez, from La Via Campesina Mexico listen as former Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations and director of Focus on the Global South talks about the need for a unified social movement strategy to challenge the green economy. Photo: Will Bennington for GJEP

June 21, 2012 – Rio de Janeiro – On the second day of UN Rio+20 “Earth Summit” negotiations, an hour away at the People’s Summit in downtown Rio, a crowd gathered to discuss moving forward as a global movement against the forces of the green economy. A mic was passed around the listening crowd, sitting in a ring of chairs three rows deep. There were bleachers and a stage at the venue, but the organizers of the event insisted that everyone be able to see each other and sit as equals. To the audience, Pablo Solon of Focus on the Global South posed the question “what can we do together, as social movements, after the Peoples Summit?”

Leaders and members from various social movements sat among the inner ring of chairs. The gathering was intimate and diverse, but the message was clear: together, social movements must deepen an analysis of the interconnections of oppression and create a road map to effectively and intentionally counter the logic of capitalism that commercializes nature.
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by | 2012-06-20 · 15:30

Earth Audio podcasts: Achim Steiner of UNEP and Pat Mooney of the ETC Group at the Rio+20 Peoples’ Summit

Achim Steiner, head of UNEP defends his model of the Green Economy while ETC Group’s Pat Mooney looks on.

At a panel session at the Peoples’ Summit, Pat Mooney of the Canadian technology watchdog organization ETC Group challenges UN Environment Program Director Achim Steiner’s concept of the green economy. Mooney says the model would hand control of the world’s biomass over to the same corporations and financial institutions responsible for the current ecological and financial chaos. June 16, 2012.

click here to listen/download

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by | 2012-06-15 · 07:59

Rio+20 Alternative Peoples’ Summit opens today: People of the world vs. the “green economy” and global economic foreclosure

By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project

Today is the opening day of the Cupola dos Povos–the alternative Peoples’ Summit for Environmental and Social Justice in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

It was pulled together by Brazilian groups and is being attended by social movements, Indigenous Peoples, activists and organizations from all over the world who are coming together to identify real solutions to the multiple and rising crises we face as humans on planet Earth.  The summit was organized in direct opposition to the official UN circus known as the Rio+20 Conference for Sustainable Development.  More aptly it would be called the Rio+20 Conference for the greenwashing of Business as Usual.

As I flew to Rio on 12 June, I read an article in the Financial Times titled “Showdown Looms at OPEC After Saudi Arabia Urges Higher Output.”  The article explained how Saudi Arabia is urging OPEC to increase their output of oil in order to ensure that the global price of oil does not exceed US$100/barrel in order to “mitigate the risks that high oil prices pose to the global economy.”

The insane logic of expanding oil production in the face of mounting climate chaos in order to help rescue the global economy accurately reflects the mindset behind the negotiations around the UN’s Rio+20 Earth Summit, set to start next week here in Rio.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Corporate Globalization, Green Economy, Greenwashing, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Posts from Anne Petermann, REDD, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Rio+20, World Bank

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by | 2012-05-17 · 12:00

Rio+20: Guide Document on Convergence Plenary and People’s Assembly

Note: Here is a statement from the organizers of the alternative Peoples’ Summit that will occur in Rio around the time of the official UN Rio+20 (corporate sell-out) Summit.  People from around the world are coming together to talk about what it will really take to successfully address the myriad ecological and social crises we face, and how to make the real solutions happen.  This is not symbolic, this is people taking real action to make a change.

Climate-Connections will be covering daily the alternative Peoples’ Summit from 15 to 23 June and also the Greenwashed Rio+20 UN Summit from the 20-22 of June.  Stay tuned, or subscribe to stay in touch.

–The GJEP Team

 

Wednesday, 16 May, 2012

To set in motion the spaces of convergence and expression of mobilization, unity and diversity in the People’s Summit

For Social and Environmental Justice, Against Commodification of Life and Nature, In defense of the Commons

We, Peoples of the World, invited to reinvent the World in the People’s Summit, we are (re) constructing all together a reading of reality from our historical fights and from our territories and looking for ways to get away with our discussions, convergence and organization.

We think about

  • structural causes of crises and social and environmental injustice, fake solutions and new ways of capital accumulation on peoples and territories.
  • real solutions and new paradigms of peoples that we are putting in practice and in proposals
  • collective setting-up of agendas, campaigns and common mobilizations beyond Rio+ 20

Setting-up of the Peoples’ Assembly from Convergence Plenaries
Networks, movements, thematic articulations and organized civil society, that are part of the People’s Summit are called to bring together to the Convergence Plenaries before Assemblies, the reflexion of their struggles and debates based on the 3 axis.

This process of reflection and previous construction can also take place during the Self managed Activities, but the organization, objectives and results of these activities are under responsibility of the organizations who want to propose it.

The Plenaries, that will take place on 17 (all day) and 18 June (afternoon), will be spaces facilitated by the organization of the People’s Summit, in order to strengthen the dialogue and the convergence between thematics and areas, and strengthen positions and commons messages.
The Plenaries will be simultaneous and distributed in the People’s Summit place according to the thematic, space, and planning.

We don’t claim that we produce negotiated documents, we are not the UN. We want to generate political agreements between our movements and also common messages that mobilize us to answer with political and popular force to the capital offensive that is expressed through the “green economy” in the Agenda of Rio+20 Conference.

How the movement of water strengthens when rivers meet together going to the sea
Every day we will spend together, in each Plenary, we will bring agreements and common messages to People’s Assembly. This will be a time of mobilization and expression of convergences and positions built within People’s Summit ‘s process

Public presentation of positions and convergence of each Plenary will be reflected in common messages, stories, symbolic and cultural actions, celebrated and facilitated by different movements, respecting and promoting cultural diversity regarding organization and mobilization.

The Assemblies
In the Assembly on Structural Causes of crises, social and environmental injustices, and fake solutions (19 June), we will denounce and mobilize people for the Global Action Day (20 June).

In the Assembly on People’s solutions (21 June) we will present our proposals.

In the Assembly about our Agenda, Campaigns and future struggles (22 June), we will take position in front of Rio+20 Conference and we will strengthen our commitment to still change together the world and get the future we want.

The Assembly is not a time for deliberations of agreements, it is a time for expression of unity built within the Plenary process and by discussion and articulation between movements in People’s Summit


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