Before everything else, the Cochabamba conference was remarkable for bringing together a large group of radical activists from all around the world.  The social connections and sense of possibility that resulted from the exchanges that unfolded in this setting were immensely valuable.  For an overview of the conference that includes many interviews as well as the official publications of the various different working groups, check out the conference website.

 

These social connections will be hugely important in building the movement for climate justice on a local, national, and international plane in the coming months and years.  Based on my interviews with activists on the trip back to the U.S., being in Cochabamba made North Americans particularly aware of the responsibility they have as citizens of the most affluent and most powerful (but also most energy-consuming) nation on the planet.  What kinds of accountability can we articulate in response to the experience of meeting activists, intellectuals, and campesin@s from the global South?  More importantly, what specific actions can we say that we are engaged in in order to challenge the U.S.'s disproportionate carbon footprint and regressive politics on climate change?

 

One of the most immediate steps on people's minds seems to be to continue organizing and networking efforts.  Activists who were at Cochabamba are already planning to link up again at the U.S. Social Forum, creating a special stream within the forum in order to continue to develop strategies for organizing.  The goal will be to develop a consistent position to take to the Cancún meeting of the UNFCC in late 2010.

 

In addition, activists will continue to pressure the Obama administration to adopt a more progressive position regarding climate negotiations.  One of the concrete outcomes of the Cochabamba conference was a series of proposals that are intended to place pressure on the UNFCC process.  Apparently at least 7 of the Working Groups were designed to produce proposals to influence the UNFCC.  The deadline to submit these proposals is this coming Monday - hopefully the Bolivian government and activists working with them will submit them in time.  These proposals will then be used to pressure the Obama administration.

 

I personally am not particularly sanguine about any significant shift happening in the Obama administration.  And even if Obama were to adopt more progressive positions and, say, to pledge to cut U.S. emissions to a point where global carbon dioxide levels could be reduced to 350ppm, he's stuck with a Congress that is virtually guaranteed not to go along with such pledges.  But one has to work at rolling this stone up the hill, even if it threatens to roll back down on top of one.

 

Given this political reality, though, it makes sense to adopt a two- or three-track approach that involves using the modicum of access that activists have to Obama in tandem with campaigns to transform and to green urban and regional economies.  Involvement on organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, Urban Agenda, and the Apollo Project will be important in this regard.

 

I also think it's essential to engage in direct action.  There's been relatively little discussion of this at the conference, but this is largely because Evo was seen as an ally.  Direct action is likely to figure far more prominently in Cancún.  But I don't think that protests should be limited to the mega-conferences.  Local action is obviously important as well in order to continue to challenge fossil fuel industries.

 

In the meantime, hopefully the Bolivian government's relatively progressive position will also begin to turn the tide internationally, forging a block of developing nations interested in green alternatives to the established path of development while also prodding big polluters like the U.S. and China to begin changing their policies.

 

But all of this feels like reading tea leaves in very murky waters.  Whatever may come, participating in the conference has been quite transformative for me on a personal level.  I came into the conference with a very pessimistic analysis.  Basically, looking at the failure of the Copenhagen conference as a result of the growing conflict between the U.S. and China, I felt that we're leaving a moment of super-imperialism in which the U.S. dominated the globe, in combination with a series of regional subsidiary proxy powers, and entering a moment of increasingly strident inter-imperial competition.  We're returning, in other words, to similar conditions to those analyzed by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.  This time, however, the theme should be more along the lines of Imperialism: The Final Stage of Capitalism since the eco-imperialist component of current capitalist culture is pushing the world's ecosystems to the breaking point.  Given this rising eco-imperialism, I think it's unlikely that either the U.S. as global hegemon or rising powers such as India or China are going to sign on to any climate accords.

 

I still don't think that this analysis is incorrect.  This is the big picture we'll have to cope with in coming years.  Nonetheless, the Cochabamba conference showed that it's possible to at least formulate and advocate for a rational alternative to such suicidal policies.  By getting involved in policy formulation and social movement politics, in other words, it's possible to overcome the sense of apocalyptic despair that the status quo inspires.  It's also important to note that while attending the conference I was fortunate to meet many truly extraordinary people.  This too inspires great hope.

 

Perhaps most importantly, what I witnessed and participated in while in Bolivia was the birth of a global counter-force to the eco-imperialist juggernaut that seems so unstoppable in North America.  The odds are stacked very high against this global movement for climate justice, but that should not and cannot stop us from giving our all to this movement.  After all, what alternative is there?  Pache mama o muerte!

Oscar Olivera is a trade unionist and leader of the famous water wars which unfolded in Cochabamba in 2000 following the privatization of the city's water supply.  The water wars, which involved shutting down Cochabamba for 6 months, were so successful because everyone was really well informed.  There were four major leaders of the water wars, and the only one who hasn't entered government is Olivera.

Interview conducted by Ashley Dawson (AD) and James Johnson (JJ).  Translation by Estela Vazquez.

 

JJ Q: We'd like to speak to you about your experience so that we can see if we can draw lessons for our struggles in US.  So how did you get involved in the water wars?

A: in the mid-1980s, there was a strong weakening in the Bolivian labor movement as a a result of changes in the modes of production and because of the demands of the cap world.

JJ Q: was this because of the breaking of the tin miners' strike?

A: 30,000 tin miners, the heart of the union movement, became coca growers.  Evo Morales is a product of this.  Worldwide there is a new reality of work.  About 15 years ago, we started to investigate this work of labor, not just working through the internet but also watching changes practically on the ground.  We become aware of second-class workers in big factories.

JJ Q: who owns these factories?

A: they're multi-nationals.  This process of investigation drew three types of workers: women and young children.  This phase of investigation led to a second one: how to make this level of reality visible to everyone.  We had a lot of support from the media to make this reality known.

AD Q: who was in control of the media?

A: Big corporations, but journalists had few rights so, when they wrote about the oppressed out of sympathy.  we wanted to bring together two modes of work: old trade unions and the world of new reality of work, where unions do not exist and people don't have any rights.  So we formed a trade union school.  This school was one where two worlds of labor meet (this is 1996), where people share their experiences and their knowledge.  It's now called "The People's School."  Many people who come are not members of trade unions.  And the school was also mobile, so that we could take it to factories and neighborhoods.

AD Q: pedagogical methods?  Liberation theology?

A: yes, education popular, so that we begin from people's own experiences.  In this year, my union became a very important social point of reference.  People were coming to us to ask for help in how to organize, how to deal with problems.  Even ex-police officers and soldiers who work with the DEA came here asking for help after they were fired from US embassy with no relief.  So

So when they started the privatization of water at the end of 1999, the peasants came to the federation asking for help.  They said: you work very well in defending your own rights, rights inside the factory, but we need your help to protect our rights.  So we began thinking about water - what is it?  It's life.  This began to transform my vision of life and what the new vision for the union movement could be.  This is how I became involved in the war for water. 

The struggle for water gave me a much broader vision of union struggle.  It no longer involves just economic ends, but rather a fight for the struggle for life and much broader framework.  What we did as trade unionists and workers was to share an organizational experience in what became know as the Coordinator of Water.  The demo of 50,000 people in the main plaza was like a kind of popular union.  People were not accepting the privatization of water.  A union that was horizontal, participatory, without hierarchical structure, and without walls.

JJ Q: What did the water war to help the trade union movement?  How did it help build unions?  And other movements like the movement for the rights of indigenous people, rights of women, etc.

Q:  I think more than anything else, it showed that you can win victories under new conditions.  The coordinatora was a new social space.  It nurtured a battle from the base and not from the top down.  It created organizations that were very flexible and very participatory.  It showed new forms of organizing that were horizontal, participatory.  The trust build this way gave us much strength.  For example, the organization has worked with sex workers, homeless people, etc.  We tried to create a situation where everyone feels protected and has a space.  The Coordinatora and water wars challenged established unions.

JJ Q: Can you tell us about the organization on a concrete level?

A: There was no president, there were no spokespeople.  At the most, the responsibility to be the spokesperson could be taken away on short notice.  Everyone felt they were the same, but thre was a very strong commitment that what was decided had to be respected.  We also cultivate values like solidarity, respect, personal responsibilities.  We didn't want the instiution to become a part of the state.  we think that many state institutions that exist today are corrupt.  So we couldn't ask state to give us recognition.  Today, the space is more closed.  The space has been coopted by political parties and we've lost some autonomy of action.

JJ Q: to what degree do you feel that this movement made it possible for Evo to become president?

A: It's absolutely true.  The Water Wars gave birth.

EM?: Did Morales' party exist before Water Wars

A: Originally MAS existed before water wars (movement for the sovereignty of the people), but Morales really took off after the Water Wars.

JJ Q: how does the union struggle impact the status of women in Bolivia?

A: There has been an incredible increase in their participation, but in WC area they do not take a leadership position.

JJ Q: do you have an explanation for this?

A: I've not had time to investigate this, but I'm finding a strong recovery of traditional values, which is highly political.  Indigenous sector is by linked to the union movement.  In the urban sector, women have two roles: women are workers and housewives, and also have to administer the poverty of the reality.  So she doesn't have time for union activity.

AD Q: was there cross-pollination between rural and urban movements?

A: once factories were largely rural.  I remember a time when a Czech shoe firm opened in the country and people didn't know what the toilets were for, but would instead go to the fields.  But today workers are more urbanized.  But the new world of work is populated mainly by young people.  For example, software developers.  People who don't have hours.  The new worker is one who very young and very urban.  With their iPod and cellphone, but very exploited.  Big US multinationals have huge factories here where young people are working for very low wages.  Typical people are telephonic workers.

The public sector - teachers, health care, etc. - I'm not talking about people in this sector.  In these sectors, there might still be some traditional factors.  Here in Bolivia, university educators are hired to teach very specific subjects, on a set quota - but you're not a tenured teacher, you don't have insurance, etc.  The same thing as in the U.S.

The number of unionized people in Bolivia used to be 80%.  The form of citizenship WAS the unions.  If you weren't a member of a union, you didn't exist.  Today, to be a citizen you need to belong to a party.  Today, only 15% of the country's population is unionized.

There are about 40,000 workers in Cochabamba, but we have only organized 6,000.

AD Q: what are strategies to unionize the new knowledge workers?

A: we've tried, but they work in powerful international companies, and the people who work there are very fearful.  We've denounced them, but the process is very slow.  We also work with workers in the service sector such as in supermarkets.  but this is a person without an identity, someone who sees a coworkers as an enemy.  This will be a long ideological battle.  Lots of people don't want to say that they work, but that they are 'technicals,' that they're not workers exploited by the system.  It's a very difficult job because you have to regain the traditional values of workers.

AD Q: Can the notion of commons be useful for struggles going forward?

A: We're having lots of discussions over whether water can be owned.  But we have very different ideas and values than the West.  Do we talk about water as a communal property or of property of all and no one?  The issue of water allows us to regain a vision that is more humane and more inclusive.  For the Andean people, everything is alive.  The stones, the air, the earth.  And we're part of that concept of inclusive life.  Western concept is more anthropocentric.  People need to use natural resources for their good.  We're recuperating such values gradually in our struggles over the last ten years.

 

I have the feeling that a lot is going on behind the scenes.  Day three featured a mix of panels with expert testimony and reports by Working Groups.  I'll talk first about the latter.  I attended presentations for the working groups on a global referendum on the rights of Mother Earth, and on technology transfer.  After the latter, I spoke to a guy from a San Francisco-based organization who had been made the chair.  He explained to me that the working groups had been convened four months or so ago to pull together statements in each of their areas of interest.  People could sign up on the website and participate in a discussion that led to the final working document.  Then, at the conference, the four or five members of the working group pulled all of these discussions together to create the final document.  Apparently there have been major interventions from organizations based in the global North to undermine these draft documents and to give them a neo-liberal spin.  Today, a group of dissident groups calling themselves "mesa 18" or "Working Group 18" (because their petition to be included among the other working groups was denied) held a meeting in which they attacked the forms of fossil-fuel based development taking place in Bolivia today.  Democracy Now has an interview with Moira Millán, one of these Mesa 18 activists; check it out here.

 

In contrast with this back-door negotiating process, the expert panels were pretty uplifting.  The one I attended (and documented earlier on the blog) focused on the rights of Mother Earth.  I attended partially to see what was going on with Liberation theology today - I had understood that the Vatican had pretty much stamped it out over the last two decades.  But I was also interested in the role of legal experts who made appearances.  The panel turned out to be quite powerful.  Okay, there are clearly problems with the concept of pache mama or Mother Earth that has made such a strong appearance in the conference so far.  This equation of the Earth with femininity and women potentially plays into some pretty regressive patriarchal representations of gender relations.  But, as Leonardo Boff explained, the point of this representation is to challenge hegemonic forms of commodification of the planet.  The philosophical points advanced by Boff were then given far more tangible form by Cormac Cullinan and Mari Margil, two environmental activist lawyers.  Their points about the objectification of nature in juridical discourse were powerful, and gave insight into an unfolding insurgent legal movement.

 

The rest of my day was spent attending a panel on labor unions and green jobs, which recycled many points I'd heard before while also giving some insight into unfolding campaigns.  I then attended a caucus meeting of the North American delegation.  There was some conflict about how this caucus should be organized, but we managed in the end to put together a working group and to advance some (but not nearly enough) action points.  Among these was a suggestion that I made that we denounce the U.S.'s recent policy of deny mitigation funds to Bolivia and Ecuador because of their refusal to sign on to the meaningless Copenhagen Accord.  Plans were made by caucus participants to meet at the U.S. Social Forum in June in Detroit to push organizing plans forward.

Jonathan Neele: I speak for an alliance of 6 labor unions in the UK (www.campaigngcc.org/greenjobs).  We have a campaign for 1 million green jobs in the UK.  But I want to join with all of you in this campaign, because unless we act now, we run risk of run-away climate change.  No one is sure when this tipping point is, but we have to think that we have twenty years in order to organize.  If we hit tipping point, it will mean that the rains will fail, creating famine and hundreds of millions of refugees, and war.  This will change the balance of economies and power, and countries will go to war to change that balance back.  We're now living through the wars for oil, and we're destined to live through the wars for water. 

The good news is that we can stop that from happening.  We have the technology now, and we can do it in ten years.  We need to cut CO2 emissions in the rich countries by 80% and in the poor countries by 25-50%.  To do this, there are thousands of things we have to do, but three things will make most of the different.  One is to cover the world with renewable energy, wind power, and solar power.  The second is to fix all the houses and buildings in the world so that they use much less energy.  The third is to cover the world with public transport not cars. 

Bush and Obama tell us that this is too expensive.  It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars.  But stop for a minute and think: what does too expensive mean?  It means jobs.  It means hundreds of millions of jobs all over the world.  We have hundreds of millions of people all over the world without work.  So what we are saying is very simple: we have work that must be done to save the planet, we have people who need work, give them the jobs.  In UK, we have 2.5 million people out of work.  Our unions are campaigning for the government to act and to hire 1 million new workers to stop climate change.  We know that the money is there. 

Two years ago we learned a lesson: the Federal Reserve of the US can find 400 billion dollars in a day if they think it's important.  If the planet were a bank, they would save it.  They tell us now that the money isn't there because they gave it all to the banks.  To that we say two things: first, the banks are still there - go and get the money back from them.  But also, this will not cost much.  IN the UK, for 1 million jobs, it'll cost about $50 billion pounds.  But, the government gets much of that money back since the people with the new jobs pay taxes and don't have unemployment benefit.  And also, the government can charge for the electricity.  So, we think that it'll only cost the government about $20 billion pounds per year.  But the government of Britain spent $200 billion pounds last year in what they call "quantative easing" which only means printing money.  We want the same amount of money over 10 years.  They can afford it. 

But also, we have an economic crisis over the whole world.  In every country, people need jobs.  Look back to World War II; in that war, all the great powers of the world changed their whole economy to make as many weapons as possible to kill as many people as possible.  We need to do the same thing now, but to save jobs.  When they did this during WWII, they ended the Great Depression and all over the world, people had jobs.  A government that reacts to an economic crisis by cutting jobs is a government punishing worlking people.  The only way out of an economic downturn is to create jobs.

In stopping CC, we face 2 big challenges.  First, in fighting CC, we're tackling a phenomenon in the future, but we want people to act now.  With jobs, people want jobs now.  And we can get people to fight NOW.  The other reason is political.  Until now, the environmental movt as been a ghetto, made up of mostly white, middle class people.  After Copenhagen, we know there's only 1 way to stop CC.  That is, to build a mass movement.  These days in Cochabamba are the moment of change for this.  Here we have the indigenous and campesinos in the movement.  As a result of this week, we are incomparably stronger, and there is incomparably more hope for the planet.  But we need the workers.  If we say to the people without jobs, come fight to save the planet and your job, then we can build a mass movement.  We are starting our movement and our campaign with the unions in the UK.

We may not win our campaign for 1 million jobs, but if we do, all the people of the world will see that it's possible.  If we win, we want you to fight in your countries, where union traditions are stronger.  If we fight in multiple countries, the odds are much better that we'll break through in one country and then in the rest of the world.

 

Q: We need to involve unions from all over LA here.  Why is there such slight representation?

Q: I'm a teacher and a unionist from Argentina, active for 40 years.  I'm really concerned about the lack of representation from unions in Latin America.  This is going to be a difficult fight given the lack of mass mobilization.  But we know that the state has to intervene to create more green jobs.  In LA, unemployment is not the same as in developed countries.  In LA, unemployed workers do not receive unemployment insurance.  In our countries, the conditions are such that even when companies are created that contaminate the environment, people support such companies because they create jobs.  When people in the North fight against pollution, their jobs just decamp to the south, where they find cheap labor and permissive governments.  In LA, there are long periods of military dictatorship that cost thousands of disappeared people.  This was followed by neoliberal states that have lost control over national resources and labor conditions.  We have tremendous difficulty pressuring our state to adopt green measures.

Q: I'm a member of a pharmacists' union in Argentina.  Notions of green jobs in Argentina are often just a façade or veneer.  We need to expose corporations that say they're creating jobs, even if they're dirty.

Q: Bolivian woman who's a teacher in UK.  The problem of unions in UK is that they're paralyzed, and that EU has passed legislation for 'green fuel' which is going to make prices of food much higher.  The problem we all have in common is transport.  Neoliberalism has dismantled our public transportation systems.  We need to fight for a global system of public transportation and free access for all.

Q: Man from Chile who talks about the problem of lack of democracy in LA labor unions.  Only 6% of labor force in Chile is organized.

Q: Man from South Korea who says that workers don't like green jobs because green jobs aren't well-paying or secure.  We've struggled to get government to support shift of production in plants from car factories to public transportation.  We're having a huge rally in October for real green jobs; if we can be successful, so can people in former dictatorships like South Africa, Chile, and Bolivia.

Q: Woman, originally from Cuba, representing the federation of Latin American trade unions speaks about how the largest problem in LA is the high level of unemployment.  This is the fundamental issue that we have to address.  Also, if we don't change the underlying capitalist system, which produces unemployment and climate change, we won't make any progress.  We need to find alternatives such as regional integration of the continent.

Q: Argentinian woman who works with the transport union says that we should work out of here with a common agenda so that we can go back to our countries and our unions and get to work organizing.

Q: We need national and regional networks so that we can support and gain from one another's experience.

Response by Jonathan Neele: Green jobs=climate jobs.  Green jobs can mean anything.  My job is teaching, which is worthwhile.  But it doesn't cut carbon emissions.  We have to limit this to jobs which cut carbon emissions.  This is the only way that we can keep this movement honest.  If people outside our movement think we're being dishonest, they won't support us.  If people inside our movement think we're being dishonest, they won't support us.  Thinks about CUNY - if students and faculty mobilize to make government rebuild the city in a green way, it'll change whole city and class relations in US, and it will also provide jobs in green economy.  What about workers in difficult jobs?  What about coca farmers in Bolivia and miners in South Africa?  In UK, we say 1 million jobs and the government employs them, not the corporations.  You don't tell coca farmers to stop cutting down the forest, you give them good jobs in the climate economy.  In UK, strongest union was coal miners, so the heart of every trade unionist in UK is with the miners, BUT we must stop using coal.  We don't take people's jobs away, we must be strong enough to force government to give us climate jobs.  This means that we must transform the union movement.  And we must transform the state.  so we're going to have to build a mass movement.

Greetings from the Postmaster General of Bolivia.  The Bolivian postal service is issuing two stamps that illustrate the impact of global warming in our country: image of glacier from Bolivian Andes that only 10 years ago was still extensive, and now is completely gone - which the second stamp shows.

 

Panel participants: Miguel D'Escoto (former President of UN), Leonardo Boff (Liberation Theologian), Alberto Acosta (Ecuadorian economist and politician), Cormac Cullinan (South African environmental lawyer), Mari Margil (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund)

Miguel D'Escoto: Not long ago there were meetings like this to discuss women's rights and black people's rights.  The human conscience is something that is constantly developing.  Right now we are coming to understand belatedly that mother Earth is alive and that we are part of it.  That we are the part of the earth that thinks, and loves, and laughs.  Why has it taken us so long to understand all these things?  Aristotle said that, as opposed to animals, men are not born with instincts.  Our only quasi-instinct is our intuition that we should do good and avoid evil.  But we're not clear about what kind of good we're supposed to do and what kind of evil we should avoid.  Not all human beings have the same ethical sensibility.  Let's look back at the industrial revolution.  Marx raised his voice in defense of the rights of the exploited; he's mostly an ethical person.  We must reemphasize Marx's ethical dignity.  The church was silent during this period.  Capitalism has put our ethical capacity to sleep.  Now we must draw attention to the rights of Mother Earth or perish.  Progress evident in declaration of Earth Day on April 22^nd by the UN; but we need to recognize that the UN has failed since it has failed to prevent wars, and the most war-like nation on the planet - the U.S. - has a permanent seat on the Security Council.  We've proposed a World Declaration for acceptance by the General Assembly of a reconfigured UN.  I do not believe the UN should disappear; on the contrary, I believe it will become the most important organization to help humanity survive.  Within the context of the new charter, there are two issues relating to Mother Earth rights.  We do not intend to replace the UN Human Rights Declaration but rather to complement and enrich it.  These documents can be found at www.reinventingtheUN.org, which includes a feature to allow comments.

 

Leonardo Boff: Miguel D'Escoto's brilliant idea of creating a declaration of rights and a court to judge infractions.  It's not a question of markets or anything else, but of life in all its diversity.  Evo's presentation on April 22^nd last year refocused from Earth Day to celebration of Mother Earth.  This was a revolutionary step.  It's one thing to say Earth, which can be bought and sold and exploited.  It's another to say Mother Earth, because you cannot sell or exploit your mother, you have to love her.  To say this is to say that pache mama is a subject, with rights and dignity.  This is new in terms of legal regimes.  We need to get away from an anthropocentric vision that only sees human beings as carriers of rights and dignity.  We need to remember that every living thing has an intrinsic value and has a right to exist.  I'd like to present some thoughts on the right of Mother Earth to legal rights, because we need a philosophical framework to legitimate these rights.  First of all, there is a great tradition of according dignity to Earth because it has all we need to live.  Modern sciences have shown that Earth is not simply inert but is a living organism that is constantly producing life; this living super-organism has been called Gaia, which is the same reality as pache mama.  James Lovelock as creator of theory of Gaia, a theory that challenges us to put together the native people's vision (since they understood the earth as pache mama) and the scientific viewpoint.  Both these perspectives are vital.  And the third element is the legacy that the astronauts have provided us by showing us Earth from outside, by showing us that there is no division between Earth and humankind.  This is why man in Latin comes form humus or Earth.  We are the Earth which thinks and feels and dances and celebrates.  We must not deny our earthly roots, and we must not deny the autonomous value of the Earth.  In addition, physicists have argued that all matter is a highly condensed form of energy.  For Niels Bohr, for example, all of reality is made up of energy networks that are continuously related to one another.  There's nothing outside relationship.  We've realized that matter not only has mass and energy but also information.  So Earth stores the historical memory of its revolutionary trajectory - it has a subjectivity, one that's different from ours.  But this difference is not absolute, but rather one of degrees.  And so it's our duty to look after the Earth.  I believe that we're now entering the age of biocivilization when human beings will recognize our common fate.  The 21^st century will be the century of the rights of Mother Earth.

 

Alberto Acosta: We are gathered here to provide a specific response to the failure of Kyoto at Copenhagen.  There were no concrete responses here, but an imposition of shameless behavior by the U.S.  Today, countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are being excluded from funding - I consider this an intolerable form of blackmail.  Today, CC is already causing terrible crises around the world, including forced migration, droughts, famines, etc.  CC is accelerating as a result of the perverse logic of capitalism, which has put the logic of accumulation over the logic of life.  So we're seeing increasing commodification of nature and colonization around the world.  1 citizen from the US emits nearly 20 tons of CO2 per year, while Chinese emit 3.2 million tones.  IN Ecuador, per capita emissions are 2.2 million tons per year.  It's clear where responsibility lies, but let us not forget that there's only one pace mama.  Within this context, the Declaratoin of the Rights of Mother Earth says that nature has been changed because it's been changed into a factory.  Our main task is to overcome this commodifying process of nature to understand that resources are for life not accumulation.  What we're living now is part of a process that begin many centuries ago: a permanent expansion of rights, from the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage to the present struggles for political, civil, social, and economic rights.  Environmental rights expand on such rights.  The European writer Italo Calvino's created the tree baron to speak for the rights of trees and animals.  But we must recognize that native people's have never lost the vision that Mother Earth is sacred and that everything is related.  This is the perspective that we need to recover now.  The Bolivian Constitution recognizes the rights of nature as part of a plurinational state.  We must begin to reconstruct our perspective on citizenship to include environmental citizenship to include biodiversity, to include both human rights and the rights of nature.  With this in mind, we must claim environmental debt due to the poor of the world after centuries of exploitation.  And we must implement an Environmental Court to prosecute those who exploit the Earth.  And we must not follow the path of development of the North.  We need to live in harmony with Mother Earth.  In addition to work of governments like Evo's, we need to call ourselves to permanent global mobilization to protect pache mama.

 

Cormac Cullinan: We in the rest of the world are all aware that Latin America is giving birth to a new revolution, one that must spread throughout the world if our civilization is not to collapse.  Before I talk about this, I'd like to talk about the caterpillar.  The caterpillar starts out as a tiny creature that eats and eats, and grows and grows.  If it kept doing this, it would eat all its food and die.  But fortunately Mother Earth imposes limits.  So the caterpillar eventually goes into a pupa and begins a transformation, forming new cells that remake the caterpillar into a butterfly.  Because there is no future of a caterpillar that eats incessantly, a point to transformation must be reached.  Each of the caterpillar's cells have plan for the butterfly written into them, and so the butterfly can be born into a new future.  I'm telling this story because, in the same way that the DNA in the cells of the caterpillar determine its ability to transform, so we in society have a certain DNA.  The law of a society acts like DNA, determining possibilities for the present and the future.  What we're trying to do here is to establish a new DNA for society, a structure that will enable us to restructure ourselves and transform.  This is an essential tasks, one as grand and far-reaching as the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Unfortunately, the legal DNA that structures most societies is based on the idea of the Earth as a machine for exploitation.  As a white South African, I was born into a culture of domination.  Merely by being born into this society, I was born an exploiter, part of a society based on separation and exploitation of the majority.  Fear of the majority created a ruthlessness and oppression of the majority.  If you were born like me into such a society, you began blind.  But as I grew older, I realized that I needed to reeducate myself and change many of the ways of thinking that my society had inculcated.  I eventually realized that to be silent is to be an accomplice of injustice.  We South Africans realized that there would be no future for the country unless we got away from this idea of separation.  This notion of separation is very strong in many other countries and cultures.  Most of us grow up in cultures that teach us that we're separate from others and from nature.  We have to move from a society based on separation and domination to embrace our participation in life.  In whole universe, we have not yet discovered another planet with life.  We are incredibly fortunate to be born into this community of life.  Through out actions, we are breaking the rules of that community, and this will lead to our exclusion.  I have worked for many years as an environmental lawyer.  I believed that I was one of good guys, and that we just needed better laws and better enforcement.  But I began to experience problems that showed me that the problem is underlying and philosophical.  I was fortunate to meet Father Thomas Berry, who said that the legal system as a whole legitimates and perpetuates the exploitation of the Earth.  The law has been structured on the basis of an attitude of domination.  For example, only human beings are capable of having rights.  everything else is only a thing, and can only be a property of humans.  The rest of creation, Mother Earth, is like a slave - simply property.  There can never be a whole and healthy relation between slaves and masters.  We must address this fundamental imbalance.  I wrote a book called Wild World that proposes Earth jurisprudence.  In addition, this metamorphosis is a personal transformation.  It's hard for a lawyer who's been trained to believe that only people are rights-bearers to understand this perspective.  We need to understand that there's a source of law beyond us: the planet itself is a self-ordering system.  We need to align our human legal systems with the legal system of which we form a part: Earth's.  We need to develop a concept of restorative justice.  What we're talking about is entering into a vast network of relationships that bind us each to one another.  We have to start thinking in holistic terms, as connected to community of inter-related beings, bound together by intimacy and love.

 

Mari Margil: these past several days, I've been a part of the working group on the rights of Mother Earth.  Lawyers define nature as property, particularly in the U.S.  Environmental laws legalize how much harm can occur to Mother Nature under the law.  My community works with communities that challenge this approach.  U.S. legal regime being exported around world.  We can see results: collapse of fisheries, massive species extinction, climate change, etc. Nonetheless, these kinds of environmental laws continue to be adopted throughout the world.  My organization works with communities that must fight enclosure of the commons, but they recognize that they cannot win such fights when legal structure legitimates such acts of commodification.  But people are beginning to recognize that these laws cannot be improved, but must be abolished, just as were laws that permitted slavery.  These laws must be rewritten and replaced.  We worked with a community in Pennsylvania, for example, to rewrite laws so that corporations could not take coal from under their land, so that corporations wouldn't have rights of personhood, and so that ecosystems would have legally recognized rights.  We worked in Ecuador in 2007 to draft proposed provisions for new constitution, one that was adopted in September 2008, provisions that include rights of nature.  Ecuador and Bolivia are now leading the way for countries around the world to develop a different legal regime to protect nature.  Everytime a movement is launched to recognize rights for people who are considered rightless, these movements are called treasonous and radical.  John Stuart Mill wrote that every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, and adoption.  We know that movements for rights don't achieve success quickly.  We know that we'll be vilified.  We know that it will take a great shift in human consciousness to recognize the rights of Madre Tierra.  But this is what we must do.  We ask you to join us.

Pache mama o muerte!  (Mother Earth or Death)

Evo's rallying cry at the beginning and end of his speech confirmed everything that I'd hoped to find in Bolivia.  Here is a leader who really understands the stakes of the epic struggle that we face in climate change and articulates that struggle to potent revolutionary traditions.  Before coming on stage, Evo sang the Bolivian national anthem, which ends in an assertion of loyalty to the nation something along the lines of patria o muerte.  So, when Evo says pache mama o muerte (Mother Nature or Death), he's linking the struggle for climate justice to Bolivarian traditions of battle against Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism.

It's one thing to understand the stakes and science of climate change in a relatively dry analytical way.  This is obviously an important issue, one that Bill McKibben and Jim Hansen both commented on in their panel today on the politics of climate science.  The climate change denialists continue to gain ridiculous amounts of traction through their control of the media and their ability to play on people's fears of the federal government in the U.S.  So we nee to read Hansen and McKibben and understand their explanations of the science as well as their well thought-out calls for radical shifts in contemporary U.S. culture in order to avert climate chaos.

But such calls pale in comparison with the resonant anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist stance of Evo.  And this is the kind of leadership we need now.  All day I was thinking about what it means to be in this present moment in history.  Being here at the conference certainly makes one feel aware of participating in a truly epochal moment.  Some people I've talked to here have referred to it as "our Woodstock," perhaps because of the rock concert quality of the inaugural ceremony.  But I would compare it much more to the so-called greatest generation, the men and women who fought against fascism and Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, or to anti-colonial nationalist militants in the decades that followed.  These people truly remade world history.  But today, we face a struggle that goes way beyond those great battles for liberation -  we're literally fighting for the survival of the human species, and of most other species on the planet as well.  I don't think the gravity of this challenge, as well as the intoxicating sense of mobilization and possibility that come with such world-defining moments, have sunk in with most people yet.  But this conference is a blast from the future, a clarion call to make the world anew.

With the People's Conference on Climate Change, Evo has occupied the high moral and political ground, and he's standing there alone.  Just to hear him to through the climate science honestly in his speech and urge the adoption of measures to reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations to 350ppm is to hear words that virtually no other world leader is willing to pronounce.  Certainly not Obama, and not even any of the other progressive leaders of Latin America such as Lula or Chavez.  In addition, Evo has very cannily created a virtually bulletproof set of alliances for himself with social movements from other parts of the world.  It's going to be very hard to marginalize or even depose him given the alliances gestated at this conference.

Not that Evo doesn't have feet of clay.  His homophobic reference to GMO chicken leading to effeminancy among men suggested that he's not in touch with progressives working on gender and sexual orientation issues domestically or internationally.  In addition, apparently during the meetings to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the water wars that preceded the conference, many Bolivian activists criticized him for not developing a real environmental agenda for Bolivia.  For example, he continues to rely on natural gas exports to Brazil to produce significant revenues for the country rather than shifting to renewable energy.  Perhaps there's an element of hypocrisy then in his strident call to save pache mama, but it's also true that he needs to maintaining regional alliances, including those with Brazil, the regional super-power where most of Bolivia's gas goes.  But obviously the social movements within Bolivia need to keep the pressure on him for progressive change.

And it is these social movements that give one real hope.  There's an amazing alliance of indigenous leaders, leftists, women's groups, etc. evident here on the ground.  This alliance is leading to fascinating cross-fertilization and transformation.  And now the international social movements fighting for climate justice are tapping into and helping build these movements.  The world is being made anew.  Pache mama o muerte!

I should add that there is, of course, lots and lots of media coverage here.  Not enough international though.  But Democracy Now, beating mainstream coverage by a mile as usual, is covering the events.  Check out their coverage here.  It's going on all week.

Also, some of the NYC delegation who are media workers have already begun posting their material online.  The photographer Alexandra Corazza has some up here - check them out for a different angle on the conference.

James Hansen:

This is a time pregnant with danger.  This danger exists because of a large gap between what the science has made clear and what the public realizes.  It has become clear from the science that we are in a dangerous situation.  The climate system responds slowly to man-made factors.  But it does respond.  And we're pushing the system to the point where we can guarantee that large changes are going to become evident in the next few decades.  But the public at large is not well informed because of the nature of discussion in the media.  The public things it's still up in the air about whether Climate Change (CC) is happening. 

But it's clear that we're passing major tipping points.  For example, the possibility that the Artic ice caps will melt and lead to massive sea-level rise.  We can already measure such rises in sea levels.  Another tipping point is the increasing mass extinction.  CC will drive even more species to extinction.  This is a non-linear event; as individual species become extinct, others that depend on them will follow, creating potential collapse of ecosystems.

The CC contrarians and deniers are having a field day with "Climate-gate" and the IPCC errors.  But in both of these cases, the scientific evidence is irrefutable that the climate really is warming.  Glaciers are melting all around the world.  So the science is clear, yet the public continues to buy into the idea that the whole thing is a hoax.

This is because the people who prefer biz as usual are more successful at controlling the media.  But the science tells us that a safe level of greenhouse gases is 350ppm.  If we're going to get CO2 back down below this level, we cannot burn all of the coal.  We're going to have to phase out coal emissions.  And we cannot exploit unconventional sources like tar sands and shale.  And we shouldn't be going after every last drop of oil.  We need to move promptly to clean energy systems.

This has implications for what is needed.  We cannot achieve what is needed through distant emissions reduction goals.  Such promises are worthless.  What we actually need are policies that move us to clean energies of the future.  This means that cap-and-trade with offsets is a method to continue biz as usual.  What we must do is put a rising price and carbon emissions so that alternative fuel sources will become more competitive and allow us to move to a clean energy future.

Governments are continuing to go down the opposite path, with more and more coal and other conventional sources.

We need to realize that this is a moral issue.  This means that we must realize that it is a question of inter-generational injustice if we think we can address the problem by having goal for emissions reductions in the future.  We must give priority to mitigation of the forces that are driving the carbon cycle.  If we put CO2 in atmosphere now, it'll remain there for generations.

This has implications for developed countries, which must develop policies we need for the future.  But developing countries should also not put first priority on adaptation.  We must put first priority on mitigation.

 

Edson Ramirez:

Scientist who studies glaciers in Latin America, which has 5% of world glaciers, 99% of which are concentrated in the Andes, 70% in Peru, 8% in Bolvia.  The Andes have more than 40 million inhabitants.  Glaciers are an archive of a climate hurtling towards extinction.  Similar massive change going on today.

 

Foster Brown, "Climate Change and its synergies: the case of South-west Amazonia."

Discussion of increasingly dry weather in Amazonia area.  2005 drought in the region finds hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest burning down.  Result later is more than 20,000 people affected by severe flooding.  Many cities (such as Cobija, Madre de Dios) are vulnerable since over 50% of the population of this region is urban.  Also, we're looking at greater rural vulnerability due to the creation of novel, fire-prone ecosystems.  Literature on global CC growing rapidly - several articles being published per week in the top scientific journals.  It's hard to keep up with all this new knowledge.

Central observations in Amazonia: forst fires in 2005 & 2007, flooding in 2006, 2009, and 2010, pattern suggesting greater extreme climate events.  These extreme events are likely to become the rule.  South-western Amazonia is where CC is on fast forward.

Risk management approach: we cannot wait to be absolutely sure about CC.  Evaluate the risks then chose the lesser risks.

 

Ricardo Navarro:

We're looking at catastrophic consequences if temperature goes up above 4° C.

This climate crisis will never be resolved until we adopt the perspective of climate justice.  We need to challenge the big corporations.  Production of beef creates as much emissions as all transportation. 

 

Bill McKibben:

Beginning with science issue.  My first book was written 21 years ago.  Then we already knew a lot about the science.  What we didn't know was how much CO2 would be too much, and when effects would manifest themselves.

Unfortunately, it's become very clear over last 20 years that problem is bigger than before.

Tipping moment was summer of 2007 when Artic ice caps melted faster than ever before.  We're seeing rapid changes in hydrological cycles.  Air holding over 4% more water than 20 years ago.  Also, the chemistry of the sea is changing and becoming more acidic, with resulting death of the coral reefs.  All of this with only 1° change. 

We're being told that 3-4° change this century is possible.

One good thing from last few years is that we finally have a number around which to rally.  This comes from James Hansen in a January 2008 paper.  Any value of CO2 greater than 350ppm is not compatible with human civilization. 

But we're already at 390ppm and rising fast.  Official negotiating positions of many environmental groups and governments are for 450ppm.  Question is how we go back down to 350ppm.

This isn't too complicated.  We've got green technologies.  Hard part is mustering the political will to make something happen.  We saw at Copenhagen how difficult it is.  150 countries endorsed 350ppm, but they were not the ones that counted when accord was written.

When we started 350 in 2008, many said it was too complex and scientific.  We feel that it's clear: one simple number.  This is the case.  Last October, we put together 5,200 simultaneous demos around the world.  This was the most widespread day of political action in the world's history, the largest coordinated protest in world history. 

We need to keep this movement going and growing.  We want people to use October 10^th as a global day of work installing green technologies.  We don't think this will solve problem.  It can only happen through international agreement that puts a price on carbon and lowers emissions.  But this day will show politicians that they have to get to work all around the world.

It's crucial that civil society be part of this story, because cooperation between civil society and government happen.  This is THE movement for the future of the planet.  If it doesn't win, we won't have a future.  But we feel that it will win.  We're so grateful to you for organizing your conference, and to the scientists for showing us where we need to go.

 For the planet or for death!  I salute the social movements, unions, government representatives, and many people who have come to Bolivia, the heart of the Americas, to participate in this conference in the defense of pache mama.

Copenhagen wasn't a fiasco; it's a victory for the people and a failure of the powerful nations of the world.  It's the so-called underdeveloped countries protect who respect Kyoto.   Copenhagen Accord will lead to warming of more than 4° Celsius.  That's why we've called this meeting.  We're facing mass extinction and other terrible effects.   We need to establish a limit of 350ppm in the atmosphere.

But underdeveloped countries are only responsible for 5% of GHGs.  Developed counties ar blocking any kind of progress on this front.  COP15 agreement eliminates the Kyoto Protocol, and responsibilities of developed countries to cut their emissions.

Capitalism is the major element responsible for the destruction of the Earth.  Capitalism depends on the greatest profit possible.  Yet globalization is manifestly creating poverty.  For capitalism, we're only consumers or workers.  There is no other aspect to our identities.  Capitalism commodifies everything.  We must choose either corporations and death or life.  We cannot live in harmony with Earth when a few people are controlling the vast majority of the planet.  Our new system of collectivist socialism will solve these problems.  We are again unlimited development.

We are united here to celebrate the role of indigenous peoples a stewards of the Earth and as an alternative to unsustainable development.  Mother Earth belongs to all of us and cannot be sold.  Capitalism is synonomous with the destruction of the planet.

For example, capitalism persecutes indigenous people for raising coca, a product we used for centuries before European conquistadores arrived.  But today our indigenous communities know that tea made from coca is one of the best medicines available.

We have to reverse the illegality imposed on use through the 'War on Drugs."  What if we decided that another traditional indigenous food, quinoa, was illegal and went around persecuting health food proponets in the US for eating it?

GMOs are another example of how the West's values are wrong.  We know that eating GMO chicken makes men effeminate (!).  GMOs also create baldness, so if we all eat them soon the entire planet will be bald.

We also need to embargo Coca-Cola.  This drink only makes us sick.  I know certain plumbers who use it to unclog toilets.

Another example is the difference between traditional clay plates and plastic plate.  Evo tells UN representative that when he went there for dinner, they gave him food on plastic plates.

Evo then took a (wool?) poncho, the type worn by indigenous people in Bolivia, and demonstrated how waterproof it is by pouring water all over it.  He was flanked on both sides by generals, and the water went dangerously close to them as it swirled off the poncho.

Evo then says that these small examples show that we need to go back to indigenous ways.

Capitalism constantly invents wars, he said.  Wars on drugs.  Wars on terror.

When it can't sell its products, capitalism manufactures weapons and starts wars in order to sell those weapons.

If we unite all the people, he argued, we can defeat capitalism and imperialism, and save the planet.  He then advanced a series of five action points:

1)    reduce carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million.

2)    Prod the UN to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth

3)    Open frontiers to receive the millions of climate migrants in coming years

4)    Help underdeveloped countries cope with effects of climate change

5)    Recognize people's rights to things like water, and recognize their right not to be exposed to things like excessive pollution.

We need, Evo argued, a huge global intercontinental movement in support of the rights of Mother Earth.  We need to indict the countries that don't support the Kyoto Protocol in the International Criminal Court. 

We are confronted with two paths: pache mama or the path of the multi-nationals.  If we don't take the former, the masters of death will win, he argued.  If we don't fight, we will be guilty of destroying the planet. 

Two paths: pache mama o muerte.

We arrive in the stadium of the University of Univalle at 8am, walking through a gauntlet of military police, naval police, army officers, cobra special SWAT troops, etc.  The bleachers are sparsely populated by Bolivians with their union banners hanging off the upper steps.  The main people in the center of the field are a huge contingent of extremely vocal Argentinians from a group called Los Pibes (the kids), with bright blue banners waving in the early morning sunlight.  They created an incredibly festive atmosphere, chanting what sounded just like a football chant, but with some souped-up words: "Olé, Olé, Ola, Yo non so Yanqui e No Quiero Ser, Sono Con Chavez, Correa, e Fidel" (Olé, Olé, Ola, I'm not a Yanky and I don't Want to Be One, I'm with Chavez, Correa, and Fidel).  Their other chant with huge banners waving from bamboo flags was "Alerta, Alerta, Alerta Che Camina, La Espada De Bolivar por America Latina" (Watch Out, Watch Out, Watch Out, The Sword of Bolivar is Marching through Latin America).

 

There were two MCs of the affair: a man dressed in a western suit, who spoke in Spanish, and a woman dressed in traditional dress and speaking Quechua.  Things warmed up gradually with a procession of singers from different countries in Latin America; my favorite was an Argentinian singer who sang a song dedicated to Evo Morales called "The Woodpecker."  In between acts, the MCs talked about the many representatives present at the conference and the importance of protecting pache mama - Mother Earth.  When the music really heated up, the spectacle intensified - there was sometone dressed in what looked like a team mascot outfit as a 19^th century Bolivian military officer who was swing dancing in front to the crowd with a woman dressed in indigenous garb.

 

After a few performers sang, these presentations were interrupted by a procession of indigenous peoples from the Americas, who walked through the crowd surrounded by billowing clouds of incense.  They performed a ritual in front of the crowd to beg pache mama for forgiveness for our desecration of the planet.  There was a long incantation by an old Quechua man as he lit some sort of sacred fire.  Then a group of Machateros, dancers from the eastern part of Bolivia carrying machetes and wearing spectacular crowns of exotic bird feathers, began dancing in circles.

 

Next, a series of speakers appeared.  First up, significantly, was a Native American woman from Alaska.  She spoke about how her people had survived European genocide.  We continue to fight, she said, to protect mother earth.  The imperialists cannot sell what the creator has given us.  We must stop, she said, to cheers and chants, corporate interests from stealing pache mama.  We have a choice of two paths: the path of life or the path of extinction.

 

After her, a representative from the European parliament and the united Left in Europe spoke, bringing greetings and saying in unequivocal terms that those responsible for the failure of the Copenhagen conference on climate change are the rich countries of the global north.  We need to stop these countries and abolish the capitalist system, which victimizes the poor.  We from the European Left offer our solidarity with Bolivia.

 

A representative from Africa, who brought greetings from Friends of the Earth International, said that the people of Africa completely reject false market-based solutions.  Commodification of nature is not the way forward.  Similar comments from a man from India, who talked about the need to create a new planet.

 

These presentations concluded with a speech by a representative of La Via Campesina from Brazil.  She began by saying that we need to globalize the struggle.  We're here, she said, to change this capitalist system, not the climate.  This system is a system of death, it produces death.  We have to embrace life and another model of development.  We need agrarian reform and land redistribution, local agricultural systems, and food sovereignty.  In addition, we need to form alliances between governments like Bolivia's that are dedicated to protecting the earth.

 

The presentations closed with a brief speech by an envoi of the U.N.  The Argentinian comrades were not happy with this representative of the U.N., and began their "Olé" chant again.  She tried to keep going but eventually gave up and went away.

Photos are by Juan Antigua, one of my NY delegation comrades.

 

Many of the pronouncements and plans advanced during the Action Strategies Working Group on day one were important, perhaps even essential, but did not strike me as particular original.  The need for better networking and better education around climate change, the importance of building organizations on both a local and a transnational level, the crucial role of coordinated days of direct action around the world, the ongoing symbolic importance of global summits - these are all fairly familiar issues within the radical green movement (and, in fact, within the global justice movement in general).

 

What was more significant for me and I should imagine most other people was simply to be surrounded by so many activists from different walks of life.  Despite the growing importance of networked technologies, I think that people remain hugely influenced by face-to-face connections.  This morning I was woken up around 4am by a cacophony of dogs barking, cats mewling, and roosters crowing at the place where I'm staying for the conference.  I tried listening to the BBC to go back to sleep, and happened on a broadcast about the role of book fairs.  Seems that personal encounters of the type that unfold at the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs are essential, ironically, to the success of the written word.  The same thing, to a certain extent, seems to me to be true among environmental activists.  Simply feeling power in numbers is one thing.  Drawing on the wisdom of people from completely different places (in class, race, gender, as well as geographic terms) is even more important.  Just walking around the grounds of the university where the People's Conference on Climate Change is held was an incredible experience.  As one of my friends in the delegation, Byron Silva from Ecuador, pointed out, as recently as ten years ago, none of the bowler-hatted women and various other indigenous people who were ubiquitous in the university grounds and in the university lecture halls where the conference working groups were held would have been allowed onto the property.  They were seen as marginal to the political life of the nation.  What a massive transformation in Bolivia we are witnessing, then, as we participate in this conference.

 

In addition, the People's Conference on Climate Change is also the culmination of a decade of global organizing in forums such as the World Social Forum (which began in Porto Allegre, Brazil, in 2001).  Indeed, many of the forms of dialogue that this conference uses, such as the speak-out format of the working group I attended yesterday, draw on this history of non-hierarchical organizing.  I'll include more reflections on the forms of organizing I see unfolding as the conference continues.

 

It's also surely no coincidence that this conference is being held in Cochabamba, site of the water wars in 2000.  Here, popular movements mobilized to reject the privatization of municipal water supplies by multi-national corporations such as Bechtel.  The location of this conference in Cochabamba should help ensure that the voices and needs of the people of the global South are heard prominently.  Of course, this is precisely the opposite of what happened in the Copenhagen conference, where backroom deals between super-powers such as the US, EU, and China excluded the populations who are already being impacted most severely by climate change.

 

So, being at this conference is an immense privilege and an incredibly uplifting experience.  But of course that's not enough.  I tend to see social change in terms of a model of punctuated equilibrium, with grassroots organizing and popular discontent bubbling away mostly unseen until moments of revolutionary upheaval.  Previous social movements such as the abolition movement, the women's movement, anti-colonial nationalist movements, and the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. took decades to achieve their goals (and, one might even argue, they still are engaged in struggle for equal rights).  But the world simply does not have decades to deal with climate change.  The longer we dally and procrastinate, the worse the effects of climate chaos are likely to be. 

 

In addition, this is the mother of all crises, one that draws together all the threads of inequality and crisis that have characterized this planet over the previous three centuries or so of capitalist, imperialist development, expansion, and exploitation.  So thinking about and being active around issues of climate change means being engaged with all previous progressive social movements as well as staying attentive to the many different voices that are all too frequently silenced today.

Working groups started this morning.  As I said in my last post, we missed some of the discussions because of registration.  So, I'm picking up halfway through the day of discussions over Action Strategies to deal with the climate crisis.  This is one of the many working groups set up for the conference.  Here's the full list:

• 01. Structural causes
• 02. Harmony with Nature
• 03. Mother Earth Rights
• 04. Referendum
• 05. Climate Justice Tribunal
• 06. Climate Migrants
• 07. Indigenous Peoples
• 08. Climate Debt
• 09. Shared Vision
• 10. Kyoto Protocol
• 11. Adaptation
• 12. Financing
• 13. Technology Transfer
• 14. Forest
• 15. Dangers of Carbon Market
• 16. Action Strategies
• 17. Agriculture and food sovereignty

More details are available on the conference website.

Now, after that brief background info, let me get straight to what's unfolding in front of me in the conference.  Right now there's a line of people standing waiting to get access to the microphone in front of a standing room crowd.

Right now a woman is speaking about the need to organize ourselves.  Who can participate in this organization?  It doesn't have to be a hierarchical society.  We have to see how we can involve communities, non-governmental organizations, and also governmental groups.  We also need to define what are going to be our objectives.

Another woman from Via Campesina in Paraguay talking about need to begin protecting subsistence farming and the sovereignty of nurturing and family & women farmers.  This will then allow us to begin thinking about sustainable farming.  Subsistence farming is not the enemy.  We also need to protect small fisherfolk and artisans.  We as a country demand that all of the agro-industrial and food processing companies be brought down.  These are the models that have taken away the wealth of nature from its true owners, and are producing pollution and garbage.  We must have sustainable farming and we must prohibit all use of GMOs.  We reject industrial farming and fossil fuels.  We embrace millions of small producers from all around the world instead of industry.

Now a man from Cochabamba, who begins by saluting us all as companeros and companeras, is talking about the need to protect life from transgenics.  We have failed to create a global organization to support social movements supporting the environment.  We need to oblige governments to respect mother earth through legal means.

A woman says that we need to focus our efforts on three main axes: timely decision making and complete actions - which means that not all countries can be grouped together, because we've seen in forums like the Organization of American States that nations are often excluded; we need an organization that will link up the grassroots social movements - we have to create a network, not just on the web since so many don't have access; we also need a strong national organization.

Next up, a man talks about the problem of the autonomy movement within Bolivia and the need for unity.  So here we must say that it's not just capitalists who are responsible for global warming.  We're also responsible.  We see the effects all around us.  We need a proposal to cut global emissions, but we also need to behave differently.

 The moderator then intervenes to ask how we can make many of the issues concrete.

Next speaker is a man who belongs to a network of alternative systems of production in Cochabamba.  We do need to create an alternative network of communications.  But I also want to share with you how we were able to publicize human rights violations here in Cochabamba.  We began filming all abuse and disseminated videos to farmer communities, because citizens in general didn't know about this abuse.  This is an essential means to articulate the social movements.  We my proposal is that we create radio systems in communities and means to transmit audio-visual means of dissemination.  We need to establish a TV station called Coca-TV; what's the point of this?  It should be an open channel where people can walk in and say what they're thinking.  Bolivian law doesn't allow for community owned radio and TV.  How can we generate spaces that are open and get legal approval to have access to such media.

German guy from Climate Action Network talks about carrying out actions in Copenhagen.  But after the total failure of this summit, the global movements have to develop and show our power to change the world from below.  We can't wait for elites to have another world summit.  So we want to propose a global day of direct action for Oct. 12, 2010.  We believe that in order to save earth, we have to start breaking the 'normal' rules, close industries and mines, interrupt the craziness of industrial agriculture, disrupt the insanity of carbon trading.  We're carrying out a workshop to help build this day of action.  Take action and break the rules of normality to reclaim our power!

Next up is a member of our New York delegation, Taleigh, who talks about being part of the delegation representing poor and struggling people from NYC, an alliance of people fighting for social justice.  People are starting to challenge the lies of the government and the press.  My proposal is that this idea of a network would help create messages and links that would help people understand what's happening.  For example, the mainstream press covered Copenhagen in a way that suggested that Obama had gone there in order to save the planet.  People need to know what really happened there.  And we need to galvanize action around simple and popular ideas such as green jobs.  People will be able to see links between local and global awareness.  People of USA are with you.