by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 8, 2016 | Human Supremacy, Strategy & Analysis
by Alex Jensen / Local Futures
In 2015, a major study of 24 indicators of human activity and environmental decline titled “The Great Acceleration” concluded that, “The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind”.[1] We have all seen aspects of these trends, but to look at the study’s 24 graphs together is to apprehend, at a glance, the totality of the monstrous scale and speed of modern economic activity. According to lead author W. Steffen, “It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force.”[2]
Every indicator of intensity and scale of economic activity — from global trade and investment to water and fertilizer use, from pollution of every sort to destruction of environments and biodiversity — has shot up, precipitously, beginning around 1950. The graphs for every such trend point skyward still.
The Great Acceleration is manifest everywhere, including many areas not covered in the study. It is impossible to directly, humanly appreciate the ghastly scale of change. Only statistics can do that. For example:
- Humans now extract and move more physical material than all natural processes combined. Global material extraction has grown by more than 90 percent over the past 30 years, reaching almost 70 billion tons today.[3]
- In this century “global economic output expanded roughly 20-fold, resulting in a jump in demand for different resources of anywhere between 600 and 2,000 percent”.[4]
- For more than 50 years, global production of plastic has continued to rise.[5] Today, around 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year. “About two thirds of this is for packaging; globally, this translates to 170 million tons of plastic largely created to be disposed of after one use.”[6]
- The global sale of packaged foods has jumped more than 90 percent over the last decade, with 2012 sales topping $2.2 trillion.[7]
- “In the last 50 years, a staggering 140 million hectares… has been taken over by four industrial crops: soya bean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane. These crops don’t feed people. They are grown to feed the agro-industrial complex.”[8]
Not only are the scale and speed of materials extraction, production, consumption and waste ballooning, but so too the scale and pace of the movement of materials through global trade. For instance, trade volumes in physical terms have increased by a factor of 2.5 over the past 30 years. In 2009, 2.3 billion tons of raw materials and products were traded around the globe.[9] Maritime traffic on the world’s oceans has increased four-fold over the past 20 years, causing more water, air and noise pollution on the open seas.[10]
While it may be correct, generically, to ascribe all these signs of the Great Acceleration to “humanity” or “human activity” as a whole, this ascription is also flawed. Indeed, the study concludes that the global economic system in particular has been a primary driver of the Great Acceleration. The graphs of economic activity (such as the amount of foreign direct investment or the number of McDonald’s restaurants) and environmental decline (such as biodiversity loss, forest loss, percentage of fisheries “fully exploited,” etc.) look identical from a distance — both shooting dizzyingly upward since 1950. The resemblance is not coincidental. The latter are a consequence of the former.
This expansion of global economic activity has been driven forward by the dynamics of capitalism and the pursuit of endless profits: by marketing and advertising; by subsidies and sops to industry of every stripe; and by the concomitant destruction of local, self-reliant communities around the world. In the process, much of “humanity” has been swept into the jetsam of the overall economic system. While this system may be the product of some human designs, to confuse it with humanity at large is to get the story backward.
One incontrovertible conclusion of all this, it seems to me, is that it is precisely the increasing scale of economic activity – of “the economy” – that is the heart of the multiple interlocking crises that beset societies and the earth today. The relentlessly expansionist logic of the system is inimical to life, to the world, even to genuine well-being. If we wish to instead honor, defend, and respect life and the world, we must upend that logic, and begin the urgent task of down-scaling economic activity and the system that drives it. We must embark upon the “Great Deceleration.”
Nevertheless, from every organ of the establishment, where the commercial mind reigns, we hear that the challenge before us is not deceleration, but making the great acceleration even greater by ramping up production and consumption still further. Even as governments expound solemnly on the need to arrest climate change and promote Sustainable Development Goals, they are handing over nearly boundless subsidies to industry, pushing for the expansion of global trade, and otherwise facilitating the acceleration of the acceleration.
Projections based on the assumption that the great acceleration will continue ad infinitum show, for example, that the number of cars will nearly double from 1.1 billion today, to 2 billion by 2040; that seaborne trade will increase from 54 to 286 trillion ton-miles; that global GDP will climb from $69 trillion to $164 trillion; and so on. As a news article reporting the projections declares, “If there’s a common theme, it’s that there’s going to be more of everything in the years ahead”.[11] By 2025, the output of solid waste is expected to grow 70 percent, from 3.5 to more than 6 million tons per day.[12] Leaving aside the actual feasibility of such growth – given biophysical limits that are already well-surpassed – the very fact that the political and economic establishment takes such growth for granted and will continue to pursue it heedlessly is cause for grave concern.
In India, chemical and physical pollution occasioned by the frenzied rush of industrial development has become so treacherous that it is deforming air and water into poisons to be avoided at the risk of health and life itself. Mephitic mountains of plastic waste choke every town and city, clog drains, suffocate rivers and shores, fill the stomachs of animals. Pesticides have killed soil and farmers alike across the country. Despite these and so many other manifestations of ecocide, industry and the government — central and state-level alike — clamor for more of it, faster. Because it is a ‘developing’ country, we are told, the average Indian vastly underconsumes plastic, energy, cars, et al. Cultural traditions of thrift and sharing, wherever they still hang on, are seen as nettlesome but surmountable barriers to keeping the growth machine growing, faster. Replacing each and every one of those traditional practices with packaged, often disposable, commodities is an explicit goal of industry. Relentlessly generating novel needs is another. The current government’s “Make In India” program, marketed to attract foreign investors and businesses, is the latest campaign to fuel this process.[13]
No matter how polluting, how much land and water are required, how many communities will be displaced and livelihoods destroyed, the formula is basically the same: more mines, more coal and power plants, more tourism. More and more of everything. For every industry, every product, every process that has swelled to become a planetary-scale abscess, the normal prescription that should obtain — “stop the swelling!” — is inverted. The out-of-control global economic system needs more and more growth just to feed and maintain itself.
In defense of this system one may hear some version of the refrain: “These are the unfortunate costs we must pay to alleviate poverty, improve human well-being, and provide enough for all.” This argument has become embarrassingly spurious. It is now widely known that not only has the great up-scaling bequeathed the planet and its inhabitants a legacy of destruction, ugliness, and waste, but its prodigious production and profit has failed to make a dent in the hunger and privation suffered by hundreds of millions. At the same time, it has unleashed a storm of junk food and diet-related diseases across the planet, which has persecuted the poor the worst. The menacing pollution attendant to the great acceleration also harms the poor the worst. It exacerbates poverty even as it churns the planet into money. Meanwhile, those most enriched in the process amount to a conference-room-sized group of individuals. The statistics will likely have grown even more outlandish by the time this is read: the world’s 62 richest people own as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity.[14]
This system of plunder and inequality has, unsurprisingly, left in its wake demoralized human souls. The great acceleration and loneliness, depression, anxiety and estrangement are two sides of the same sinister coin; paralyzed and tyrannized by a surfeit of superficial ‘choice’, by loss of meaning and connection, even the supposed beneficiaries of this system have been made miserable by it.[15]
So the increasing scale and speed of the economy is, for the vast majority, the enemy of prosperity. This fact offers some hope, for reducing the scale and speed of the economy provides the possibility of relief and reclamation of contentment for those afflicted by affluence, while at the same time providing not “growth” — which the poor have never and will never be able to eat — but the actual material needs that are being trampled beneath the very stampede of growth that is supposed to deliver those needs. The great up-scaling is a sybaritic saturnalia for an infinitesimally small and incomprehensibly moneyed elite. It is everyone else’s curse.
Downscaling the economy, therefore, is not only necessary to save and perhaps enable regeneration of our beleaguered earthly home; it is also a genuinely humane, anti-poverty agenda. This may sound counter-intuitive to those marinading in trickle-down theory.
Upsetting the great acceleration juggernaut will require innumerable, profound systemic shifts. Since the regnant system is not the consequence but rather the cause of consumerism, acquisitiveness, separation, alienation, etc., it will require first and foremost resistance to the forces that relentlessly propagate it — stopping corporate plunder of all sorts (from mines to minds); stopping and revoking neoliberal ‘free trade’ agreements; breaking up and dismantling corporate-state power and the legal frameworks that underpin it; and, challenging the fundamentalist logic of unlimited growth. It will simultaneously require the (re)construction of radical alternative systems, rooted in environmental ethics, ecological integrity, social justice, decentralization and deep democracy, beauty, simplicity, cooperation, sharing, slowness, and a constellation of related eco-social-ethical values.
But where will the motive to act either in resistance or in regeneration come from, if the values of commercialized growth societies — competition, individualism, narcissism, nihilism, avarice — are so deeply indoctrinated? How can the opposite values be resuscitated after decades or centuries of anesthetization and repression? The fact is that all over the world, there has always been and continues to be tremendous push-back against the system, along with nurturance of countless alternatives. This is testament not only to human resilience and common sense, but to the utter asynchrony of this system with the genuine well-being of people.
To acknowledge and celebrate this spirited and widespread push-back is not to be complacent or naïve about the terrifying hegemony and momentum of the great acceleration. It is, rather, precisely to disrupt the complacency and debilitation of “inevitablism.”
Thankfully, all over the world, vibrant movements of resistance-(re)construction both new and ancient are saying loudly, “we are ready to stop being trickled-down upon.” The Degrowth movement is assailing the status quo assumption of a cozy positive relationship between economic growth and well-being and even (weirdly) environmental “improvement.” Its many exponents and activists are broadcasting the reality of the obvious-to-all-but-economists inverse relationship between growth and well-being. Given that the economy today is vastly exceeding what the planet and its denizens can give and take, degrowth — as its name announces — promotes not merely slowing and stopping growth, but reversing it.
At centers like Can Decreix on the Mediterranean coast, the main argument of degrowth – that well-being improves and life becomes richer through sufficiency, commoning and technological-material downscaling – is practiced, demonstrated and shared. Human muscle and craft skill reclaim from machines simple, pleasurable subsistence work, done communally. Heat energy of the sun is used to bake bread and warm water. Music and fun become not something that must purchased on weekends, but part of the fabric of everyday. But it is not merely an escapist, “live your values while the world burns” sort of experiment; on the contrary, its members are deeply involved in the broader political struggles (e.g. against “free trade” treaties) that are a necessary corollary to living alternatively.
There are also many sister concepts and movements to degrowth, that, despite their differences, share some basic, fundamental values and perspectives. There is Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay emerging out of indigenous, eco-centric Andean cosmovisions, calling not for alternative development but alternatives to development, for affirmation and strengthening of traditional practices, knowledge systems, processes and relationships (human and non-human alike) that since time immemorial have embodied many of the qualities that movements (like degrowth) in industrialized locales are striving to re-create.[16]
On the Andean altiplano, most Aymara and Quechua farming families still nurture, process and eat a spectacular varietal diversity of tubers, grains, legumes and other foods. One farmer I stayed with near Lake Titicaca grew 109 varieties of potato, plus dozens more of oca, olluco, mashua, quinoa, edible lupine, fava, wheat, barley, maize, and much more. He and his family, like the majority of other farming families there, provide most of their own milk, cheese, meat and wool from livestock like cows, alpacas, goats and sheep. They live in houses fashioned from adobe bricks of local clay, roofed with local grass thatch. Their young children know dozens of wild medicinal plants. They do all this not as heroic, isolated survivalists, but in webs of community and earthly relationships of community, mutual aid, sharing and care. These communities have met their needs through local-regional economies – many based in barter – for centuries.[17] Are they thus perfect and free of all troubles? Of course not. But many of their worst troubles are imposed by capitalist industrialism and other forces of “progress.”
Perhaps the signal movement synthesizing resistance and (re)construction, ancient and contemporary, South and North, is the food sovereignty movement. This movement turns on its head 500 years of colonialist food policy, which would have everyone give up their food autonomy and diverse traditions and have peasants moved off the land into cities to become factory proletarians or, if remaining in the countryside, to become plantation proletarians exporting food calories, water and labor power – receiving in exchange paltry wages with which to shop for packaged “food-like stuff” in a global agribusiness supermarket. The movement inveighs against the political-economic forces that continue the war against peasants and subsistence economies, and demonstrates again and again the superiority (health, nutrition, productivity, ecological, social) of diverse, small, localized, cooperatively-worked, integrated polycultures of the sort that characterized food systems before the logic of the factory was imposed onto the land.[18]
These and many other movements are pointing the way back from the abyss into which the great acceleration has hurled us, directing us towards the Great Deceleration necessary to live again with affection and beauty on this earth.
This essay originally appeared in In Praise of Downscaling: 21st Century Conversations on How Small is Still Beautiful.
Photo credits: Indian trash heap: Juan del Rio; Andes grain winnowing: Alex Jensen.
Endnotes:
[1] Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., and Ludwig, C. (2015) ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, 16 January. http://anr.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/01/08/2053019614564785.abstract.
[2] http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2015-01-15-new-planetary-dashboard-shows-increasing-human-impact.html
[3] Giljum, S., Dittrich, M., Lieber, M., and Lutter, S. (2014) ‘Global Patterns of Material Flows and their Socio-Economic and Environmental Implications: A MFA Study on All Countries World-Wide from 1980 to 2009’, Resources 3, 319-339. www.mdpi.com/2079-9276/3/1/319/pdf.
[4] Dobbs, R., Oppenheim, J., Thompson, F., Brinkman, M., and Zornes, M. (2011) ‘Resource Revolution: Meeting the world’s energy, materials, food, and water needs’, McKinsey Global Institute.
[5] Worldwatch, 2015.
[6] Jowit, J. (2011) ‘Global hunger for plastic packaging leaves waste solution a long way off’, The Guardian, 29 December.http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/dec/29/plastic-packaging-waste-solution.
[7] Norris, J. (2013) ‘Make Them Eat Cake: How America is Exporting Its Obesity Epidemic’, Foreign Policy, 3 September. http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/09/03/make-them-eat-cake/.
[8] GRAIN (2014) ‘Hungry for Land: Small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland’, GRAIN 28 May. http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland
[9] Giljum, S. et al, op. cit.
[10] American Geophysical Union (2014) ‘Worldwide ship traffic up 300 percent since 1992’, ScienceDaily, 17 November. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141117130826.htm.
[11] Scutt, D. (2016) ‘This chart shows an insane forecast for worldwide growth of ships, cars, and people’, Business Insider Australia, 19 April.http://www.businessinsider.com.au/global-crude-oil-demand-emerging-markets-india-china-april-bernstein-2016-4.
[12] Hoornweg, D., and Bhada-Tata, P. (2012) ‘What a waste? A global review of solid waste management’, Urban development series knowledge papers; no. 15, Washington, DC: World Bank Group.http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/302341468126264791/What-a-waste-a-global-review-of-solid-waste-management.
[13] Make In India
[14] Oxfam (2016) ‘An economy for the 1%’, Oxfam Briefing Paper 210, 18 January.https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-en_0.pdf.
[15] Monbiot, G. (2013) ‘One Rolex Short of Contentment’, The Guardian, 10 December. http://www.monbiot.com/2013/12/09/one-rolex-short-of-contentment/.
[16] Gudynas, E. (2011) ‘Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow’, Development 54(4).http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasBuenVivirTomorrowDevelopment11.pdf.
[17] cf. Marti, N. and Pimbert, M. (2006) ‘Barter Markets: Sustaining people and nature in the Andes’, IIED. http://pubs.iied.org/14518IIED/, and Argumedo, A. and Pimbert, M. (2010) ‘Bypassing Globalization: Barter markets as a new indigenous economy in Peru’, Development 53(3). http://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fdev.2010.43.
[18] Fitzgerald, D. (2003) Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 1, 2016 | Colonialism & Conquest
Featured image: The Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, a large area on the Peru-Brazil border that is home to the largest concentration of uncontacted tribes in the world. © Survival International
By Survival International
A new “death road” advocated by a notorious Italian priest is set to cut in two the land of several uncontacted tribes in the heartland of the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier.
The road is expected to be approved by Peru’s congress soon, and will run through 270 km of the Amazon’s most biodiverse and sensitive protected areas.
The project has been supported for years by Father Miguel Piovesan, a Catholic priest who has described the local tribal peoples as “prehistoric,” and slammed international NGOs for raising concerns about the plan.
The road was rejected by Peru’s Congress in 2012. Despite this, work continued illegally for many years, and now the project has been proposed again by Congressman Carlos Tubino.
Fr. Miguel Piovesan, the main backer of the Purus road, alongside former President Ollanta Humala.
© Anon
Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. There are estimated to be around 15 uncontacted peoples in Peru, many of them in the region where the road will be built.
Survival International has lodged a complaint with the United Nations, citing the catastrophic impact on the uncontacted Indians and urging the Peruvian government to veto the plan.
Of the 3-4,000 people in the area, around 80% are indigenous. Most of them are opposed to the road.
Emilio Montes, president of the indigenous organization FECONAPU, which is based in Puerto Esperanza said: “We flatly reject this road. We indigenous people won’t benefit from it, only the loggers, miners, oil companies and narcotraffickers. It threatens the lives of our isolated relatives, like the Mashco Piro. It will destroy our animals and plants. They should, instead, respect our ancestral territories. We’ve always lived here, and our children must carry on doing so. We need another type of development which looks after our resources sustainably: so that we can live properly, and secure our future.”
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said: “If this road goes ahead, it will destroy the uncontacted tribes, and their “development” will be terminated for ever. Survival has fought roads in this part of Amazonia for decades. Who are they supposed to help? If Peru has any respect for fundamental human rights and the rule of law, it must stop these plans now.”
Uncontacted Mashco-Piro Indians on a riverbank near the Manú National Park. 2011.
© Jean-Paul Van Belle
Background
- The road will connect Puerto Esperanza to the Inter-Oceanic Highway, which runs through Peru and Brazil. The area is part of the Amazon Uncontacted Frontier, the region along the Peru-Brazil border with the highest concentration of uncontacted tribes in the world.
- Uncontacted peoples who could be wiped out if the road is built include the Mashco Piro, Chitonahua, Mastanahua and Sapanawa, who have all lived nomadically in the region for generations. Outsiders such as missionaries and loggers have forced several groups to make contact in recent years.
- Elsewhere in the Amazon, road “development” projects have allowed an influx of colonists to access remote areas and threaten the lives and lands of uncontacted peoples.
- Several indigenous organizations in Peru have made a statement rejecting the road.
- Fr. Piovesan has repeatedly denied the existence of uncontacted peoples. His parish newsletter stated that: “Isolation is not a natural wish. We can’t prove that isolated people exist. They are dreamt up by those who barely know indigenous people, or base their investigations on unproven theories.”
- Uncontacted Indians have clearly expressed their desire to remain uncontacted. The project cannot be carried out with their consent and will violate their right to determine their own futures.
We know very little about uncontacted tribes. But we do know there are more than a hundred around the world. And we know whole populations are being wiped out by genocidal violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.
Uncontacted tribes are not backward and primitive relics of a remote past. They are our contemporaries and a vitally important part of humankind’s diversity. Where their rights are respected, they continue to thrive.
All uncontacted tribal peoples face catastrophe unless their land is protected. Survival International are doing everything we can to secure their land for them, and to give them the chance to determine their own futures.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 30, 2016 | Male Violence
Featured image: Counting Dead Women project
by Karen Ingala Smith / openDemocracy
Across everything that divides societies, we share in common that men’s violence against women is normalised, tolerated, justified – and hidden in plain sight.
Since 25 November last year, at least 118 women and girls in the UK aged over 13 have been killed by men, or a man has been the primary suspect.
An average of one woman dead at the hands of a man every 3 days.
I’ve been recording women’s names and details of how they were killed since January 2012 when Counting Dead Women was launched.
Today we commemorate 653 women.
Men’s fatal violence against women in the UK crosses boundaries of class, race, nationality and age. Over the last year, the oldest woman killed was 85, 18 were over 60, and 21 were aged 25 and under. They included hairdressers, writers, shop assistants, prostituted women, a politician, lawyers, students and school girls; women born in Eritrea, Poland, China, Italy and other countries, and of course women born in the UK with a range of ethnic backgrounds. Most, but not all, were killed by current or former partners, others were killed by burglars, rapists, neighbours, brothers, sons, men they saw as friends or men who paid for sex.
Many think of intimate partner violence, or, more broadly, domestic violence, if they think about women killed by men at all. This focus is reflected and reinforced by official statistics. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes an annual report on violent crime, including homicide. For the year ending March 2015, the Home Office Homicide Index recorded 518 homicides. There were 186 female victims, 331 male victims, and one victim whose sex is unknown/undeclared.
The proportion of female victims was the highest recorded for 20 years. 19 men and 81 women were killed in circumstances described as partner/ex-partner homicides. 31 were killed by other family members (domestic/family violence).
But what about the remaining 74 women? Is it important to have a sex-specific analysis of their deaths?
51-year-old Majella Lynch died in hospital after the a removal of a 400ml shampoo bottle from her abdominal cavity. William Mousley QC, prosecuting, said “The bottle could not have been self-inserted because of the extreme pain such an act would have caused.” Mousley said her attacker, Daniel McBride, 43, an habitual user of hardcore pornography “had an interest in violent sexual activity and was in the mood for sex that night having had an argument with his girlfriend and being rejected by another female.” Yvette Hallsworth, 36, was selected by Mateusz Kosecki because she was “slightly built.” At 18 he was already a predator targeting women in prostitution. He had attacked at least three women who sold sex before he killed Yvette Hallsworth, stabbing her 18 times. Judge Michael Stokes QC described him has having a “fascination, if not an obsession” with prostituted women.
How can a feminist perspective of men’s violence against women disregard some women when patriarchal misogyny, violent sexualisation and objectification are so clear in their murders?
The prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) is globally uneven. Corradi and Stockl, 2014, looked at the relationship between men’s fatal violence against women, feminist activism and government policy in European countries since the 1970s. They found no clear link between rates of IPV and government policies, rather that feminist activism was a crucial catalyst of change – and was most effective when it was independent of government.
“Since the late 1960s, organized women’s activism played a fundamental role in rallying the state to tackle VAW.” (Corradi & Stockl, 2014: 605).
It is estimated that across the world around 66,000 women and girls are violently killed every year. Comparing country-by-country data is challenging, partly because there isn’t a cross-national approach to collecting and disaggregating murder statistics by the sex of both victim and killer, but globally women are at greater risk than men of intimate-partner homicides and are overwhelmingly killed by males. Across everything that divides societies, we share in common that men’s violence against women is normalised, tolerated, justified – and hidden in plain sight, and that there is a lack of truly proactive and deeply rooted state action to protect women’s right to life.
Of course it is essential to look at domestic and intimate partner violence, including homicide; but to focus only on this context not only obscures the full extent of men’s fatal violence against women, it also misses the sex differences within these crimes. In the UK, women are more than 7 times more likely to be killed by a man than men are by a women in the context of intimate partner homicide. Men are more likely than women to be killed by a same-sex partner, and histories of violence before the homicide are different – with men tending to have inflicted months or years of violence and abuse on the women they go on to kill, while women tend to have suffered months or years of violence and abuse from the man they go on to kill.
Responses to men’s violence against women which focus almost exclusively on “healthy relationships,” supporting victim-survivors and reforming the criminal justice system simply do not go far enough. Men’s violence against women is a cause and consequence of sex inequality between women and men. The objectification of women, the sex trade, socially constructed gender, unequal pay, unequal distribution of caring responsibility are all simultaneously symptomatic of structural inequality whilst maintaining a conducive context for men’s violence against women. Feminists know this and have been telling us for decades.
One of feminism’s important achievements is getting men’s violence against women into the mainstream and onto policy agendas. One of the threats to these achievements is that those with power take the concepts, and under the auspices of dealing with the problem shake some of the most basic elements of feminist understanding right out of them. State initiatives which are not nested within policies on equality between women and men will fail to reduce men’s violence against women. Failing to even name the agent – men’s use of violence – is failure at the first hurdle.
Working in partnership, Counting Dead Women and Women’s Aid Federation England, supported by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Deloitte, have developed The Femicide Census, a relativity database that allows data to be collated and disaggregated for analysis. It currently contains information regarding over 1000 women who were killed by men between 2009 and 2015. Our intention is to build a research resource than can be used as a tool to influence understanding and policy development. We’ll soon be releasing our first report. In September, our work was cited as an example of good practice in a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women.
Feminists have started Counting Dead Women or femicide count projects in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Counting Dead Aboriginal Women. There is feminist action against femicide on every continent, in countries including Argentina, Peru, Italy, Spain, India.
Women across the world are finding ways to protest the murders of our sisters.
By recording women’s names, and where possible their photographs, we want to create a reminder that women are not reducible to statistics.
653 women dead in the UK in 5 years at the hands of men cannot be 653 isolated incidents. Action is needed and action can be taken to reduce these killings.
Read more articles on openDemocracy in this year’s 16 Days: Activism Against Gender-Based Violence. Commissioning Editor: Liz Kelly
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 29, 2016 | Rape Culture, Repression at Home
by Robert Jensen
From a “critique” of my work on the latest Professor Watchlist, I learned that I’m a threat to my students for contending that we won’t end men’s violence against women “if we do not address the toxic notions about masculinity in patriarchy … rooted in control, conquest, aggression.”
That quote is the “evidence” that I am one of those college professors “who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to the watchlist’s mission statement.
This rather thin accusation appears to flow from my published work instead of an evaluation of my teaching, which confuses a teacher’s role in public with the classroom. So, I’ll help out the watchlist and describe how I address these issues at the University of Texas at Austin, where I’m finishing my 25th year of teaching. Readers can judge the threat level for themselves.
I just completed a unit on the feminist critique of the contemporary pornography industry in my course “Freedom: Philosophy, History, Law.” We began the semester with On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (I’ll assume the Professor Watchlist approves of that classic book), examining how various philosophers have conceptualized freedom. We then studied how the term has been defined and deployed politically throughout U.S. history, ending with questions about how living in a society saturated with sexually explicit material affects our understanding of freedom. I provided context about feminist intellectual and political projects of the past half-century, including the feminist critique of men’s violence and of mass media’s role in the sexual abuse and exploitation of women in a society based on institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy).
The revelations about Donald Trump’s sexual behavior during the campaign provided a “teachable moment” that I didn’t think should be ignored. I began that particular lecture, a week after the election, by emphasizing that my job was not to tell students how to act in the world but to help them understand the world in which they make choices.
Toward that goal, I pointed out that we have a president-elect who has bragged about being sexually aggressive and treating women like sexual objects, and that several women have testified about behavior that—depending on one’s evaluation of the evidence—could constitute sexual assault. Does is seem fair, I asked the class, to describe him as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.
Trump sometimes responded by contending that Bill Clinton was even worse. Citing someone else’s bad behavior to avoid accountability is a weak defense (most people learn that as children), and of course Trump wasn’t running against Bill, but we can learn from examining the claim.
As president, Bill Clinton abused his authority by having sex with a younger woman who was first an intern and then a junior employee. He settled a sexual harassment lawsuit out of court, and he has been accused of rape. Does it seem fair to describe Bill Clinton as a sexual predator? No one disagreed.
So, we live in a world in which a former president, a Democrat, has been a sexual predator, yet he continues to be treated as a respected statesman and philanthropist. Our next president, a Republican, was elected with the nearly universal understanding that he has been a sexual predator. How can we make sense of this? A feminist critique of toxic conceptions of masculinity and men’s sexual exploitation of women in patriarchy seems like a good place to start.
In that class, I spent considerable time reminding students that I didn’t expect them all to come to the same conclusions but that they all should consider relevant arguments in forming judgments. I repeated often my favorite phrase in teaching: “Reasonable people can disagree.” Student reactions to this unit of the class varied, but no one suggested that the feminist critique offered nothing of value in understanding our society.
Is presenting a feminist framework to analyze a violent and pornographic culture politicizing the classroom, as the watchlist implies? If that’s the case, then the decision not to present a feminist framework also politicizes the classroom, in a different direction. The question isn’t whether professors will make such choices—that’s inevitable, given the nature of university teaching—but how we defend our intellectual work (with evidence and reasoned argument, I hope) and how we present the material to students (encouraging critical reflection).
If the folks who compiled the watchlist had presented any evidence that I was teaching irresponsibly, I would take the challenge seriously. At least in my case, the watchlist didn’t. But rather than assign a failing grade, I’ll be charitable and give the project an incomplete, with an opportunity to turn in better work in the future.
Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, to be published in January by Spinifex Press. Other articles are online at http://robertwjensen.org/. He can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 25, 2016 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
by Survival International
A mining company in India has renewed its efforts to start mining on the sacred hills of the Dongria Kondh people, despite previous defeat in the Supreme Court, and determined opposition by the tribe.
The Dongria Kondh consider the Niyamgiri Hills to be sacred and have been dependent on and managed them for millennia. Despite this the Odisha Mining Corporation (OMC), which previously partnered with British-owned Vedanta Resources, is once again attempting to open a bauxite mine there.
In February this year, OMC sought permission from India’s Supreme court to re-run a ground breaking referendum, in which the Dongria tribe had resolutely rejected large-scale mining in their hills. This petition was thrown out by the Supreme Court in May.
India’s Business Standard reported recently that OMC is gearing up for yet another attempt to mine, after getting the go-ahead from the government of Odisha state.
Dongria leader Lodu Sikaka has said: ”We would rather sacrifice our lives for Mother Earth, we shall not let her down. Let the government, businessmen, and the company argue and repress us as much as they can, we are not going to leave Niyamgiri, our Mother Earth. Niyamgiri, Niyam Raja, is our god, our Mother Earth. We are her children.”
For tribal peoples like the Dongria, land is life. It fulfills all their material and spiritual needs. Land provides food, housing and clothing. It’s also the foundation of tribal peoples’ identity and sense of belonging.
The theft of tribal land destroys self-sufficient peoples and their diverse ways of life. It causes disease, destitution and suicide.
The Dongria’s rejection of mining at 12 village meetings in 2013, led the Indian government to refuse the necessary clearances to mining giant Vedanta Resources. This was viewed as a heroic David and Goliath victory over London-listed Vedanta and the state-run OMC.
Only the Dongria’s courageous defence of their sacred hills has stopped a mine which would have devastated the area: more evidence that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than anyone else. They are the best conservationists and guardians of the natural world. Protecting their territory is an effective barrier against deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 21, 2016 | Obstruction & Occupation, Repression at Home
by Indigenous Environmental Network
Cannon Ball – On November 20th at approximately 6PM CST over 100 Water Protectors from the Oceti Sakowin and Sacred Stone Camps mobilized to a nearby bridge to remove a barricade that was built by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department and the State of North Dakota. This barricade, built after law enforcement raided the 1851 treaty camp, not only restricts North Dakota residents from using the 1806 freely but also puts the community of Cannon Ball, the camps, and the Standing Rock Tribe at risk as emergency services are unable to use that highway.
Water Protectors used a semi-truck to remove two burnt military trucks from the road and were successful at removing one truck from the bridge before police began to attack Water Protectors with tear gas, water canons, mace, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
At 1:30am CST the Indigenous Rising Media team acquired an update from the Oceti Sakowin Medic team that nearly 200 people were injured, 12 people were hospitalized for head injuries, and one elder went into cardiac arrest at the front lines. At this time, law enforcement was still firing rubber bullets and the water cannon at Water Protectors. About 500 Water protectors gathered at the peak of the non-violent direct action.
The following is a statement from the Indigenous Environmental Network:
“The North Dakota law enforcement are cowards. Those who are hired to protect citizens attacked peaceful water protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures and targeted their weapons at people’s faces and heads.
“The Morton County Sheriff’s Department, the North Dakota State Patrol, and the Governor of North Dakota are committing crimes against humanity. They are accomplices with the Dakota Access Pipeline LLC and its parent company Energy Transfer Partners in a conspiracy to protect the corporation’s illegal activities.
“Anyone investing and bankrolling these companies are accomplices. If President Obama does nothing to stop this inhumane treatment of this country’s original inhabitants, he will become an accomplice. And there is no doubt that President Elect Donald Trump is already an accomplice as he is invested in DAPL”.
