Mobilization for Climate Justice

Posts Tagged ‘abya yala’

cross-posted from Global Justice Ecology Project Climate Voices:
From Thirty Thousand Feet Above Mother Earth

by Jeff Conant

En route to Bolivia – that is, somewhere 30,000 feet above Mother Earth – I crossed paths with Alberto Saldamando, the legal council for the International Indian Treaty Council, and a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network delegation to the Cochabamba climate summit. As we stood in the aisle of the airplane, raising the hackles of the flight crew, I asked him his vision of the week ahead. Alberto is a friend, someone I’ve worked with in the past, so he may have been more candid with me than he might be in public; when I asked his opinion on the state of the climate negotiations and his hopes for Cochabamba, he said, “I’m pessimistic. You know, greed has no bounds.”
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December 21, 2009

April 22, 2010: International Day of Mother Earth

CHUQUISACA, Bolivia, December 20 — Bolivian President Evo Morales announced today that a world conference of social movements is to take place in Bolivia, as a response to the failure of the 15th Summit on Climate Change, recently held in Copenhagen.
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Vote for Mother Earth here

In view of the profound differences found between presidents and continents in the Copenhagen climate summit, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales proposes to conduct a referendum with the peoples of the world for an agreement that could save Mother Earth from the abuses of capitalism.

Because we have deep differences from president to president, lets ask the people and do what they say

Evo Morales Ayma President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia

Referendum here

From TomDispatch by Rebecca Solnit

We’ve just passed through a media celebration of the media’s own role in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, hilariously parodied on The Daily Show recently; and yet, to this day, few in our world grasp that, while walls were tumbling in the Soviet Empire two decades ago, they were also cracking in the American one.  Our “wall” finally began to crumble in the seasonally appropriate fall of 2008, when our economic system went over a cliff.  (You can watch a version of this, or at least a measure of the human pain it caused, via these mapped U.S. unemployment figures, month by month, from January 2004 to September 2009, knowing that the latest numbers are worse yet.) 

There were, of course, no celebrations, no cheering crowds, no cries of freedom then, and 20 years from now reporters will probably not be proudly or nostalgically recounting just where they were and what they were doing in that grim season when our “wall” fell.  Still, it is far clearer today that the Cold War, that decades-long nuclear stand-off between two mighty imperial powers and their minions, militaries, and assorted spooks, had no winner, only losers.  The other loser of the Cold War, so much stronger than the Soviet Union, remains, as in Afghanistan, intensely reluctant to leave the superpower stage.  Nonetheless, you only have to note the anxiety in this country over Obama’s “bow” in Japan or the anxious, critical reporting of his trip to China to see the intensity of the conflict here between denial of, and acknowledgement of, a new American reality in the world.

TomDispatch regular and author of the remarkable A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit is both an early warning system for, and a chronicler of, the sort of change that goes astonishingly unnoticed until it suddenly startles everyone.  Looking forward to the 192-nation Copenhagen climate change conference, due to open on December 7^th, where possibilities seem to be receding, even as global warming speeds up, and back at the unexpected upheavals of the last two decades, she offers a typically surprising view of our world and its possibilities.  (Keep in mind, by the way, that while Congress may be dragging its feet on global warming action, the U.S. Navy is already deep into preparations for an “ice-free Arctic” and the conflicts that might arise as soon as ships can float on those increasingly ice-packless waters.)  Tom    

Learning How to Count to 350
Remembering People Power in Seattle in 1999 and Berlin in 1989
By Rebecca Solnit

Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather.  Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit.  There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first.  Activists — farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers — around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.

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from Rising Tide Abya Yala Norte October 27, 2009

Some three hundred indigenous people from the Peruvian Amazon region of Madre de Dios are on their way to the town of Salvacion to evict the Texas-based company Hunt Oil from their ancestral territory.

According to reports on mongabay.com, hundreds of Peruvian police officers are waiting in the town for their arrival.

Last month, Indigenous leaders from the Madre de Dios issued a formal statement rejecting Hunt Oil’s presence in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve—a legally protected biodiversity ‘hot spot’ which the government handed over to the company in 2006. The leaders warned Hunt Oil to voluntarily exit the territory within a week or they would be forced out.

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LA Victory: Community stops power plant

A Victory For LA’s Air And A Victory for the Planet!
Communities for a Better Environment

Move over Al Gore, make room for some new environmental leaders – working class Latina mothers and high school youth from South East Los Angeles!

After 3 years of organizing, mobilizing, advocacy and lawsuits, CBE members in Southeast Los Angeles stopped a 943 megawatt fossil fuel power plant that would have emitted over 1.7 million pounds of toxic pollution per year as well as 2.8 million tons of greenhouse gases.

The strength of this exciting grassroots effort compelled the City of Vernon to withdraw their application for the power plant on September 28th, 2009. The was a life-and-death struggle since the power plant emissions could have caused as many as one dozen deaths every year. Since these facilities usually operate for fity years, literally hundreds of lives have been saved.

This was not only a local victory. By preventing the emission of more than 200 million tons of greenhouse gasses, the mujeres and youth made a major contrubution to the flight against global warming. They have also created a community empowerment model for teh other 22 California communities facing a similar threat of fossil fuel power plants.

In the immortal words of Cesar Chavez: Si Se Puede!

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
Climate Justice Chicago
How green is Chicago?

This is important; read it aloud!
from IV Cumbre Continental de los Pueblos Indgenas del Abya Yala

October 12-16, 2009 Global Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and Her Peoples!

Gathered at the Main Paqarina of the Mama Qota Titijaja Lake, Lake of the Grey Stone Puma, 6500 delegates from organizations representing the Indigenous Peoples from the 22 countries of Abya Yala along with our relatives of peoples of Africa, United States, Canada, the Polar Circle and other parts of the world, with the participation of 500 observers from various social movements, we resolve:
To proclaim that we are witness to a deep crisis of Western capitalist civilization that superimposes upon itself to encompass the environmental, energy and cultural dimensions, the policies of social exclusion and even famines, and that as an expression of the failure of Euro-centrism and a colonialist definition of modernity that was born from ethnocide is now carrying the whole of humanity to slaughter.

To offer an alternative of life to the civilization of death, regenerating our roots as Peoples of the Earth in order to project ourselves to our future, guided by our principles and practices of equilibrium between men and women, Mother Earth and spirituality, cultures and peoples, all of which we call Good Living / Living Well. We are a diversity of thousands of civilizations with over 40 thousand years of history, which were invaded and colonized by those who, just five centuries later, are leading us now to a planetary suicide. We are called to defend our food sovereignty by giving priority to native crops, domestic consumption and communitarian economies. Our mandate is to empower our organizations so that they can improve our strategies for Living Well, and to exercise these strategies through our community governments.
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A good article from RAN that reinforces the message of the Minga (traditional indigenous collective communal organization) of the Global Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and Her Peoples against the commercialization of life.
from The Mama Quta Titijaja Declaration: IV Continental Indigenous Summit Abya Yala:

We shall reconstitute our ancestral territories as a source of our identity, our spirituality, history and our future. We the Indigenous Peoples and our territories are a single complementary entity. We reject all forms of land division, privatization, concession, predation and pollution from extractive industries. We demand the Free, Prior and Informed Consent, in public and in our own languages, conducted in good faith, and through representative organizations of our peoples, not only regarding specific projects but also development policy and plans. We demand the decriminalization of the coca leaf

The article:Indigenous peoples as the most effective protectors of rainforests
by David Gilbert

Global “Minga”/Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and the People
More than 20, 000 indigenous climate justice activists and their supporters march to Cali, Colombia

With the entry of the Minga of Social and Community Resistance, from the departments of Cauca, Narino, Choco, Antioquia, Valle, Risaralda and Caldas, among others, on October 13 begins the Pre-Congress of Peoples, whose schedule has confirmed the participation of over 20 thousand people. Walk the floor Also thousands of students and social activists who join this celebration of Life, for the Liberation of Mother Earth and against global warming.

original article
more gooffle translation:

video from indymedia colombia

one blog : reporting in English on giant march and organizing on huge scale

this is re-posted from Intercontinental Cry

October 12, 2009 (the 517th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Western Hemisphere) is the first day of the Global “Minga”/Mobilization in Defense of Mother Earth and the Peoples, called by the IV Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples Abya Yala. Rallies, protests and other actions are being carried out around the world in response to the call, including:

Labrador, Canada: Inuu elder and activist Elizabeth Penashue launched a week-long walk along the Mitsa-Shipu (Churchill River) from Happy Valley-Goose Bay to Gull Island, in opposition to the proposed Lower Churchill Hydro Project. If built, the two dams would cause vast environmental devastation and irreparable loss of Innu land, history and culture.

USA: The Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) is holding a weeklong mobilization against the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements (NAFTA/CAFTA) and against gold mining in El Salvador. Events are planned for Seattle, Olympia, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Washington (DC), Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Find out more information here.

London, England: Protests were held at the Colombian, Peruvian and Spanish embassies, the UK Foreign Office and the Department for Energy and Climate change, demanding and end to EU-Latin America free trade agreements and an end to UK agrofuel subsidies.

Melbourne, Australia: A Latin American Solidarity Network space was launched at Trades Hall. A documentary film night will be held October 15.

Colombia: More than 25,000 indigenous People have begun to March to the city of Cali to protest for respect for their territory and against the harmful social policies maintained by the Uribe government. The protesters are expecting to arrive on October 16. 115 indigenous councils have ceased ongoing dialogues with the Government For the occasion. (For updates, keep an eye on:www.cric-colombia.org, www.onic.org.co). Approximately 2000 Uwa have also begun an “armed strike” in opposition to Ecopetrol, who has been exploiting natural resources from their ancestral sanctuary for the past 13 years.

Paris, France: Social groups have organized a week of solidarity actions for the Minga, including public debates, forums, a one-day festival, and protest rallies in support of Indigenous Peoples.

Call for action against Transnationals.

Argentina: A Global Week of Action against Debt and International Finance Institutions (IFI’s) is running in conjunction with the Minga. Opposing the new agreement between the Government and the International Monetary Fund, participants will be rallying for climate justice (October 13), rural women and the repudiation of debt (15 October), food sovereignty (16 October) and the eradication of poverty (October 17). A memorial was also held on October 11, honoring the martyrs of resistance.

Cuba: A one day event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Cry of the Excluded was held in Havana.

Bolivia: The First hearing of the International Court of Climate Justice will be running at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, from October 13 to 17. The event will be transmitted LIVE on the internet. An Assembly of Social Movements will also be held in Cochabamba on the 15th, immediately followed by a Regional Meeting Against Climate Change.

Peru: Delegations from around the country marched to the headquarters of the UN in Lima on October 12, to present a series of demands and proposals by indigenous peoples to stop global warming. This will be followed by 3 days of workshops led by indigenous communities.

Other events, including festivals, workshops, protests, Ceremonies and other actions are taking place in Spain, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, and elsewhere.

Via Campesina has also called for an International Day of Action Against Multinational Corporations for the final day of the Minga: October 16, 2009.

Defenders of the Land, a cross-Canada network of First Nations in land struggle, is also putting together a week of educational events on Indigenous Rights and struggles, from October 25-31, 2009.

Credits to Rootforce for compiling the initial list of actions. For more updates on the Minga, be sure to keep an eye on http://www.movimientos.org/defensamadretierra/