by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 11, 2013 | Climate Change
By Associated Press
The world’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 percent in 2012 to a record high of 31.6 billion tons, even though the U.S. posted its lowest emissions since the mid-1990s, the International Energy Agency said Monday.
In its annual World Energy Outlook report, the Paris-based IEA said top carbon polluter China had the largest emissions growth last year, up 300 million tons, or 3.8 percent, from 2011. Still, the increase was among the lowest seen in a decade as China continues to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
U.S. emissions dropped 200 million tons, or 3.8 percent, in part due to a switch in power generation from coal to gas, while Europe’s emissions declined by 50 million tons, or 1.4 percent, the IEA said.
The agency said the energy sector accounts for about two-thirds of global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, which scientists say are fueling climate change.
Global climate talks are aimed at keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) compared with pre-industrial levels. The IEA found the world’s on track for an increase of 3.6-5.3 C (6.5-9.5 F).
“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.
Climate scientists have warned that the global temperature rise could have catastrophic consequences such as flooding of coastal cities and island nations, disruptions to agriculture and drinking water, and the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.
Read more from The Kansas City Star:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 10, 2013 | Defensive Violence, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Jorge Barrera / APTN
A Colombia guerilla group is trying to draw Ottawa into its battle with a Toronto-based mining company which is quietly trying to secure the release of one of its executives who has been held hostage since January.
The Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) kidnapped Gernot Wober, 47, on Jan. 18, during an attack on the Snow Mine camp in Bolivar state, which sits in the northern part of the country. The guerilla group kidnapped five other people, including three Colombians and two Peruvians, who have all since been released.
The guerilla group says that Wober, the vice-president of Toronto-based Braeval Mining Corp, won’t be released until the company gives up gold mining concessions in the San Lucas mountain range which the ELN claims were initially given to local miners who live in the area.
In a statement issued Wednesday and posted on the guerilla group’s website, the ELN took aim at the Canadian government.
“The Canadian government should at least be concerned about whether its anti-corruption laws are being followed by Canadian companies in their foreign operations,” said the ELN. “Neither the Colombian nor Canadian governments have bothered to investigate our accusations about the dispossession of four mining concessions held by communities in the southern part of Boliver (state) by the Northern American company Braeval Mining Corporation.”
The ELN claimed the Colombian government was increasing military operations against the group to secure Wober’s release.
The ELN is the smaller of Colombia’s main guerilla groups. It’s estimated the ELN has between 2,000 to 3,000 guerilla fighters.
A spokesperson for Braeval said the company has been advised not to comment on the kidnapping.
Foreign Affairs emailed a statement to APTN National News saying federal government “officials continue to work closely with our partners on the ground.” The statement said officials are also in contact with Wober’s family.
“The government of Canada will not comment on efforts to secure the hostage’s release,” said the statement. “Due to privacy considerations, we cannot provide additional information about the situation.”
The ELN has released no evidence to back its claims that Braeval wrongly obtained the mining concessions.
According to his on-line work history, Wober has extensive experience in the mining sector, including involvement in projects in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia and Manitoba.
The activities of foreign mining companies, including those based in Canada, have long been a point of contention among Indigenous and local communities in Colombia.
Under Canada’s free trade agreement with Colombia, Ottawa is required to present an annual report on human rights in Colombia every year. Last year’s report failed to report on human rights in the country.
The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (NIOC) has called on Canada to pressure the Colombian government to respect Indigenous rights in its mining laws.
In a recent interview with Maria Patricia Tobon Yagari, a lawyer with the NIOC said that mining companies present a bigger threat than the armed groups because the firms fuel the violence.
“The presence of these miners have reinforced (the violence) because they have benefited from it. By using private security they have forced these Indigenous groups and Colombian campesinos to resist and it has increased the violence in the territories,” said Tobon Yagari.
Tobon Yagari was scheduled to appear on Parliament Hill on May 22 but her visa was initially denied by Ottawa.
Tobon Yagari said foreign mining firms have put pressure on the Colombian government to pass mining laws tailored in the interest of development.
“Of course Canadian miners have a large interest in getting legislation in their favour,” she said. “That is what is happening without our mining code and our situation in Colombia.”
Many Indigenous communities in Colombia are clinging precariously on the edge of extinction.
Of the 102 documented Indigenous nations in Colombia, 32 have populations under 500, 18 have populations of 200, while 10 have less than 100.
Tens of thousands of Indigenous people have been displaced from their territories which are often rich in minerals and hydrocarbons eyed by foreign mining firms.
Amnesty International has said it’s concerned about deepening ties between Canada and Colombia’s military as a result of the free trade deal.
“And recent changes to export controls in Canada to allow for the sale of automatic firearms to Colombia,” have added to list of problematic issues, said the international human rights organization.
The situation of Indigenous peoples in Colombia is so dire that the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples James Anaya has called for the UN special advisor on genocide to visit Colombia.
From APTN
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 4, 2013 | Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
We’ll need a miracle to save the world, and the only miracle we’re going to get is us. Right now, we—as in life on this planet we—are losing. That nobody wants to say this out loud doesn’t change its truth: we are losing, and badly.
For all the tireless marching, writing, petitioning, film-making, and purification of our lifestyles, how much destruction has actually—in the real world, not just our hearts and minds—been stopped?
We are losing. No one wants to say this out loud. Every impassioned conversation, book, and documentary film seems to follow the same wishful script: things are bad—okay, things are really bad—and while that’s certainly not good, it doesn’t change the fact that we are actually winning, that our individual actions are making a difference, that hearts and minds are changing, that we’re on the cusp of a great turning, that sustainability is upon us. All this whether the greedy or ignorant like it or not.
With our hands up in the air, who will do the work to make sure this future turns to reality? It’s easy to be optimistic in the cradle of privilege. It’s easier to look out the window and see winds of change when that window isn’t found in a sweatshop or prison complex. Those who feel firsthand the destruction of life—of democracy, community, freedom, landbase, and bodily integrity—do not have this luxury; they cannot pretend justice is now, or will be, prevailing when every day is testament of the opposite.
Many on the Left would call this cynicism. They would say it reflects a negative attitude. They would say negative attitudes don’t get us anywhere. They fail to mention what will.
The first step to not losing is to admit that we are. Cynicism is defined as a “feeling of distrust.” We would all agree that it is distrustful of humanity to imagine that we can do nothing. But it is also distrustful of our own collective power to lie about our dire situation and stake the future of the planet on mere hope and prayer.
We are losing. Most of the world’s old-growth forests, prairies, and large ocean fish have been wiped out. Indigenous species—including human beings—are under perpetual assault. Every river in the world is contaminated with carcinogens. 27 million people live in slave conditions. One in four women are raped and less than 10 in 100 perpetrators spend even one night in jail. The richest 1% own more wealth than the poorest 95%. One in nine African-American men are incarcerated. Nearly half a million farmers in India have committed suicide after having their livelihoods destroyed by multinational corporations. Every moment, every hour, every day, every year, it all gets worse.
In giving up the fantasies of some inevitable paradigm shift and subsequent global salvation—however good the fantasies may make us feel—another option reveals itself: actually changing the world. There is no shortcut to the nitty-gritty work of organizing, mobilizing, and taking action. Those not blinded by privilege know this all too well.
Despite intricate visions of what is to come, the activists so quick to employ lullabies in the place of concrete action are in fact doing a great disservice to the struggle. For those actively engaged in challenging unjust power certainly need encouragement, yes, and certainly need the assurance of knowing a better world is on the other side, yes, but they do not need to be lied to and they do not need reality watered down. Calling this a disservice is an understatement. Activists betray the oppressed they claim to stand for by promising a future they won’t act to create. They are witnessing a crime—be it land theft, rape, white supremacy, gay-bashing, or ecocide—and doing precisely nothing, safe in the excuse of a sweet, imagined tomorrow. It doesn’t get much more cynical than that.
We are losing. Where is the evidence showing this is not the case? The world isn’t dying from a lack of righteous rhetoric or symbolic action; it’s dying from the largest campaign of exploitation staged by the most unholy of alliances between the richest 1%. More, it’s dying because we aren’t doing anything about it. Setting good and pure thoughts aside, we haven’t even really begun to do anything about it.
Admitting to the vastness of the odds we face does not imply giving up. On the contrary, it is a sobering reassurance that there is much work to be done. It is an obligation for each of us to act. As Lierre Keith puts it, “any institution built by humans can be taken apart by humans.” We may be losing, but this does not mean we can’t start fighting back; it doesn’t mean there aren’t those who already have. Indeed, it is the underprivileged that lack the naivety—and, indeed, the cynicism—about the possibility of social change who have been most courageously engaged in it.
Ours is not a happy story. But while scene after scene depicts ever more loss, the ending has not yet been written. This is not cause for guessing what will happen. This is cause for fighting like hell to make sure it includes a living planet.
Members of the dominant culture—including the most progressive and well-meaning of us—teeter between cynicism and blind hope. When we feel despair, it’s all we can do to desperately explain it away by conceding to our own powerless: the problems are too big, so we may as well give up. On the flip side, we see a glimmer of humanity beneath the haze of apathy and conclude a revolution is nigh. Neither impulse serves our struggle.
Right now, we are losing. We need to not be so cynical as to pretend this loss is inevitable and not so idealistic as to pretend that we can wish our way to victory. Change happens when we fight for it. To begin this fight, we’ll have to at least be honest about our predicament: those on the side of a just, sustainable world are losing to those who would destroy it. This means we need to try harder.
It took five centuries for the Irish independence movement to break the stranglehold of British colonial rule. Every generation passed down the struggle to the next one; they passed down a culture of resistance and the understanding that this fight is a long haul. Other resistance movements have shared the same courage and determination, struggling for years and years to taste justice, persisting even when all seemed lost.
We too often forget our own history. Far from five centuries, today’s activists can barely manage five minutes without gratifying results. Worst of all, these (non-)actions reflect their unfounded expectations and, when change invariably doesn’t show, they give up.
Denying reality because it’s hard. Promising results without any plan of action to see them through. These are the qualities of children, not a strategy for success. As Frederick Douglass so bravely said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men [and women] who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.”
The rest of the world beckons activists of privilege to see past our blinders, past our cynical apathy, and open our hearts to reality, however uncomfortable it may be. It’s time to say this out loud: we are losing. It’s time to make a promise and dedicate our lives to seeing it through: we will win.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
A Swedish translation of this article is available at: http://djupgron.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/berattigad-till-forlust/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 1, 2013 | Lobbying, Toxification
By Jonathan Fowlie, Scott Simpson and Jeff Lee / Vancouver Sun
The B.C. Liberal government has strongly rejected the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, stating in a formal submission to a National Energy Board review panel that the company has not properly addressed the province’s environmental concerns.
The province did not outright kill the proposed $6-billion oil pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast at Kitimat, but said Enbridge has left unanswered too many questions about its ability to protect marine or freshwater ecosystems in the event of a spill.
The proponents have “presented little evidence about how it will respond in the event of a spill,” the province wrote in its submission to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel.
“It is not clear from the evidence that (Northern Gateway) will in fact be able to respond effectively to spills either from the pipeline itself, or from tankers transporting diluted bitumen from the proposed Kitimat terminal.”
B.C. said Enbridge failed to explain how it would respond to a catastrophic spill.
“The project before (the Joint Review Panel) is not a typical pipeline. For example: the behaviour in water of the material to be transported is incompletely understood; the terrain the pipeline would cross is not only remote, it is in many places extremely difficult to access; the impact of spills into pristine river environments would be profound,” the province wrote.
“In these particular and unique circumstances, (Northern Gateway) should not be granted a certificate on the basis of a promise to do more study and planning once the certificate is granted. The standard in this particular case must be higher,” it added.
“‘Trust me’ is not good enough in this case.”
The rejection is a major hurdle for the multi-billion dollar pipeline project, and especially for its ability to gain approval from the Joint Review Panel.
“It simply is insufficient for us to think it should go forward,” provincial Environment Minister Terry Lake said in an interview on Friday.
“The company was unable to give us adequate detail about how they would respond to a spill in some of these (freshwater) locations,” he continued.
“There’s a lot of questions about the behaviour of this product in cold marine environments, and a recognition that more research needs to be done on whether this material would float or whether it would sink, because obviously that makes a difference in terms of any potential spill and how it would be dealt with.”
Lake said the province’s submission is not a death knell for the project, but does set a “high bar” for it to proceed.
“Until the National Energy Board is able to process all this and deliver a final verdict, we don’t want to conclude that this is absolutely a no,” he said. “But we’re just saying from what we’ve seen to date, it doesn’t meet the test.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 26, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
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
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 25, 2013 | Alienation & Mental Health, Colonialism & Conquest
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.
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