Environmental Colonialism in the Climate Struggle?

July 21, 2011

By Editor

What’s in a number? In the case of 330 ppm, a whole lot. “Imperialism, not human nature, has caused this global crisis; anti-imperialism and solidarity are the only paths out.”

by Macdonald Stainsby

Though the arguments made in this article appear to be about the numbers set as targets in parts per million [ppm] of carbon in the atmosphere, it is not the numbers alone that has made this debate necessary. It is, at the essence, how we come to the positions we do that says the most about what kind of organizing we are truly undertaking. It goes far beyond parts per million, even though the highlighted versions of the debate will often come in exactly the ppm debate, posted in a twitter-like condensed version that obscures instead of simplifies.

Evo Morales

Yes, 300ppm is the goal sought by the Bolivian government as well as many other south Pacific island states and social movements from all over the so-called developing world. Indeed, the call for a target of 300 ppm along with the need to calculate a form of climate debt mechanism that will not punish the Global South that has not constructed this crisis– the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced, and is already facing– and instead offers both development and possible survival. Imperialism, not human nature, has caused this global crisis; anti-imperialism and solidarity are the only paths out.

The number 300ppm is not arrived at in order to pose as “radical”. This number comes from a position of solidarity.

With 300ppm (and an accompanying one degree Celsius rise in global temperature averages) the survival of the water supplying glaciers in Bolivia are possible; the food producing agricultural regions of central Africa may yet produce again; the home supplying land of islands such as the Maldives may continue to exist. Solidarity by definition cannot make a target based on the destruction of some peoples, sacrificed for the expediency of ‘realpolitik’ for rich regions of the world. Yet the movement does not end there, and demands mechanisms that seriously curtail the emissions first of nation-states who created the crisis for their own narrow development while not punishing the (artificially) impoverished regions being decimated atmospherically.

Despite this, larger first world ENGO’s are setting targets that have nothing to do with the survival of people who are already watching their very homes disappear underwater. The concerns in North America are weaker and have nothing to do with power relations between Global North and South. If the need to immediately collapse any further c02 emissions into the atmosphere will mean a drastic reduction in energy use as a starting point– ending fossil fuel production– the “what is possible” arguments about “politically feasible” immediately must end. The arguments are not figuring out:

A) what has a scientific chance of success, but even more so

B) Ignoring the plight of the struggling Global South– already seeing droughts, floods and fires– is seen as ‘natural’ because the only constituency that apparently matters is an amalgam of all North American residents (themselves also seen as all “equal”).

In appeasing the American ‘birthright’ of over-development, concepts of a false “green shift” and “transition to a green economy” are regularly touted as the way forward for North American environmentalists. In fact, not one of the large and powerful environmental groups has ever challenged the notion of a capitalist led growth economy in a time when any growth is inherently suicidal for dealing with climate change– and genocidal in the implications of billions of human beings living with an already unbalanced atmosphere.

We have two major stumbling blocs on the path towards the goal of a green shift.

A): it is an economic non-starter. This green development would be based on the laws of capital accumulation and carried out under a market based economy. You cannot deliberately shrink such an economy without starting an economic freefall.

B): under basic capitalist laws of accumulation when any energy is added to the grid one actually expands the economy– which by the very rules of capitalist production also expands the demand for energy.

In the US and Canada we have the “just transition” version of the same “simultaneous growth and survival” model. This goal itself presupposes a static energy grid in the most unstable economic system, and in the most unstable economic decade in a century. Energy demand goes up when the economy recovers, and the least c02 producing versions of energy still increase the emissions into the air while they also facilitate the increase in more production of fossil fuels.

This campaign is one giant exercise in realpolitik that sacrifices reality in order to facilitate the chance of popular support for a plan of action that will fail. Sadly, the Global North ENGO definition of success is measured in public support not tangible environmental survival.

The approach taken in North America (far less than Europe) is based on consumption guilt, consumption legislation and the imaginary world where we simply stop buying gasoline and ride bikes everywhere with only good argumentation and eco-friendly bank sponsored picnics against climate change. The entire structure of North American society is constructed towards fossil fuels more than anywhere on the planet, while there is already a major shift in energy underway.

With pilot plants for coal to liquids under conceptualization in the US and continued investment into ways to produce oil shale into petroleum in several places (most notably Colorado) and the continued expansion of the largest industrial development in human history in the Albertan tar sands, the energy shift is taking place not at a point of consumption deliberately but in fact at the point of production.

Carbon taxes– even at the level that may actually have a tangible effect on emissions– undermine the need to reduce carbon emissions in a just fashion and rely instead on trying to use economics to deal with what is essentially a political problem. The notion of making the consumer of fossil fuels pay for consumption is a climate version of having you and I pay to ‘rescue’ the banks– when we did not make this mess in the first place. The strengths of the campaigns against developments like the tar sands are when the campaign focuses on the impacts on Fort Chipewyan immediately and across the planet ultimately. When people use arguments about “slowing down” production or how one can consume cosmetics to fight against climate chaos, the message is lost in feel good pointless solutions, or worse– diversion into consumer choices that have no effect but to make one falsely believe they did their part.

The real threat posed by the Albertan tar sands is starting to bleed across the planet and is locking all of humanity into a mode of production that utterly defeats any possibility of realistically tackling climate change. No matter how many “green energy alternatives” get built, if production of bitumen continues to expand in Canada and starts becomes a norm worldwide we have no chance to address the atmospheric levels. No other energy source simultaneously being built will slow that, but in fact speed up the destructive process. We must never call on corporations like BP and TOTAL to “invest in alternative energy”. They just might actually do it.

From Colombia to Scotland and parts of Canada the development of the least climate damaging energy supplies have been used to build new coal mines, power possible shale gas extraction as well as to greenwash energy giants like Suncor and even give them carbon credits to make their legal operation continue. The green shift may take away the only window left to tackle climate change.

Internationally the movement that came out of Cochabamba&  Tiquipaya, Bolivia last April called for 300ppm as a target, but with the caveats of no false solutions and that the main needs were to both power down the industrial world and to provide mechanisms for the over-exploited mass of humanity to be able to develop a decent standard of living while tackling the odious task of protecting their own environments. Basically, it’s a global “you broke it, you bought it” to the imperialist countries of North America and Western Europe. But the real kicker is that it is a call that allows all of the human residents of the planet to be valued on the same level, and applies the principles of environmental justice to the international stage. Let’s be clear– the fight will be internationally won or lost.

When 350.org went to Cochabamba, they not only argued for their position of 350ppm despite that the Global South led, initiated and hosted conference had differing positions. They made the same tired arguments around what was “politically feasible”, what was “achievable” and that there was so little support for real action in the US and Canada that this path was at least tenable. In environmental circles, “politically feasible” and bad deals that allow business as usual for industry. Going well beyond parts per million, the people from Africa pointed out that such a call condemns their continent to permanent protectorate status, unable to feed itself and as a mass of humanity treated as a continental invalid. Countries from Southern Pacific Islands point out that the temperature rise associated with 350ppm would leave them underwater and permanent refugees as a modern day series of nations with Atlantis like status.

Let us, however, leave aside the numerical points and talk about what way a movement in the interests of environmental justice will operate. When a pipeline is being proposed the community next to it gets full messaging control and overwhelming precedence. The voices that must be amplified are those of the community whose traditional territory is under siege. Sadly, the history of environmental NGO organizing has been to use their struggle as a great fundraiser, to put some colour on the colourful brochures, to make posters with sayings from elders– sold and used to claim a profit for already well-financed ENGO’s.  Now we must apply these principles to what came out of Cochabamba.

The plenaries heeded the voices of the Global South and agreed to endorse no false solutions, power down not power up, no trading the air and the land for carbon credits, and to take the voices of the already suffering as a unified voice to Cancun in December 2010. But what of 350.org? From places of using ‘facilitation’ of plenary sessions to try and manipulate demands downward to falsely taking notes [after the fact], trying (on two separate occasions) to change the text of the agreed upon declarations– and ultimately refusing to sign onto and agree to uphold the principles of the Peoples Agreement that came out of the conference. Instead we have reality distorting pictures of Bolivian children posted during their 10/10/10 “Global work party” with “350.org” painted on their faces.

Note that 350.org is funded by unaccountable foundations that have historical ties to industry, and that 350.org itself steadfastly refuses to list any solutions, but instead delivers solar panels to the White House for stunt effect.

Meanwhile Bolivia (and the social movements that built the People’s Agreement) were hung out to dry in Mexico at COP16. That didn’t happen overnight. At meetings in advance of Cancun, 350.org “backed” small island states into a corner, “helping” them once they dropped “silly” demands and adopted the 350.org platform (or lack of one). Among other ENGO’s at Cancun were the usual competing voices, all demanding different things  from almost all the governments in the world. The declarations from the Peoples Agreement had already been delivered to the UN, and were being demanded by hundreds of social movements from all over the Global South and dozens of nation states to be presented for real discussion and legally binding enforcement on the global level. ENGO’s didn’t promote the agreement (many actively undermined such, with Greenpeace promoting REDD and the Mexican government) and such demands collapsed.

Silence on this dynamic runs counter to organizing an international resistance movement based on solidarity. Big money and slick advertising campaigns are trying to silence the voices emerging from all those gathered last April 2010 in the shadows of the melting glaciers of the Andes. It is the path to justice to fight to make certain that this legitimate voice for transformation is not turned into another prop of coloured peoples on a “professional” campaign. It is often accurately pointed out that this kind of division over the numbers 300 vs 350 is silly when we are almost at 400 already. That is agreed in the abstract, but this debate is not about the numbers. It is a struggle for recognition on a global scale– one that goes way, way beyond parts per million debates. It is pointed at a revolutionary approach.

Macdonald Stainsby is a social justice activist, journalist and professional hitchhiker looking for a ride to the better world. He is the coordinator of http://OilSandsTruth.org and can be reached at: mstainsby@resist.ca

Click here to download:

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Paulina Hernandez, Co-Director and Co-Founder of Southerners Organizing on New Ground, Atlanta, GA
on La Onda Bajita, 9 pm, Friday July 1, 2011, on the eve of the National Day of Noncompliance!

Sisters,

I strongly support the call by NWSA members to honor the GA travel, conference and tourism boycott due to the recent passage of HB87.

At this moment in time, we all see the crisis in governance, the crisis of capitalism, of identity in our country. As any astute scholar or practitioner of justice-making change knows. there are moments when it is clear that a line in the sand has been drawn. That line, in terms of human rights, wimmin's rights, and migrant rights, was SB1070 in Arizona.

As people of conscience, peoples whose very existence in the academy, whose very voices in public discourse are only possible because of social movements and other people in previous generations who took risks and hits to do what was clearly the right and just thing to do, we *must* stand with our sistren and brethren, and our members who are the targets of this legislation to fight injsutice, as well as take a clear stand against those who perpetrate hate crimes through so-called legal systems.

In addition, like the forced sterilizations of eugenics science policy from the 1920s through the 1960s that targeted poor white, Black, Latin@ and native Americans in the US and in places including Puerto Rico, El Salvador and Nicaragua, racist policies are often carried out with a particularly brutal force on systemically vulnerable groups of women and children. These are the sisters who have taught me, mentored me, challenged and supported me over the years.

As sisters, we must stand in strong solidarity with each other, now. We are more powerful than I think we know. This is the moment to honor the words of June Jordan, immortalized by Sweet Honey in the Rock, that honored the sisters in struggle against apartheid in the townships of South Africa. We are the ones we've been waiting for. These, and other reasons, are why I support the call to honor the travel ban and the boycott.

In addition, I know that many things are not what they seem. In the spirit of openness and transparency, as I know that in general we in NWSA share the values of justice and fairness, I would like to hear from the NWSA leadership:

(1) What steps did you take to explore the option of honoring the travel boycott and moving the conference out of Georgia before they sent us the email on May 16?

(2) What steps are you taking to substantively meet the call by Georgia organizations to meet with the organizers if an organization cannot or will not honor the travel boycott?

Thank you.

In loving, powerful sisterhood,

Diana Pei Wu

Antioch University Los Angeles

... "But some of us are brave."

Sisters, these are the moments when we are called, not only to be brave, but to be bold in doing so.

Today is the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, when transgender women of color led the fight against unjust police repression and surveillance of trans and queerfolk in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Today, courageous youth and young people "came out" in the Georgia City Capitol and in the streets near the Gold Dome. They have come out as undocumented and unafraid, as has Jose Vargas, the queer Filipino Pulitzer Prize winning journalist formerly with the Washington Post, in the New York Times and last night on the Maddow Show.

This fight, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is against the re-institution of Jim Crow legislation in the South and throughout the nation. The target is "migrant"-looking people right now - that means many of us, our families, loved ones, communities.

And if not now, history shows that unjust means of surveillance and state-sponsored violence often start off with a test population and then expand the technology to the general population once the technology of repression is honed and ready to be implemented at scale. That's the rest of us.

History shows that the impacts on women of color in these kinds of times can particularly inhumane: women have had their children taken from them and put under CPS even as they are put into deportation proceedings.

A woman who called the local police in a DV case found herself put under deportation proceedings. There are several documented such cases across the U.S.

When we look back, will we, NWSA, have stood against fear and hatred, or will we have done nothing in the name of financial expediency and procedural ease?

I urge us to begin and continue, publicly, the deeper process necessary to be able for us to honor the boycott of HB87 and to stand with love and justice, now, and in the future.

* * * * *

To summarize a few hours of research, here are some of the options thus far, most of which have not yet been explored, to the best of our collective knowledge:

I sent this list of options in a different version of this email to the NWSA Staff and Governing Council and have not received any reply, so I am posting it publicly.

Additional resources for moving the conference:

Other conferences that moved from Arizona last year:

* MALCS

* and a good 50 or so organizations who have said that they will not go to AZ as long as SB 1070 is on the books. http://altoarizona.com/az-boycott.html

Other conferences that moved their conference for another reason:

* American Studies Association (San Antonio, TX) - to honor a labor boycott of the hotel

What happened to a conference that didn't move AND didn't treat their membership with respect when asked:

* American Bar Association (bad publicity for the Association AND for the hotel: this has been used successfully in other conference negotiations to convince a hotel to allow an organization to break the contract without losing the deposit)

INMEX: www.inmex.com

* INMEX is a social justice event planning service that helps organizations negotiate contracts that can be re-negotiated in the event of labor, environmental and social justice boycotts; started by some folks who used to work with UNITE HERE. We (NWSA) could contact INMEX and ask for help. In addition, I would offer that NWSA could consider always using INMEX in the future.

Current organizations honoring the GA Boycott: http://www.wearegeorgia.org/action-center/boycott-signon-supporters/

Paulina Hernandez (Southerners on New Ground, one of the lead organizations calling for the boycott and Somos Georgia) and Lisbeth Gomez. Email: paulina@southernersonnewground.org

We can do this! We must.

If in good faith, NWSA has exhausted all the above options after carefully exploring and considering them, and only then finds that we cannot move the conference, the community organizers and many of us would be down to help NWSA make the conference a true support to the many multi-layered struggles happening in Georgia and the region, in principled, just, loving, brave and bold ways.

In sisterhood, love and justice,

Diana Pei Wu, PhD

Antioch University Los Angeles

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/06/24/253135/half-of-worlds-refugees-are-running-from-u-s-wars/

And, here is a report on REDD and the Market: http://www.redd-monitor.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Munden-Proje...

Click here to download:

Response-_Species_Extinction_and_Human_Population.pdf (125 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Response-_Species_Extinction_and_Human_Population.pdf (125 KB)

The Center for Biological Diversity (http://www.biologicaldiversity.org) is making disturbing claims about the relationship of human population growth to species extinction rates. Their analysis on population and climate change is somewhat more nuanced.

According to this graph, they attempt to make the claim that increases in population growth have led to increases in species extinctions since the 1800s.

In high school and college calculus mathematics courses, you learn that more than the actual number of any phenomenon, it is often, when looking for causality, important to actually look at key points where the slope of the graph is changing – to look at the rate of the phenomenon, as well as the changes in the rate, or slope, of a graph. The idea is to look at points in time where things are accelerating or decelerating and look for system drivers at those points.

By the way most of you will know that correlation is *not* the same as establishing causality.

If we look at this graph, you actually see the following trends (marked with arrows):

1. Although the rate of population of human beings was increasing since the 1800s, the rates of species extinctions are not significantly changing until somewhere between 1920 and 1930.
2. Somewhere between 1930 and 1940 the species extinction curve starts to trend upward. What’s going on in that time globally? The end of the Great Depression, the massive expansion in land use for agroindustrial uses, and the expansion of the use of buses and privately owned cars, as well as exploration and drilling for oil.
3. The species extinction rate starts to increase during WWII.
4. The species extinction rate starts to decrease right at the end of WWII.
5. The human population growth rate slows during WWII.
6. By 1950 the human population growth rate is increasing again.
7. Around the beginning of the 1970s, the species extinction rate starts to pick up. This is the era, in international development, of the “Green Revolution” and of large industrial infrastructure projects – roads, dams, and the like.
8. In the beginning of the 1990s, we enacted NAFTA, and this is the place where the extinction rate kicks up again.
9. There is a slight, final kick up in the rate of extinctions in the late 2000s.

Now, I assigned the arrows to the graph based on the rates of change in the graph, before I knew what the related dates were.

When I look at the points where the arrows identify conjunctures, correlated with my study of international development and world history, you find that perhaps that changes in species extinctions rates are more related to changes in resource use patterns, in particular of extensive land uses, including industrial agriculture and oil, coal and other fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and development, are more correlated to changes in the rates of species extinctions, than to human rates of population growth, or changes therein. 

ICE Raids the Strawberry Days Festival in Glenwood Springs, Two Fathers Detained While Waiting for Kids at the Bouncy Castle.

Father’s Day Festival Raid by Local Law Enforcement and ICE Chills Relations with Latino/a and Immigrant Communities; Hurts Business and Safety.

Glenwood Springs, CO — The Strawberry Days Festival in Glenwood Springs is usually remembered as a treasured summer family event. This year, some children will also remember it as the day their family was ripped apart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As the Alvarez family was waiting for their children to come out of the Bouncy Castle, they were approached by a couple of Garfield County Sheriffs deputies who led the men away behind the carnival rides. While there, 2 plainclothes ICE agents approached, checked, and detained both men. Brothers Cesar and Julio Alvarez were then taken to an ICE van in the back of the fair, while their 4 children waited with their aunt and mother.

Lorenza Alvarez, Julio’s 7-months pregnant, US born wife, came looking for her husband and her brother-in-law and was treated poorly by agents as she explained that Cesar was the only caretaker of twin 11-year-old girls. Following an extended conversation, Cesar was released but Julio was taken away for processing at an ICE detention center in Glenwood Springs. The stress was almost too much for the pregnant Mrs. Alvarez, and she had to be taken to Valley View Hospital for emergency care.

Teaming up with the Garfield County Sheriff’s Department, undercover ICE agents conducted this dragnet operation at a family fair on Father’s Day, in violation of their own operating regulations — which call on them to “refrain from conducting enforcement actions or investigative activities at or near sensitive community locations, such as schools, places of worship... and venues generally where children and their families may be present.”

“This operation has revealed the Glenwood Springs ICE office to be a rogue agency operating outside of clear ICE directives to not conduct operations in “sensitive locations.” said Brendan Greene, Rocky Mountain Coordinator for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition,“ The fact that ICE and local police went after dads at the carnival on Father’s Day has been spreading throughout the immigrant community. This has the potential to negatively impact the success of Strawberry Days for years to come; not to mention erode what little trust remains between the immigrant community and the Garfield Co. Sheriff’s office.”

Adds Greene, “The local ICE office and the Garfield Co. Sheriff, by irresponsibly targeting the city’s flagship summer event, has hurt not only the City of Glenwood Springs, but also any other town in the Valley that is hoping to have a successful festival this summer. They should be ashamed of themselves for hurting the Valley’s businesses in this way.”

Local Spanish language DJ, Axel Contreras, heard about ICE’s presence at the carnival and went to investigate. “I have lived in the Valley and attended Strawberry Days for 20 years…in all of my years here, even when there were terrible storms, I have never seen Strawberry Days as empty as it was on Sunday after word had spread in the community that ICE was conducting an operation.”

This type of enforcement operation is often extremely disruptive to small towns like Glenwood Springs, where the Latino/a community has grown to become a major supporter of the Festival over the last decade.

CIRC has been receiving complaints from the immigrant community about how the Garfield County Sheriffs Departments has been closely collaborating with, and in the case of last weekend’s raids at the carnival, taking the lead in ICE enforcement operations.

“I can’t think of a better way to ruin community policing than having local law enforcement troll for undocumented workers at community events like Strawberry Days.” said attorney Ted Hess, who is representing one of the detained men, “ This unholy alliance of ICE and local cops destroys trust between the community and the police.”

Bolivia has taken a firm stance at the opening of the UN climate negotiations in Bonn today, stating that it opposed the Cancún Agreement in Mexico and refuses to negotiate it now in Bonn until its concerns, particularly vis-a-vis the fundamental issue of REDD, are addressed. Discussions will resume this afternoon, taking up this topic. 

Tuvalu - calls bluff on lack of transparency in Mx in "facilitator groups" that made decisions

- calls attention to conflict of interests and "material" motivations for decision-making on REDD

- demands transparency and that Annex I and Annex II party representatives be consulted

- demands representation of the interests of indigenous groups

Requests the chair of the SBSTA reassure Bolivia in expressed concerns.