International activists block Ilisu Dam construction site in Turkey

International activists block Ilisu Dam construction site in Turkey

By Amazon Watch

Today [May 21, 2013] representatives of dam-affected communities and organizations from South America, the Middle East, Europe, the US and Africa, including Brazilian indigenous leaders accompanied by Amazon Watch, blocked the entrance to the construction site of the Ilisu dam in southeast Turkey demanding an end to controversial development that would sink an ancient city dating back to the Bronze Age.

Some 20 people including Kayapó Chief Megaron Txucarramae, one of Brazil’s most noted indigenous leaders in the struggle against the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon, held up banners in English and Turkish reading ‘Rivers Unite, Dams Divide: Stop Ilisu and Belo Monte dams.’ Delegates from the International Rivers Conference held in Istanbul last Saturday joined local protestors to show solidarity with their struggle to stop the Ilisu dam on the Tigris River, Turkey’s last free-flowing river.

“The peace process cannot be completed without the cancellation of the controversial Ilisu dam project and the protection of Hasankeyf. At the same time, damming the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and stopping their flow reaching Syria and Iraq is a contradiction to Turkey’s ‘zero problems’ policy with its neighbors because the increasing water crisis in the Mesopotamian basin may lead to increased conflict,” said Dicle Tuba Kilic, Rivers Program Coordinator for Doga (BirdLife Turkey).

The Belo Monte dam in Brazil and the Ilisu dam in Turkey are two of the most controversial mega-dam projects in the world today. Both dams are located in cultural and natural hotspots, inflicting devastating consequences and displacing over 75,000 people in Amazonia and Mesopotamia. In addition, the Ilisu dam, located a few kilometers from the Iraqi border, will affect the livelihood of Marsh Arabs living in the newly restored Basra Marshes. Turkey controls the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria and Iraq.

“Our struggle to preserve the Xingu River from the Belo Monte dam is no different from the fight to protect the Tigris River from the Ilisu dam. We are unified in our positions to say ‘no’ to our governments. You cannot kill a river that sustains its people and culture,” said Kayapó Chief Megaron Txucarramae.

Legal and political controversies have surrounded the push to build the Belo Monte and Ilisu dams. No adequate Environmental Impact Assessment has been carried out for either dam, and both governments have failed to implement prior consultations and mitigation plans to protect the environment and rights of affected communities. Both dams proceed despite court rulings halting their construction and widespread national and international opposition to their development.

Faced by governments steamrolling human rights and environmental protections, dam-affected communities are uniting their struggle under the DAMOCRACY banner. DAMOCRACY includes 15 national and international organizations from all corners of the globe. Among them are Doga Dernegi, Amazon Watch, International Rivers, and RiverWatch.

Damocracy is produced by Doga Dernegi (BirdLife Turkey), in collaboration with other founding members of the Damocracy movement: Amazon Watch, International Rivers, RiverWatch, Gota D’água (Drop of Water) Movement, Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre (MXVPS).

To watch the documentary, visit: http;//www.youtube.com/DamocracyTV

From Amazon Watch: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2013/0521-international-activists-block-ilisu-dam-construction-site-in-turkey

Corporations in Indonesia grabbing and destroying indigenous forest land

By John Vidal / The Observer

Land conflicts between farmers and plantation owners, mining companies and developers have raged across Indonesia as local and multinational companies have been encouraged to seize and then deforest customary land – land owned by indigenous people and administered in accordance with their customs. More than 600 were recorded in 2011, with 22 deaths and hundreds of injuries. The true number is probably far greater, say watchdog groups.

The Indonesian national human rights commission reported more than 5,000 human rights violations last year, mostly linked to deforestation by corporations. “Deaths of farmers caused by the increase in agrarian conflicts all across Indonesia are increasing,” said Henry Sarigih, founder of the Indonesian Peasant Union, which has 700,000 members.

“The presence of palm oil plantations has spawned a new poverty and is triggering a crisis of landlessness and hunger. Human rights violations keep occurring around natural resources in the country and intimidation, forced evictions and torture are common,” said Sarigih. “There are thousands of cases that have not surfaced. Many remain hidden, especially by local authorities,” he says.

Communities complain that they are not warned, consulted or compensated when concessions are handed out and that they are left with no option but to give up their independence and work for minimal wages for the companies.

At fault are badly drafted laws, unclear regulations, corruption and heavy-handed security and paramilitary forces – all of which favour large business over the poor. Illegal land purchases and logging are mostly supported by police, armed forces and local government staff. Companies are even allowed to work with security forces.

Feelings run high when land is taken and livelihoods are wiped out by deforestation. In December 2011, 28 protesters from a logging concession area on Padang island in Sumatra sewed their mouths shut in front of the parliament building in Jakarta in a protest against having their land “grabbed” by a giant paper and pulp company.

Last year, three people were killed in a clash with security forces during a protest over gold prospectors in Bima on the island of Sumbawa. Farmers from Mesuji in Sumatra claimed that security forces murdered residents to evict them from their land.

Over 10m hectares (24.7m acres) of land has been given away and converted to plantations in the last 10 years, forcing thousands of communities to give up forest they have collectively used for generations. Politicians offer land to supporters and give permission to develop plantations with little thought for the human or ecological consequences. In addition, government attempts to move landless people from densely populated areas to less populous areas with “transmigration” policies have caused major conflicts with indigenous groups in provinces like Papua and Sulawesi.

“Who controls the land in Indonesia controls the politics. Corruption is massive around natural resources. We are seeing a new corporate colonialism. In the Suharto era you were sent to prison for talking about the government. Now you can be sent there for talking about corporations,” says Abetnego Tarigan, director of Friends of the Earth Indonesia in Jakarta.

Three of the group’s staff members, including its south Sumatra director, are in prison following protests at the involvement of the police and military in a land dispute involving a state-owned palm oil plantation firm. “The scale of the conflicts is growing. Every day new ones are reported. More and more police are now in the plantations. Government is trying to clamp down on mass protests,” said Tarigan.

“These developments are classed as ‘growth’ but what we are seeing is the collapse of communities of fisherfolk or farmers and increasing poverty. We are exchanging biodiversity for monocultures, local economies for global ones, small-scale producers are becoming labourers and community land is becoming corporate. This is the direction we are going.”

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/indonesia-new-corporate-colonialism

Kate Kiefer: Waking up to Peak Grief

Kate Kiefer: Waking up to Peak Grief

By Kate Kiefer

On a sunny spring day in the place now known as Death Valley, on land stolen from the Timbisha Shoshone, I sat on an irrigated green lawn and sobbed.  My tears would not stop, my weeping would not quiet – despite the silent demands of vacationing golfers in khaki shorts who stared me down with growling discomfort.  I was young, dirty, and making a scene, and I didn’t care.

It was March 20, 2003.  Missiles were striking Baghdad.

My traveling partners and I had spent three days hiking a canyon, a place we had slipped into as though in secret. It was the quietest place I’d ever been. Cradled within those cliff walls, I felt an inner peace I hadn’t known since childhood.  I watched evening primroses delicately bloom as I cooked dinner, saw the sunset paint the canyon walls with bands of saturated light.  We slept on the open ground at night, watching the tiny pipistrelle bats flutter out like butterflies each evening, eventually disappearing in an overwhelming backdrop of stars.

Then we emerged from the womb of the canyon to a world on fire.  We were driving to find water when we heard the news on the radio.  Stunned, we pulled over in what we soon realized was a resort.  Three grungy kids wavered out of the car to find a sparkling green golf course, with sprinklers blasting.  In the middle of the driest desert on the continent.  Overfed golfers zipped around in golf carts with expressions of boredom and American flag lapel pins perfectly in place. Hummers and SUVs idled in the morning heat.  Here we stood in a false oasis pumping water away from the mesquite trees that had fed generations of Timbisha Shoshone.  Everything shining and sparkling and stinking and sucking the lifeblood out of our rivers, our land, our mother, out of other nations we were enslaving or spattering with missiles.  A different sort of bomb went off in me, one that had lain dormant for far too long, and I stepped out of the car and collapsed into a flood of grief and anger.  I wept for hours.

This was over ten years ago now, and I can still remember the expressions of horrified confusion on the faces of the vacationers at the resort.  The way they tried to pretend I wasn’t there, avoiding walking past me, turning their heads in embarrassment.  And I am struck by this strange and awful fact – they were more upset by my honest expression of emotion than by our country’s initiation of an unjust war.

For most of my life I held the belief that many emotions were wrong and should not be felt at all, that some were ugly and should not be shown in public.  I was told to ‘think positive,’ to find the ‘good’ in every situation, and when I voiced my fears over the survival of our planet, like many of you I was criticized for my ‘negative thinking.’ At worst, I was told to seek professional help.  And like many of you, I believed that because I was female, I was ‘crazy’ by nature and that my ‘out-of-control’ feelings were disruptive.  Even as I became involved in activism, I felt that I had to navigate away from my emotional reality, to be stoic, strict, and steadfast – something impossible for me to attain.  As a child of patriarchal culture, I associated my emotion with weakness.

Like one in four women in America, I was advised to medicate myself away from my uncomfortable and powerful emotions.  I took antidepressants, anxiety medications, birth control pills, followed the direction of countless professionals who spent their days regulating young women into ‘manageable’ places.  Even so, I would sink into my feelings only to emerge with a embarrassment, feeling I had made a mess of things by not ‘keeping it together.’  In hindsight, I am startled that my utterly appropriate response to a great atrocity was considered pathological.

The day in the desert, I felt no shame for my tears, and nobody was trying to stop me.  I was ashamed for my country and for civilization itself, and I knew I had a right to feel.  I knew I must feel, if I were to call myself human.  But every day in these years since, I know I am still holding back, trying to keep my heart from tearing at the seams.  So many times I have let myself become numb.  I want to get through the day, do my work, feed my children…and yet the heaviness is always there, because the truth is still the same.

What I am coming to realize, though, is that we have to face the awful truth down to its marrow, we have to have our hearts pierced if we are to succeed – it is the first step in unbelieving the lies we have been told, and told ourselves, all our lives.  As Derrick Jensen has said, “For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”

“Like the layers of an onion,” he writes, “under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”

The truth is a doorway to grief and rage, but we must cross the threshold, because otherwise this planet won’t stand a fighting chance.  When I look into my heart, yes, the despair is there.  I know it seems bleak, I know there aren’t words within me to explain this to my tiny children.  I know we’ve all been had, and now we have to face the enormous task of undoing civilization as we know it, of giving up on the future as we’ve been told to expect it.  The losses our world is enduring are enormously painful and there will be more to come.

It is time, and long past time, that we allow our hearts to open, to break, over what is being done to our world.  We must acknowledge the depth of loss that is occurring around us, and with it must come the cascade of emotion.  This will be uncomfortable for most of us, as this culture has invested much in teaching us to harden ourselves, in keeping us from loving this planet enough to weep for it.  But it is time to feel without apology, and to let this spur us into action.  Once we experience this grief and fury, how can we walk away?

We can, as Terry Tempest Williams urges, start by “taking our anger and turning it into sacred rage. It is a personal and collective gesture of resistance and insistence.”

This movement calls us to face reality, the awful reality that the culture we live in is destroying our only home.  We remove the blindfold and face mass extinctions of species occurring each day, the genocides of indigenous peoples, the poisoning of our air and water and bodies, the rape of land by industrial agriculture.  We know this is real, it is happening around us, we have been complicit.  And we cannot let this truth send us ducking into mechanical numbness.  How can a movement to save our planet succeed if we cannot keep awake and alive the parts of us that passionately love rivers, mountains, bats and bison?

It is part of our cultural sickness to distract ourselves away from what we feel for our earth, both our deep love and bitter sorrow.  We have all done it.  I stand guilty as charged.  And so many are afraid to educate themselves about the ecocide in progress, simply because they are afraid of how the truth is going to make them feel.  But it is much worse to ignore the monster when it is right outside the window.

Lierre Keith has said, “Reality is an avalanche of grief right now. Maybe we could call it Peak Grief…But I’m asking each of you to take your heart out of cold storage. I know you put it there for safe keeping. I know. But there is no safety on a planet being murdered.”

The powers that be are very much invested in our emotional disconnection.  We are much less of a threat to them when our hearts are out of reach.  We live in a culture that not only makes us crazy, but hands out mind-dulling prescriptions and addictions for its own preservation.  It keeps us distracted, while reality slips past us.  As long as we stay numb, we feel no impetus to rise up.  In trusting ‘professionals’ instead of ourselves, we are held down.  In being embarrassed to feel and speak our feelings to each other, we are prevented from reaching out and joining together.

We must walk away from the cold comfort this culture has offered us, and wake up once again to our own hearts.  We can’t do this alone, not without deep connection to the earth and each other, not without the fullness of our spirits.  So as we lay siege upon the forces killing the planet, let us hold true to our love for all that is living, for this earth, for our friends and families.  May we never forget that our hearts are our strength.  Our grief gives us compassion.  Our love gives us courage. Our joy gives us spark.  Our anger gives us fire.  Our sorrow gives us empathy.  Our connection gives us commitment.  May we take up these strengths like reins, and for our earth’s sake, carry onward.

References

Support the Resistance Rewritten Tour!

Support the Resistance Rewritten Tour!

Most of us who hold radical political beliefs have likely felt isolated and alone at one point or another. This isolation is a powerful tool of oppression. When we are alone, we are powerless to share our experiences, powerless to reflect on them, and powerless to organize together to make concrete material change in the world.

Fighting back against this isolation and building strong communities of mutual support and resistance needs to be one of our top priorities as people who care about justice in the world. Change requires sacrifice, and sacrifice requires commitment. True community is one of the few ways to build that commitment, to one another and to the land.

It sometimes surprises me how many ordinary people understand the Earth- and community-destroying nature of the dominant culture. I really should stop being surprised – most people don’t have the language to describe and analyze the culture, but the knowledge is there, deep within us.

Capitalism, white supremacy, civilization, patriarchy – we understand in our bones, from when we are children, that this is a way of life built on crumbling foundations and supported by global violence and ruthless exploitation.

But it’s hard to take the next steps alone. It is hard to move from a place of understand to a place of action. That is why, since the beginning of the Deep Green Resistance movement in 2011, there have been several speaking tours across turtle island to promote the DGR strategy and analysis, support allies, and build communities of resistance.

In fall of 2011, the first Deep Green Resistance speaking tour traveled the west coast of Turtle Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkQ8kT_uzDY). Since then, other tours have made their way across the eastern seaboard, the midwest, and deep into Canada.

This summer, the latest in a long series of DGR speaking tours will be making it’s way across occupied native land known as ‘New England’. This tour will focus on sharing strategies and tactics for effective resistance – knowledge that can be used by anyone to gain more leverage in our movements for justice. We are asking your support to make this happen. We need funds to help the tour succeed and venues to host public events. We can’t do it without you.

You can donate to this tour at this link: http://www.gofundme.com/resistancerewritten

Thank you!

Residents shut down Alpha headquarters with support from Mountain Justice

Residents shut down Alpha headquarters with support from Mountain Justice

By Mountain Justice

Three residents of Central Appalachia and supporters with Mountain Justice chained themselves to an industrial tank of black water in front of Alpha Natural Resources’ Bristol, Va., headquarters to protest Alpha’s mountaintop removal strip mining and coal slurry operations across the region.

“I’m risking arrest today because mountaintop removal has to end now for the future viability of Appalachia,” says Emily Gillespie of Roanoke, Va., whose work with the Mountain Justice movement is inspired by Appalachian women’s history of non-violent resistance. The tank of water represents coal contamination from affected communities across the Appalachian region.

The group called for Alpha to stop seeking an expansion of the Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment in Raleigh County, W.Va. “We want Kevin Crutchfield, CEO of Alpha Natural Resources, to produce a signed document expressing that they won’t seek the expansion of the Brushy Fork Impoundment before we leave,” Junior Walk, 23, from the Brushy Fork area said.

“I live downstream from Alpha’s Brushy Fork coal slurry impoundment on Coal River. If that impoundment breaks, my whole family would be killed,” Walk said, “Even if it doesn’t, we’re still being poisoned by Alpha’s mining wastes everyday. I’m here to bring the reality of that destruction to the corporate authorities who are causing it, but who don’t have to suffer its consequences.”

More than 20 peer-reviewed studies since 2010 demonstrate a connection between mountaintop removal coal mining operations and increased cases of kidney, lung, and heart diseases, as well as increased birth defects and early mortality. The ACHE act, currently in sub committee in Washington, calls for a moratorium on new mountaintop removal operations until a definitive, non-partisan study can demonstrate the reason for these community health emergency levels of health impacts.

The impoundment at Brushy Fork holds back almost 5 billion gallons of toxic sludge and is considered the largest earthen dam in the Western hemisphere. Recently leaked records show that coal slurry impoundments in Appalachia failed 59 out of 73 total structural tests performed by the Office of Surface Mining. “Alpha is only profitable because they’re allowed to gamble with our lives—and we’re the ones who pay the cost of their negligence and toxic pollution,” Walk said.

Alpha has lost numerous lawsuits relating to pollution from mining wastes in recent years, but they continue to violate safety regulations and expand their hazardous operations.

After refusing to take responsibility for the massive floods caused by the King Coal Highway and their destructive mountaintop removal mining practices, Alpha continues to push forward similar projects, such as the controversial Coalfields Expressway in Virginia.

From Mountain Justice: http://mountainjustice.org/events.php?id=245

You can support the Mountain Justice legal fund here: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=rz2f3BpZzTXerYXJ2w8VcOfrYjnxsKfKZd8OHROTTFFg6xVKjvMCbhb8qh0&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d14f86393d55a810282b64afed84968ec