Open veins

Cancun agreement stripped bare by Bolivia's dissent

2010-12-23T16:17:34-08:00

This analysis was published in several places: TNI, Links Journal and Red Pepper

In the famous Hans Christian Anderson fable, The Emperor's New Clothes, a weaver famously plays on an emperor's arrogance and persuades him to wear a non-existent suit with the argument that it is only invisible to the 'hopelessly stupid.' The moment of truth comes, as we can all remember, when a child in an otherwise silent crowd yells out, “But he is not wearing any clothes!” What we don't always recall is that the naked Emperor suspects the child may be telling the truth, but carries on marching proudly and unclothed regardless.

The story is a rather apt parallel for the Cancun climate agreements that were signed last week. Only one dissenting nation, Bolivia, dared to voice its dissent with the agreement. Yet their voice was silenced by the gavel of the Chair and by the standing ovations of 191 countries. They, like the Emperor, must know that the deal is naked and without substance, yet they march on proudly regardless.

Cancun sets us on dangerous path to runaway climate change

Bolivia's indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any 'clothes' was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The troubling reality, as he pointed out, is that the agreement merely confirms the completely inadequate voluntary pledges of reductions of 13-16% by 2020 made since Copenhagen's talks.

Analysts at Climate Action Tracker [3] have revealed that these paltry offers are nowhere near enough to keep temperature increases even within the contested goal of 2 degrees. Instead they would lead to increases in temperature of between 3 and 4 degrees, a level considered by scientists as highly dangerous [4] for the vast majority of the planet. Solon said, “I can not in all in consciousness sign such as a document as millions of people will die as a result.”

To a stony silence from fellow country negotiators, Solon also pointed out a whole range of critical flaws in the agreement from its complete lack of specifics on key issues of finance to its systematic exclusion of voices from developing countries. As a press statement from Bolivia [5] put it: “Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.” Solon concluded that in substance the Cancun text was little more than a rehashed version of the Copenhagen Accord, that had been widely condemned the year before.

Mexican Environment Minister Patricia Espinosa, chair of the talks, refused to open up any points of her draft text for negotiation and cheered on by other delegates made the legally dubious ruling that Bolivia's opposition did not block consensus. The Cancun agreements were 'approved' to great celebration from the international community.

Cancun mood-music sways opinion

It became clear soon after the plenary ended, that what seemed like roars of support for the Cancun text, were more cries of relief or desperation. After the debacle in Copenhagen and following a probably deliberate policy by major powers who spoke constantly of ‘low expectations' [6], the mere existence of an agreement seemed enough. As Chris Huhne, UK climate secretary put it, “This is way better than what we were expecting only a few weeks ago.” The mood seemed to infect the larger non-governmental organisations who were gathered in Cancun. Greenpeace that had labelled the almost identical Copenhagen Accord last year a “crime scene [7]” said that Cancun had put “hope over fear [8] and put the building blocks back in place for a global deal to combat climate change.” Oxfam echoed [9] them, saying that “negotiators have resuscitated the UN talks and put them on a road to recovery.”

In the aftermath of Cancun, the main defence of the text has been based on appeals to realism. As Tom Athanasiou of Eco Equity puts it in his analysis [10] on the Accord: “The reason that so many people are celebrating the Agreements is because they believe that, setting aside the details, they capture the only agreement that was possible.” Many environmentalists argue that at least with this accord and a reinvigorated belief in the UN, we live to fight another day. Meanwhile they warn that a collapse of negotiations in Cancun would perhaps have for ever destroyed the UN process and even the possibility of any future binding agreement on climate change. Nearly all use one of the favourite mantras of the negotiations, saying that critics should “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Realism of science, or realism of the powerful?

However this argument supposes two things: firstly that progress, even if small, was made at Cancun and secondly that it is better to have some kind of agreement than none at all. This reasoning along with both the financial offers, cajoling and bullying of the major powers – which was revealed most dramatically in wikileaks cables [11] – is no doubt what drove most government negotiators to sign the Cancun texts. Yet both suppositions are highly questionable.

First in terms of analysing progress, aside from the many other critiques of the texts, there is strong evidence that the Cancun agreements take us backwards rather than forwards. One of the key characteristics of the otherwise wholly insufficient Kyoto Protocol is that it had legally binding targets based in theory on the science. As we come up to the first deadline of 2012, seventeen nations will almost certainly breach [12] their commitments to reduce emissions by 2020 by 5% compared to 1990. Some nations like Canada, Australia, Turkey and Spain have instead vastly increased emissions. However the fact that they signed legally binding targets does open up the possibilities of legal challenges and a more effective incentive in future for countries to abide by their commitments.

By contrast, the Cancun agreement effectively kills off the Kyoto Protocol and replaces it with a pledge system of voluntary commitments. Not only does this lead to countries only offering what they plan to do anyway, ignoring what science demands; there is absolutely no possibility of legal penalties if a country fails to fulfil its commitments. It is an ineffective and highly dangerous way of tackling one of the biggest crises humanity has faced.

Will good be the enemy of the necessary?

The second questionable supposition is that any agreement is better than no agreement. This may be true for some international discussions on less critical issues, but is it for discussing a climate crisis where urgent and radical action is the only way to avert runaway climate change? As even supporters of the Cancun agreement note, the text has mainly punted off most difficult decisions to the next meeting of the UNFCC in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. It already seems likely that we will see a repeat of the hype built up around Copenhagen and the equal likelihood of either a fudge or a failure – particularly if delegates can seem so easily sated by a few symbolic gestures such as the ones in Cancun.

Meanwhile the window of opportunity to act is closing. One report by the London School of Economics [13] suggested that greenhouse gas emissions will have to peak by 2015 to have even a 50 per cent probability of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees – the demand made by over 100 developing nations. The Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change similarly identified 2015 [14] as a time when emissions will have to peak to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at levels of 350 to 400 Parts Per Million. Yet in the face of this, the best the world community can come up with is an agreement to continue negotiating? And we are happy to call that a success? [As a side note, it can only be seen as deeply cynical that industrialised countries in Cancun agreed on 2015 as the date to review whether the global target should be 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees given that any action after that will almost certainly be too late].

The truth is that Cancun revealed a shocking failure by the world's nations - and particularly those most responsible for causing climate change - to find a collective and effective response to a crisis that will affect the most vulnerable. A report by the Climate Vulnerable Forum [15], in December 2010 noted that already 350,000 people die from natural disasters related to climate change and that this figure is likely to rise to one million people every year if we don't radically change course. Bolivia was not an obstacle to progress, it was rather the only nation daring enough to tell the truth. Rather than less Bolivias, we need more willing to stand up and say that the agreement was 'naked' and unacceptable. Perhaps if more nations – especially major emerging economies like India and Brazil - had said they would not accept an illusory deal, it could have shocked the world into moving beyond cautious approaches and acting radically for humanity and the planet.

Only mass mobilisation can shift power balance

The needed shift in thinking and action, though, will only happen if we mobilise and on a scale that has never been done before. Bolivia's bravery came to a large degree from the mandate it received at the World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change held in Cochabamba in April 2010, and the support it felt from people on the streets just a few blocks from the negotiating halls. There thousands of indigenous people, smallholder farmers and grassroots activists marching on the streets were unequivocal in condemning the Cancun agreements and in supporting Bolivia. They already see the costs of climate change and were not prepared to be bought off with a deal that did nothing to safeguard their future. They were backed by climate justice networks worldwide.

Yet the isolation of Bolivia in the conference plenary shows that this movement faces a huge challenge in the coming year to scale up. As Bill McKibben, founder of the global campaign 350.org, argues we need to “build a movement strong enough to take on the most profitable and powerful enterprise that the human civilization has ever seen—the fossil fuel industry” and we need to do it urgently before it is too late.

Cancun text: A backwards step

    * Document effectively kills of the only binding agreement, Kyoto Protocol, in favour of a completely inadequate bottom-up voluntary approach
    * Increases loopholes and flexibilities that allow developed countries to avoid action, via an expansion of offsets and continued existence of ‘surplus allowances’ of carbon after 2012 by countries like Ukraine and Russia which effectively cancel out any other reductions.
    * Finance Commitments weakened: commitment to “provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries have been diluted to talking more vaguely about “mobilising [resources] jointly”, with expectation that this will mainly be provided by carbon markets
    * The World Bank is made trustee of the new Green Climate Fund, which has been strongly opposed by many civil society groups due to the undemocratic makeup of the Bank and its poor environmental record
    * No discussion of Intellectual Property rights, repeatedly raised by many countries, as current rules obstruct transfer of key climate-related technologies to developing countries
    * Constant assumption in favour of market mechanisms to resolve climate change even though this perspective is not shared by a number of countries, particularly in Latin America
    * Green light given for the controversial REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme which often ends up perversely rewarding those responsible for deforestation, while dispossessing indigenous and forest dwellers of their land
    * Systematic exclusion of proposals that came from the historic World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change including proposals for a Climate Justice Tribunal, full recognition of indigenous rights, and rights for nature

[3] [http://www.climateactiontracker.org/briefing_paper_cancun.pdf
[4] http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934.toc
[5] http://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/bolivia-decries-adoption-of-copenhagen-accord-ii-without-consensus/
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/30/cancun-climate-talks-pablo-salon
[7] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/releases/commenting-on-the-latest-devel/
[8] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/press/Cancun-builds-momentum-much-more-work-to-be-done-to-save-the-climate--Greenpeace--/
[9] http://www.oxfam.org.uk/applications/blogs/pressoffice/2010/12/13/cancun-climate-change-talks-oxfam-says-were-off-life-support-with-hope-for-the-future/?newsblog
[10] http://www.ecoequity.org/2010/12/cancun-success-compared-to-what/
[11] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-us-manipulated-climate-accord
[12] http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2010/sbi/eng/18.pdf
[13] http://www.cccep.ac.uk/Publications/Policy/Policy-docs/bowen-Ranger_MitigatingClimateChange_Dec09.pdf
[14] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/main.html
[15] http://daraint.org/climate-vulnerability-monitor/climate-vulnerability-monitor-2010/

Could granting rights to nature change the climate debate?

2010-12-23T15:24:09-08:00

This joint article with South African environmental lawyer, Cormac Cullinan, was published on TNI.

Psychology has become a fashionable tool in the climate world to try and understand the levels of climate denial exhibited most vocally by the rowdy cohort of climate naysayers. With the conclusion of climate talks in Cancun, a more relevant question seems to be whether our climate negotiators suffer from an even worse form of denial – one that accepts the climate science but knowingly signs agreements that do nothing to stop our rush towards runaway climate change.

That certainly seems to be the conclusion if you followed the UN climate negotiations in the first two weeks of December. For 11 days, there were no shortage of powerful speeches by all countries, warning starkly that nature would not compromise and that entire peoples were at risk from inaction. Yet on the final night of negotiations, the same figures were leading standing ovations and gushing with praise for an agreement that includes no new commitments for emission reductions and no new financing for adapting to climate change. As the the Bolivian government, the sole dissenter, noted this was a very “hollow and false victory.” [3]

Climate change is not the core problem

This jarring disconnect between knowledge and actions looms even larger when you consider that UN climate negotiators are only talking about the very limited goal of reducing emissions of carbon in the atmosphere. They are ignoring the big picture that climate change is only one of many interrelated and converging crises (including soaring extinction rates, and the depletion of freshwater, fish stocks, forests and arable land). These issues are all symptoms of the same problem – contemporary human civilization is living well beyond the ecological capacity of the planet that is our home.

The reason why few are willing to look at the big picture is that admitting to this collision course between humanity and nature opens up a conversation that most of the world’s governments and corporations are desperate to avoid. They prefer to focus on greenhouse gas emissions, because it narrows the response to debating emission reduction techniques, instead of on transforming the economic, legal and political systems that encourage and legitimize environmental destruction.

This is not surprising. When we can't even agree to adequately limit levels of a few gases in the atmosphere, fundamental “system change” seems beyond the scope of any negotiation. Yet it is also clear, in round after round of UN climate talks, that our current international mechanisms for tackling these unprecedented global crises are failing us. Those on the brunt end of climate change can do little but plea for the largest polluting nations to do more, while we slip ever faster towards climate chaos.

Challenging BP over violation of rights of nature

However a little reported event, a few days before the Cancun summit, may point us to a way forward that could start tackling one of the root causes of climate change. On 26 November 2010, a group of prominent international environmental and social activists and indigenous people’s leaders filed a lawsuit with the Constitution Court in Quito [4], Ecuador. This is based on the provisions in the new Ecuadorian constitution that, for the first time in history, recognize that Nature (or Pachamama) has inherent legal rights [5] which any person may enforce before a court of law. The lawsuit was filed against British Petroleum (BP) and relates, not to oil spills in Ecuador, but to the harm to natural ecosystems caused by the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Plaintiff Diana Murcia explained the motives for the case, saying that, “Nature is the only subject that has been absent from the legal discussions surrounding the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and one of our goals is to introduce Nature in the international debate as a rights-bearing entity.”

Up to now, the various legal suits taken up against BP are largely for personal injury and economic damages, and for breaches of specific environmental laws [6] such as the US Clean Water Act. The Ecuadorian lawsuit, by contrast, would be the first to look in its totality at the impact of the oil spill on the marine environment and surrounding ecosystems. The lawsuit states [7] that no financial sum will compensate for the environmental damage, and instead directs its demands towards ensuring that such a disaster will never happen again. Specifically it calls on BP to make public all internal documents related to the run-up and response to the disaster, to prepare effective contingency plans that will prevent future damages to the environment, to end deep sea oil drilling, and to invest in non-destructive energy solutions that leave oil in the ground.

The plaintiffs are arguing that the case should be heard in Ecuador based on the principle of universal jurisdiction which allows particularly heinous crimes that offend humanity’s conscience such as genocide, to be prosecuted anywhere, irrespective of where the act occurs.

Overcoming the environmental void in international and national law

This unprecedented case illuminates the inadequacies of current international and national regulatory systems. Our legal systems do not afford effective protection to Nature, because nature has been confused with property, which by definition cannot have rights and which is available to be traded and exploited just as slaves were. Legal cases concerning the environment are, like the case of BP, usually only for breaches of certain environmental regulations or for the economic costs; not for the damage caused to the environment itself on which we, and all life depends. Unless that changes, environmental disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will continue.

However the Ecuador case can perhaps be seen as the first salvo in a growing upsurge of support for new mechanisms and instruments to stop environmental destruction. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales convened a World People’s Climate Conference on 22 April 2010 that proclaimed a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth [8], that they have since taken for discussion at the UN and enacted into national legislation [9]. Bolivia also launched an international campaign for an International Climate Justice Tribunal, which would hold countries and companies accountable for climate change. In November, Pittsburgh [10], Pennsylvania became the first major U.S. city to ban natural gas drilling while elevating community decision-making and the rights of nature over corporate 'rights.'

Introducing nature rights and climate tribunals won't end environmental abuses, as human rights legislation has not forever ended human rights abuses. However it does enable us to begin to use our legal systems to balance destructive human initiatives against the need to maintain the health of planetary ecosystems. It would also provide a mechanism to help force our political leaders to devise policies to keep us within Nature’s non-negotiable limits. It could start to close the widening chasm between what needs to be done to stop climate change and environmental devastation and the complete ineffectiveness of our current political response. It's time as Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu has said “to embrace our kinship with all the beings of the Earth community and to recognize, respect and defend the rights of all.” Our collective survival depends on us defending the rights of the planet that is our home.

Cormac Cullinan, from South Africa, is an acclaimed environmental lawyer and founder of EnAct International

Links:
[3] http://pwccc.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/bolivia-decries-adoption-of-copenhagen-accord-ii-without-consensus/
[4] http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2805-bp-sued-in-ecuador-for-violating-the-rights-of-nature
[5] http://www.opednews.com/articles/Ecuador-s-Constitution-Giv-by-Cyril-Mychalejko-080925-102.html
[6] http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2010/bp-clean-water-act-06-18-2010.html
[7] http://alainet.org/active/42800
[8] http://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/
[9] http://www.bolpress.com/art.php?Cod=2010120801
[10] http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/pittsburg-bans-natural-gas-drilling

Three saluted as Davis Eco Heroes

2010-10-10T15:10:00-07:00

This was published in my local newspaper based on some interviews with three inspiring local figures

Reduce, reuse and recycle. Not only is that the mantra for the environmental movement, it's a good way of summing up the contributions of three Davis residents who will be honored next week as Eco Heroes.

The trio — Ben Pearl, Larry Fisher and Derek Downey — will be recognized for their efforts to incorporate sustainable practices into our everyday lives by the Cool Davis Initiative, a coalition of residents, community organizations and the city of Davis. The awards will be presented at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 10, as part of the Cool Davis Green Festival at the Veterans' Memorial Center, 203 E. 14th St.

The free event will run from 2 to 5 p.m. and is one of more than 4,000 events in 171 countries worldwide in support of finding climate solutions.

Pearl, 27, is a board member of the Solar Community Housing Association, which recently moved two historic homes from B Street to Third and J streets to be retrofitted using the highest possible standards of energy efficiency and green building practices. The houses are being worked on by a large team of community volunteers.

Pearl, who grew up in a family that worked in the construction business, says, “The environmental track record of building in California, particularly in the last 10 years of the housing boom, has been terrible. There is a serious disregard for how materials are sourced, and little thinking on how to integrate energy efficiency into building, and how waste can be recycled.”

By working on a green retrofit, Pearl hopes to model good environmental practices. The construction teams are separating out all waste materials from the old houses so they are recycled appropriately. They are using designs that minimize the use of concrete (as its production process involves high CO2 emissions) and other heavy-impact materials. They are renovating rather than rebuilding parts of the house, and investing heavily in areas like insulation to maximize energy efficiency.

One month in, Pearl is already feeling the weight of 60-hour weeks, but also is inspired by the enthusiasm the project has received from the local community.

“I have learned about the value of community both in the sense of what it can create, and also how much work is needed to create and sustain it,” he said.

Fisher is a modern-day inventor who works out of the limelight, reusing and converting the stuff we throw away into useful products. He then distributes these to networks of cooperatives, migrant workers, overseas charities and anyone willing to prevent another object from ending up in a California landfill.

Born in Fresno in 1949, Fisher grew up taking apart and fixing things. His home-based business in Davis as a repairman of washers and dryers was a natural progression. During a 1984 visit to Nicaragua, “I realized that the perfectly good food supermarkets throw away here would have been equal to or higher quality to the food I bought in markets in Nicaragua.” He decided at that point to no longer buy new things and to commit his time to reusing and recycling what others had thrown away.

While recycling is better than tossing old products, it isn't as good as reusing them, Fisher said.

“Recycling metal still has to be transported, melted down and recreated, all of which have environmental costs,” Fisher explained.

He brandishes a spade that he made by hand out of an old TV antenna and discarded shovelhead. He has donated more than 300 garden tools made entirely of recycled materials to community gardens and housing co-ops.

“This shovel is durable and one of quality and could last a lifetime,” Fisher said. “Compare that with a cheap spade, imported from China, that you buy for a few dollars. You would be lucky if it lasts a few months with heavy usage.”

Downey, 24, a 2009 UC Davis graduate in biological systems engineering, is dedicated to composting organic materials including food scraps rather than sending them to the landfill.

He was the director of the student-run Project Compost at UCD in 2005-07. With a staff of three other students, he assembled a team of 15 to 20 volunteers to perform daily collections of food scraps and other compostable materials from the Coffee House, all the dining halls, labs and 15 other locations on campus.

The team used electrically powered vehicles to collect and transport more than 250 tons of food scraps every year to the Student Farm where the students added straw and composted the materials, eventually distributing the finished compost to food gardens on campus.

Project Compost also provided free compost workshops every quarter and maintained a compost demonstration site. Downey, hoping to attract more people to these workshops, built a worm farm — at one point with an estimated 100,000 red worms — that provided free worms to anyone wishing to start worm composting.

Downey has helped the Whole Earth Festival and the Davis Farmers Market move toward zero waste.

“Composting is very important because it recycles nutrients back into the soil that have been removed when crops were harvested,” he said. “Besides other benefits to the soil, it also can reduce landfill waste by 30 to 60 percent. This can have a major impact on our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Bolivia's inclusive approach only way forward on climate change

2010-08-09T15:43:35-07:00

I posted this sometime ago but not on this blog. Original article on TNI

In the aftermath of the dismal outcomes of the Copenhagen climate summit, US chief climate envoy Jonathan Pershing was quick to blame the failure on the UN's inclusive approach and proposed that some future meetings should be restricted to major countries. “[It is] impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail,” Pershing argued, adding that “We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is going to do about greenhouse gas emissions.” For the US, apparently, too much democracy and inclusion is a bad thing.

Bolivia, which along with 160 countries, had been excluded from last-minute talks on the Copenhagen Accord took the opposite approach at the recent World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, 19-22 April 2010. Rather than looking to limit participation , Bolivia decided to be more inclusive, inviting not just every government but also representatives of every civil society and popular organisation more than willing to get into “all the detail” of climate negotiations because of its implications for humanity. President Morales in his invitation to the conference said that “As there are no agreements and profound ideological differences on the best way to confront the threats that threaten the world, it is vital that peoples mobilise and decide the policies that need to be developed.”

The resonance of Morales' call was demonstrated just four months later, when instead of the expected 10,000 people, over 35,000 people from 140 countries including representatives of 48 governments arrived in the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia for an historic debate on how to confront one of the greatest crises the world has faced.

The main work of the conference was carried out in 17 working groups covering issues within official UN negotiations such as Kyoto Protocol, Adaptation, Forests as well as critical issues that are not currently part of negotiations such as agriculture and food sovereignty.

These working groups developed concrete proposals including demands for developed countries to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2017, a draft declaration for Rights of Mother Earth (or nature rights), the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal to provide some legal sanction against governments, individuals and companies that contribute to climate change, a call for the recognition of climate refugees within all international refugee conventions, the rejection of transnational extractive industries on indigenous lands, and provision of financial resources of up to 6% of GNP of developed countries for adaptation, technology transfer, capacity building and mitigation.

At a more fundamental level and in a critical debate that has no presence at all at the official UNFCCC level, the working group on harmony with nature examined the critical issue of how to change humans relationship with the planet we live on in order to recognise our interdependence and to end a relationship of exploitation. South African lawyer, Cormac Cullinan, explained the importance of this new paradigm: “Everyone agrees that climate change is threatening humanity and many species, etc but in official negotiations no-one is prepared to look at the causes of climate change. Climate change is merely a symptom of a profound imbalance between humans and nature. We must find mechanisms and laws that help us heal our relationship with Mother Earth.”

At the forefront of the working groups were an impressive number of grassroots activists from every corner of the globe involved directly in the struggle against climate change. These community leaders were clearly empowered by taking part in a constructive and participative process of developing proposals for tackling climate change.

Faith Gemmill, part of the Alaska Tribal Council fighting fossil fuel development in her region, said that in Copenhagen indigenous people had been outside the summit but that in Cochabamba they were at the heart of negotiations. “In Alaska, we find ourselves both fighting fossil fuel extraction and the impact of climate change. Indigenous people have a lot to contribute through the negotiations and to change the nature of the climate change debate.”

Soumya Dutta who works with forest peoples in India explained how powerful it was that “the very people at the bottom of the pyramid (on whose exploitation - along with the exploitation of nature - the capitalist industrial system thrives) who have taken control and dictated the whole process. The process certainly was not smooth .. but the amount of emotive energy, the richness of living-experiences coupled with informed decision making logic and the amazingly democratic process that somehow emerged... [was] a whole new experience.”

Taking an inclusive consultative approach on a crisis that has as many perspectives as there are Parts Per Million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere certainly had its challenges. The experience of the Internet working groups in the run up to the conference quickly revealed the problems of giving as much space to one eccentric individual as a well founded network with a developed position. Working groups such as the one on Forests had serious political divergences, for example over the controversial market-based UN programme Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. There were also tensions between diverse cultures of civil society based on different languages, different forms of political accountability and different strategic approaches.

Moreover, despite the language of inclusion, the Bolivian government was not immune from its own politics of exclusion, demonstrated when they prohibited a number of meetings within the summit which critically examined Bolivia's own record on environmental issues. The government argued that the national focus was not pertinent to a conference focused on international climate issues where the chief responsibility for the crisis lies with the industrialised North.

Ironically however their attempts to exclude what became known as Group 18 actually gave the group added visibility. It also highlighted the very important discussion on how to resolve contradictions between the Bolivian government's rhetoric on “living in harmony with Mother Earth” with the environmental damage caused by Bolivia's continued dependence on fossil fuels and mineral extraction. While these issues pose serious dilemmas for an impoverished country which in recent years has made significant progress in redistributing wealth from the nationalisation of gas resources, they highlight at a micro level some of the key debates that will need to take place worldwide as we seek to remove our dependence on fossil fuels.

However, these controversies ultimately highlighted the power of Bolivia's inclusive call, rather than detracted from it. The thing about an inclusive approach, and the reason why countries like the US are so opposed to it, is that you don't control the conversation. As a result, both inside and outside the conference, there was a vigorous debate on every aspect of climate change policy. This debate is bound to continue. Yet despite vigorous debates and differences, it was impressive to see how international movements in Cochabamba succeeded in constructing consensus around radical proposals emerging from every one of the 17 (or 18) working groups.

Critics of the conference have said that the conference proposals will have no bearing on official negotiations and have tried to relegate it as a left-wing talking shop. Much of the mainstream media chose to ignore the conference almost entirely, given that no major economic powers were present. The perceived wisdom, reinforced by individuals such as US climate envoy Pershing as well as many liberal commentators, is that the only solution for climate change will come from a stitch-up between the US and a few major powers, and that the views of the world's majority are irrelevant.

However political and media elites' attempts to dismiss the power of Cochabamba more likely shows their naivete or political blindness rather than that of the social movements. The Peoples' conference on climate change showed that a global movement, much larger than anyone imagined and with firm proposals, has coalesced and gathered strength. Led by people on the front lines of climate change, from India to Alaska to Africa in alliance with scientists, researchers, artists as well as developing country states like Bolivia, Cochabamba unveiled a significant international movement determined to develop proposals that tackle the root causes of climate change. The proposals may seem radical to some but are ultimately effective proposals to preventing runaway climate change. Many social movements are already working to enact these proposals at local, regional and state level in a myriad of ways from blocking coal plants to developing organic agriculture and will continue to work on real solutions regardless of whether they are taken up by the UN.

As one of the banners at the conference summed up: Nature doesn't do compromises. We either live within the limits of the world's bio-capacity or we don't. While the world's most powerful political leaders ignore this message in favour of policies of weak compromise, empty commitments and exclusion of the majority of the world's people, the movement present at the historic Cochabamba conference offers one of the main hopes that humanity can effectively address the climate crisis.

Bolivia provides resistance and hope at Brokenhagen

2010-01-14T10:13:22-08:00

I have just published this article on TNI about my experience of working with the Bolivian government at the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference.

It was 3am on Saturday morning – a time you might expect to be heading home from a good party, certainly not waiting for a international diplomatic meeting to begin. Yet that was the reality on 19th December, as I sat with the Bolivian delegation in the main plenary of the UN Conference on Climate Change. Bolivia's negotiators however did not seem tired; rather furious and incredulous. For whilst we waited, the US and EU were out at press conferences celebrating a global UN accord on climate change that Bolivia and most of the world had not even seen.

The accord had been drawn up in a private meeting by the major powers with the token participation of a few other developing countries but had no mandate from the whole UN. To make matters worse, when the Danish Chair of the Conference eventually opened the session, he asked everyone to read the Accord and clearly expected everyone to approve it. Commotion broke out on the floor. Rene Orellana, the normally quiet-spoken Bolivia's Minister for Water and the Environment, angrily denounced the Copenhagen Accord in no uncertain terms: “This is no way to decide the future of humanity and the planet. We can not in one hour decide on the future of millions of people. We will not accept a document imposed by a small minority that does not respect consultations over the last two years with peoples and amongst governments.”

Thanks to the courage of Bolivia and a few other nations – and against huge pressure and threats to sign the deal - the UN did not endorse or adopt the accord but instead were forced to use the much weaker and vacuous language of “noting” it.
Flawed process

Sadly the catastrophic denouement of the Copenhagen conference was not atypical but rather symptomatic of a highly flawed process controlled by industrialised countries that are unwilling to take responsibility for climate change. I had been asked to volunteer my time as an unpaid media consultant (along with Denmark-based Ron Ridenour) by the Bolivia government, and witnessed up close the way the major powers at the conference did their best to silence voices such as Bolivia's but also how Bolivia's impressive team resisted and forced more radical demands for action onto the international political stage.

The power imbalance of countries at Copenhagen was immediately obvious as soon as I entered the aircraft-hangar like Bella Centre where the conference was held. Whilst the EU had a vast array of offices, and even its own pavilion and bar, Bolivia had to have meetings of its delegations in one of the conference centres. Whilst even NGO staff all seemed to sport blackberry and iphones, the Bolivian delegation had to resort to second hand mobile phones that exasperatingly ran out of pay-as-you-go credit at the wrong time. Bolivia at least had enough negotiators to just about cover the simultaneous sessions but had little capacity to do the analysis of different papers and positions that emerged during the talks. Bolivia's lead negotiator Angelica Navarro recounted one meeting where the EU official said he would send a document to his team of legal advisors. “Team??!” she scoffed. “I could do with one person but I only have enough people to attend the meetings.”

It also became obvious early on that there were two processes going on: one in the main conference hall that involved all countries that remained deadlocked, and another by the most powerful nations (and also those most responsible for climate change) held in dining rooms in hotels in Copenhagen. In the first few days it emerged, thanks to a leak in the Guardian, that the Danish Presidency had been holding secret talks with a small circle of countries to prepare a draft text (called the “Danish text”) without any mandate from the full Conference of Parties (192 nations) and divorced from the overall discussions. In the uproar that took place at the release of the text, the Danes pretended it was just one paper amongst many. Of course the Danes, in a fit of short-term amnesia, then repeated the exercise at the end causing the tumultuous final session and effective collapse of talks.

Pablo Solon, Bolivia's UN ambassador, aptly related it to the film, The Matrix, where it turns out that what humans perceive as reality is in fact stimulated by machines to keep the population subdued. “It seems negotiators are living in the Matrix, while the real negotiation is taking place in in small stealth dinners with selective guests,” he said, adding that the demonstrators outside the conference were the only ones who had taken the “red pill” that allowed them to see the reality.

It seemed many of the other delegations from developing countries were not willing to take the “red” pill. Whilst many delegates expressed frustration at the Copenhagen accord for failing utterly to meet the challenge posed by climate change, very few in the final plenary stood up to actually oppose the agreement. The most painful speech I heard was by the President of the Maldives Islands who admitted that they had got none of their demands by attending the small meeting of the large polluting nations, yet pleaded desperately to everyone to agree to the deal as the only option on the table. It is a question that should never be asked of anyone but is a damning indictment of our world's leaders: What would you do if your country is going to disappear because of climate change? Accept a deal that will do nothing to stop its disappearance but at least talks of taking action or reject it as a moral outrage and demand a just deal?

Putting a more radical critique on the agenda

Despite the flawed process, however, Bolivia's delegation remained tireless in pushing a more radical critique of global climate policies as well as putting forward innovative proposals. Bolivia's strong stance on climate change is firstly informed by the effects it is already feeling as a result of climate change with disappearing glaciers and water shortages in the mountainous regions and more regular flooding in the Amazonian region. In June 2005, I visited a community whose mini-hydropower scheme had stopped working due to disappearance of glacier melt water and heard concerns from indigenous community members about the changing climate. 2009 saw prolonged droughts in the Altiplano region and increasing water shortages in the impoverished and highly populated city of El Alto.

However Bolivia's position was also closely tied to its integration with social movements working on environmental justice worldwide. Alongside negotiators, Bolivia's delegation included respresentatives of Bolivia's principal indigenous and campesino organisations, such as respected indigenous community leader Don Rafael Quispe who has even held the Bolivian government to account for its actions related to a flawed environmental licence for a copper mine in his region.

These movements have a very clear position on the need for justice to be at the heart of climate policy. This has led Bolivia to take a strong position on climate debt – highlighting the debt industrialised countries owe to developing countries both in terms of emissions (ie the industrialised countries have a duty to radically cut emissions to below zero to allow developing countries equal access to the atmosphere) and an adaptation debt (paying the costs developing countries are burdened with as they deal with climate change effects both in terms of real finance and technology transfer to allow development of renewable energy).

During the climate conference, Bolivia's tireless promotion of the concept led to more than 100 nations supporting the call for rich nations to pay their climate debt. This put US chief negotiator Todd Stern on the defensive in a press conference: "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations - I just categorically reject that."

Pablo Solon's response was biting: "Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. Even if the fire was not started on purpose, the industrialised countries, through their inaction, have continued to add fuel to the fire." He added: "In Bolivia we are facing a crisis we had no role in causing. Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor."

Bolivia also put the issue of “Rights of Nature” on the table. In a fascinating and packed side-event, Pablo Solon from Bolivia spoke with South African lawyer Cormac Cullinan on the emerging field of earth jurisprudence. It revealed how long-held indigenous values which treat the planet and our environment as Mother Earth is now linking up with cutting-edge international lawyers looking at how nature rights could fundamentally change how we relate to nature and prevent dangerous environmental exploitation. As Pablo Solon argued, Mother Earth rights could cause a revolution in the field of rights in the 21st Century in the way that human rights did in the 20th Century.

In addition to raising issues of rights of nature and climate debt, Bolivia also put forward a proposal for a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge perpetrators of climate damage and also critiqued the use of free market mechanisms for resolving climate change. Bolivia made clear that without changing the economic system that causes climate change, we could never prevent the climate crisis. As Evo Morales put it in his speech to the conference: "After hearing all the presentations, I am very surprised that everyone only talk about effects and not the causes. The cause is capitalism." In a Democracy Now interview, Morales explained that ending capitalism meant "changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending ... this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better."

Throughout the conference, Bolivia's team of negotiators struggled, often in 20 hour days, for these issues, taking both an inspirational lead within the Latin American block of countries belonging to ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of Latin America) and the broader G77 group of nations. I always had a long list of requests for interviews and Bolivia was keen to communicate its messages to the media – but I also knew how gruelling the negotiators' schedule was. Angelica Navarro, the lead negotiator for Bolivia was both typical of the team and extraordinary in her own right. Even after only sleeping 40 minutes one night, she would still greet me with a tired smile when I cornered her for an interview, and then forcefully and clearly explain Bolivia's position to the BBC, for example, in a way that hit the heart.

One day we came out of a press conference by the Bolivian government on climate debt, I noticed a group of Indian youth singing a song to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound. Except they had changed the lyrics:

"Every day they are stalling and they are saying the same old things again,
But one bright country stands apart,
They’re saying things close to my heart,
They’ve got a plan with hope in hand,
They’re saying c’mon, let’s just start...
Bolivia, I wish I was Bolivian...
Just one degree temperature rise,
300 ppm in the skies,
100 per cent emissions down by two thousand forty"

Pablo Solon, who had barely stood still since the conference started, suddenly stopped and listened to the song, emotion etched on his face. He smiled: “They explain Bolivia's position perfectly.” It was profoundly moving to see the spontaneous demonstration of South South solidarity.

Blame game and the way forward

Since the collapse of the talks, the world has erupted into a blame game – some accusing the Danes, others the rich countries, others China. In an Orwellian twist, some have even accused Bolivia of blocking the talks, when countries like Bolivia were leading the call for much more radical action.

UK environment secretary Ed Miliband is one of the figures who said that Bolivia hijacked the negotiations and argued that there must be major reform of the way UN negotiations are done. This was a bizarre accusation given the fact countries like the UK and US systematically blocked Bolivia and G77 proposals, underminined even existing binding agreements, and then stitched up an agreement with a select group of countries. It was blindingly obvious that the only group that hijacked the negotiations were the countries most responsible for causing climate change.

Until the rich countries that have pushed the planet to the edge of climate catastrophe admit their full responsibility and the climate debt they owe the peoples of the South, we will not make progress. Those who say that President Obama, with an offer of just 4% emissions cuts by the largest polluter (per capita) of the atmosphere, came to Copenhagen with a serious offer are deluded.

That is not to say that developing countries like China and India don't also have a responsibility. As TNI fellow and Indian journalist Praful Bidwai has pointed out, there is something grotesque about Indian industrialists with private jets hiding behind the millions of poor in India to justify their consumptive lifestyles. The real divide is not one of countries but of class, with a rich elite throughout the world recklessly living out an unsustainable lifestyle whilst the vast majority try merely to survive in an increasingly fragile planet.

President Evo Morales has proposed a platform that could offer a way past this impasse. As the conference concluded, Morales said: “As there are no agreements and there remain such profound ideological differences on the best way to confront the threats that threaten the world, it will be important that peoples mobilise and decide the policies that need to be developed.” Specifically he proposed a global referendum, asking the public whether vast sums spent on the military should be invested instead in conserving the planet. He has also convoked an international peoples conference on climate change in April 2010 in Bolivia to put forward an alternative popular programme for tackling the climate crisis.

Immense expectation was placed by many movements and peoples around the world on the Copenhagen conference. Yet we saw that not only did it fail, but it also clearly operated in a way that prevented a just and effective outcome. By comparison, what does seem to be working in actually stopping ever increasing carbon emissions are the countless movements stopping carbon emissions via diverse means from blocking coal power stations in the US, fighting mono-cultural plantations in Brazil and Indonesia, along with communities modelling shifts to low-carbon use such as Transition Towns in Britain. There are also millions of people already living sustainable lives throughout the world that we should emulate. Morales is right: we can't rely on political leaders to tackle the most serious crisis humanity has faced. It is down to us.

UN undermined by G20

2009-06-29T18:10:56-07:00

Here is a blog I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian after attending the UN Conference on the Global Economic Crisis in New York last week....

Maybe I was being a naïve activist, but I thought I would be covering an important and consequential event. The world is facing a devastating economic crisis, accompanied by a toxic mix of crises of climate chaos, food prices and even flu outbreaks, so surely the world's eyes would be on the UN as 192 nations gathered this week to supposedly develop a smart, effective response to these pressing and interconnected issues.

Yet, here I am on the second day of the UN conference on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on the development, and for the press it is as if the meeting did not exist. Until Michael Jackson’s death, the latest dull exploits of US celebrity misfits Jon and Kate - famous mainly for their ability to reproduce- were the only stories staring out at me on most front pages.

So I decided to do some investigation. Perhaps it’s just the nature of the United Nations. It certainly doesn’t have a great reputation for effective and efficient responses to crises. The labyrinth of corridors and tired-looking peeled-paint walls seem to be a good metaphor for the UN’s reputation as a bureaucratic institution that had its heydays several decades ago. At times in my vain attempts to find the press room, I became convinced that I would, along the lines of the surreal John Malkovich film, find the 7th and a half floor in Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s brain.

Yet it was also clear that there is still no other institution that can tackle the global crisis. Whilst it might have started in Wall Street, the crisis is only starting to be felt in places like Nairobi or Jakarta. The World Bank this week said the crisis would be deeper than expected with more than 1 billion people pushed into hunger into 2009. Martin Khor of the South Center reported that many financial ministers of developing countries are desperate. They face plummeting trade and investment incomes and rising costs and exports of capital. But they dare not say how bad the situation because that would guarantee financial meltdown.

It is not just that the crisis has had global impacts. It is also undeniable that despite its flaws, the UN made up of 192 countries has a lot more legitimacy than the self-appointed G20 group of nations who have unilaterally appointed themselves as the global crisis repairmen. As the charismatic President Correa of Ecuador put it in one of the main forums: “How can the G20 argue that they represent the world? We cannot entrust the authors of the crisis with finding the solution. They created a situation where you could say anything no matter how stupid in support of free movement of capital and it would be accepted.” He argued that the crisis provided the opportunity to develop new ideas and fresh thinking based on the values we want represented in the economy.

It soon became apparent that the real reason why the UN conference has received no attention was exactly because of the difficult questions posed by people such as Correa. In fact it turns out that industrialised countries like the US, European Union, Japan and others systematically blocked the conference firstly by trying to ignore it, then by smearing some of their opponents, and finally by outright opposing any demands that threatened any real change.
The international press has been happy to follow the priorities set by the rich country governments - and have consequently ignored the conference's existence.

Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the avuncular Nicaraguan priest and elected President of the General Assembly of the United Nations received the brunt of attacks. Brockmann had dared to inject huge energy into the process by pulling together a high level UN commission chaired by Nobel Prize heavyweight Joseph Stiglitz and calling for radical changes in the institutions and rules that led to the crisis. Western diplomats were soon briefing journalists that Brockmann was a “radical socialist” trying to impose its vision on the world community.

Then when it became clear that the largest block of countries, the misnamed Group of 77 (in fact made up more than 130 nations) was also pushing forward many of the same ideas, the rich countries played down the importance of the conference and refused to send high-level representation. Finally the rich countries went through the G77 declaration and removed anything that entailed any reform to either the institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization) or the international rules and laws that enabled the crisis to spread and deepen. The result was an anaemic final UN document that does little to tackle the root causes of the financial crisis.

The breaking news this week that staff at Goldman Sachs bank look likely to receive the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history typifies the desire by rich countries to return to the pre-crisis world of bumper profits and deregulated chaos. Meanwhile across the US, unemployment, budget cuts are causing ever more economic and social distress. Most analysts say that even if economic growth recovers it will take several years before employment catches up. Moreover if necessary changes are not made to the system that created the crisis, it will almost certainly reoccur.

“We cannot allow business to continue as usual. Those most affected by the crisis must have a voice in how it is resolved,” concluded D’Escoto Brockmann. “The poor is tired of financing the rich and paying for their excesses. We need a new vision that involves the whole community, that expresses what we want this world to be and to look like.” His voice was echoed by community organizer Tanya Dawkins of Miami who said “These fights are about power –and the need to shift power back to where it belongs, with the people.”

Why are top Democrats shielding Goni?

2009-04-11T11:45:32-07:00

I have had the following post published in the weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My final edits didn't get through into the final piece so if you want to use it, please use the version below.

Top Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg rolled into San Francisco last month to promote his latest book, Dispatches from the War Room – In the trenches with five extraordinary leaders (2009, St. Martin’s Press). The slight, bespectacled man spoke at the Commonwealth Club, sharing what he hoped were “honest and frank” accounts of working with leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.

While he happily pontificated on the lessons these experiences held for President Barack Obama, he was a bit more defensive on why he had proudly featured in the book Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, former President of Bolivia who is currently wanted for his role in a massacre of 67 people in October 2003.

Greenberg was drafted in 2002 to help Goni, a Chicago-educated and wealthy businessman, get elected president during a time of social upheaval created largely by U.S.-backed "free market" economic policies (known as neoliberalism). Branding Goni as the only man who could “resolve the crisis,” Greenberg and other US political consultants helped their client scrape an electoral victory with just 23 percent of the popular vote.

The deaths took place less than a year later when Goni announced deeply unpopular plans to give foreign corporations more control over Bolivia’s natural gas resources. Road blockades erected by protesters in the poorest neighbourhoods of the high altitude city of El Alto effectively cut off supplies. Goni signed a decree that instructed the army to clear the roads and promised “indemnification for any damage to property and persons which might occur.” That effective carte blanche resulted in the army shooting live ammunition indiscriminately at men, women and children.

Military repression brought to a head one of the country’s bloodiest years, in which more than 100 people died in social protests. Rising popular anger led Goni to flee the country to exile in the US. He has since lived comfortably in Chevy Chase, Maryland protected by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Greenberg admits in the book that the violence caused him “to take stock,” yet he ends up saying he is now “more certain of my course and his [Goni’s].” He concludes: “I am proud of what we did to help Goni become President.” From the podium at the Commonwealth Club, he blamed the atrocities on the supposed “parallel violence” by the unarmed protestors.

It seems a surprising conclusion for a man who is supposedly in-touch with the electorate. Goni is reviled by most Bolivians as a corrupt and arrogant politician who devalued human life. Even Goni’s Vice President Carlos Mesa denounced him and swore that he would never use violence to enforce policies. Two-thirds of Bolivia’s Congress – including many who had formed part of Goni’s coalition – approved a trial seeking responsibility for the massacres. Disgust at Goni’s neoliberal economic and social policies, which had increased poverty and inequality, was partly behind the landslide 2005 electoral victory of one of the leaders of Bolivia's many social movements, Evo Morales.

Yet sadly Greenberg’s positive spin of Goni seems to be a view that is widely shared with the Democratic Party. At a Washington launch event for Greenberg’s book, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also appeared to hold Goni in high esteem, warmly welcoming Goni to the event, calling him a “very special man.” Goni’s former defense lawyer, Gregory Craig, is now Obama’s White House Counsel. The Democrats’ historic loyalty to one of their favored pro-American friends seems to outweigh their commitment to human rights and fair legal process.

Rogelio Mayta, the resolute lawyer representing the families whose loved ones were killed in October 2003, tries to give Pelosi the benefit of the doubt: “We want to believe in the good faith of…Pelosi and believe that these praises are due to misinformation rather than a concrete line of action and thinking by the US government.”

Yet the anger of Eloy Rojas, who lost his eight-year-old daughter when troops entered his village and started shooting indiscriminately, is harder to hide. “Every effort that allies of Sanchez de Lozada make to present the ex-President as a victim and an honest man is for us an offense. It is an offense against the pain and suffering that his terrible actions had for our lives. His determination to defend his and other peoples’ economic interests meant that he stopped valuing peoples’ lives...That is why we continue to seek justice.”

In March, Bolivian families who lost loved ones marked a significant milestone in their struggle to end the legacy of impunity for political elites like Goni. After five years of navigating political games and legal loopholes, a date was set for the trial of responsibility for Goni and seven of his ministers. Yet the main defendant, Goni, will be missing as the US government has ignored requests for extradition for several years.

Many in the US and worldwide continue to hope that Obama’s inauguration will mark a new chapter in relations worldwide, especially in Latin America, where there has been a new wave of resistance against US attempts to impose its economic interests. Obama has made some important first steps in ordering closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and re-invigorating the use of diplomacy in regions such as the Middle East. But if he really wants to start a new chapter of international relations rooted in human rights, he doesn’t need to travel abroad. He just needs to respond to Bolivia’s lawful request for extradition and send home the man that lives just seven miles from the White House.

Piracy and the digital revolution

2009-03-26T12:09:33-07:00

I have written the following piece for Red Pepper and the Networked Politics project of the Transnational Institute. The latest on the trial which the article covers can be seen on Wired Magazine's blog.

There isn’t an eye patch or hook in sight, but three young computer geeks and a businessman have recently made piracy very sexy in Sweden. The four founders of a popular file-sharing service called Pirate Bay, become instant underdog cyber-heroes as they took the stand in court in February 2009 against US media giants such as Sony and Warner Brothers. The four potentially face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $180,000 dollars if they are found guilty of infringement of copyright laws.

Cross and bone flags flutter outside the court, every utterance is blogged and twittered and new members are flooding to a Pirate political party that has overtaken the Green Party in terms of members. The contentious file-sharing website – www.piratebay.org – continues to taunt the music industry reps with insults and the spectre of lost profits as an estimated 22 million users swap files from U2’s latest album to Oscar-winning films like Slum Dog Millionaire.

The music and film industry is keen to change the image of the Pirate Bay from one of cyber freedom fighters to one of businessmen (albeit ones with unusual facial hair) profiting at the expense of artists. Monique Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representative in Sweden calls it simply theft: “It’s not a political trial or shutting down a people’s library or one that wants to prohibit file sharing as a technique. It’s a trial regarding four individuals that have conducted a big commercial business, making money out of others by file sharing works – copy protected works, movies and hit music, popular computer games, etc.”

Former IT entrepreneur and founder of the Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge sees it differently: “The problem is that politicians have chosen not to listen to young people. We have this new technology and culture of file sharing, but the politicians have chosen to criminalise us. The music industry is doing everything to prevent the spread of culture. In Sweden we are putting a flag in the ground and uniting to put an end to their lobbying.”

Students for free culture

Sweden isn’t the only place where flags are being put in the ground. A few months previously and across the globe, the Students for Free Culture held their first national meeting in December 2008 in Berkeley. They chose to hold the meeting at the US university, which became renowned for the launch of Free Speech movement and a subsequent wave of activism in the 1960s.

Students for Free Culture was started by two students in Pennsylvania who received legal threats in 2003 from an electronic voting manufacturer Diebold for publishing embarrassing internal company emails that revealed serious technical flaws in their voting systems. These machines were used in the controversial elections in Florida in 2000.

Rather than backing down, the students organised to get the emails published on even more websites and counter-sued the company for abuse of copyright law. Political and media attention forced Diebold to announce it would no longer try and stop distribution of the memos. The students hope to launch a movement that has similar impact to the Free Speech Movement.

“Like the Free Speech movement, we are fighting against the top-down control of speech and are motivated by beliefs about basic rights. The differences are in our ability to organize electronically- our Mario Savio [one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement] is more likely to inspire with a blog post than with a speech,” says Berkeley student Alex Kozak, one of the organisers.

The national meeting at Berkeley (titled an “unconference”) committed itself to fight for open access to university research, the use of free and open software within universities, and free licensing of any university patents related to health or software. It also promised to continue to pick fights with any attempts to control the open nature of the Internet and to take head on corporations who try to quash artistic creativity and free speech with lawsuits. (See http://barbieinablender.org/!)

Mayo Fuster Morell, a Catalan activist and researcher on digital issues, believes that “the movement has a high level of commitment and clear ideas. It is not possible to reverse what they want to do. The goal of universal access to knowledge is hugely motivating and linked with other social movements will have a huge impact.”

Internet culture

Throughout the world, the experience of “growing up digital,” as technology writer Don Tapscott has called it, has created a pattern of behaviour and cooperation that, largely unconsciously, undermines corporate control of culture, information and ideas.

“It is part of the identity of my generation to create and share content on large social networks, organise events online, and share with each other our favourite music and movies, sometimes legally and sometimes not,” says Alex. “This behaviour has lead to an unconscious dedication to the culture of sharing.”

Sharing albums via the Internet or in person, editing music and TV footage for Youtube videos or mixing tracks to produce their own music is part of the everyday experience of most teenagers. The Internet has also facilitated the emergence of communities who have the tools to collaborate across borders and produce software, music and films that previously could only be done by resource-rich corporations. This has led to a burgeoning movement of free software and open source technicians, independent media activists and creative artists and writers who openly and freely share their works.

Certainly not all elements of this burgeoning movement are political or progressive. Libertarian attitudes are just as likely (perhaps more likely) to be found on the Right than the Left. Nevertheless, it is clear that the experience of growing up digital is starting to politicise young people who find pride in the collaborative models that they are developing and are determined to defend it where it is threatened.

Corporate backlash

Inadvertently, corporations are supporting this politicisation by their desperate attempts to limit the culture of sharing. In addition to its frequent actions to close down file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay (and famously before that Napster), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the last five years has sued more than 30,000 randomly selected North American families for music file sharing.

And these legal actions are likely to continue. As corporations’ possibilities for increasing profit diminish at a time of recession and against a systemic capitalist tendency for overproduction, patents are one of the few mechanisms that insulate companies from competition and keep prices for branded products (such as music albums or Microsoft software) high.

The entertainment and cultural industry is one of the largest and most profitable industry in the developed world, especially in the US and Japan. Four companies control 70% of the world’s music market. Copyright industries in the US have typically outperformed other industries, contributing as much as 23.78% of overall economic growth in 2007. These corporations usually don’t produce the content and tend not to employ creative producers directly, but rather identify and invest in a small number of artists who can create the most value. They concentrate on licensing and maintaining the maximum length of control of the intellectual property and exercising these rights in as many arenas as possible (film, TV, DVDs, merchandise).

Corporations are not willing to let go of this control easily. Apart from legal threats, companies benefit from the largely corporate control of access to the Internet and via agreements with popular websites like Youtube and Google. In January 2009, they pressurised the first Internet Service Provider, Eircom in Ireland to block access to all file-sharing content and undoubtedly hope to pressure other ISPs to do the same.

They have backed this up with pressure to change the law in many countries. Where they don’t have sufficient influence on politicians domestically, they have used the arsenal of regional free trade agreements and even blunt diplomatic threats to impose stricter Intellectual Property regimes and to target file-sharing sites. The first attempt to close down Pirate Bay in 2006, in which Swedish police confiscated servers, took place after threats from the US embassy against the Swedish government. Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the largest owners of copyrighted materials famously said: “Intellectual Property is the Oil of the 21st Century.” Digital activists took this to mean that corporations and countries, like the US and Britain, would also be willing to go to war to protect and control it.

Losing control

But despite their best efforts, there is a sense that the corporations this time will have an impossible task in trying to put free culture back into a safe pre-digital box. Felix Stalder, media researcher at Zurich University says: “I think the war on piracy is failing for social reasons. People like to communicate, to share things, to transform things and technology makes it so easy that there is no way of stopping it.”

Pirate Party’s Richard Falkvinge compares the struggle to the attempts by the Church to control information and culture in the Middle Ages: “We are seeing the same struggle today. Fifteen years ago we had one source communicating to the many, like a newspaper or TV station. Today however with the internet, millions of people are exchanging culture and information on the Internet, so there is no way of controlling this information."

Pirate Bay’s founders have said that regardless of the trial’s outcome that Pirate Bay will continue to exist as it is now set up on distributed servers across the world so that even the owners don’t know where they are. Getty Images was notably sold in 2008 after its stock prices plunged with the rapid rise of cheaper and open-access images on the web. In January 2009, Apple announced it would remove anti-copying restrictions (known as Digital Rights Management) on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store.

Most significant, perhaps, are the strong alternatives and new models of knowledge sharing that are emerging as cracks appear in the weakening structure of Intellectual Property. In the digital world, Free and Open Source software, such as the Firefox browser and Open Office are taking off as alternatives to Microsoft. The collaborative and free-to-use internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia has emerged as the fourth most popular website on the Internet (after Google, Yahoo and MSN). Increasing number of projects are now carried out collectively and collaboratively across the Internet with limited hierarchical direction and without proprietorial control of the end product.

In the entertainment sphere, bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have shown that bypassing corporate media companies by allowing people to pay what they want to download an album can still ensure artists get rewarded for their creative work. Creativity shows no signs of being squashed by the decline in profits of companies like Sony music: 130 million works by writers, photographers, and film producers have been assigned with Creative Commons licences, designed to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others.

German activist Sebastian Lütgert from Pirate Cinema believes that: “What we are witnessing is the coming of producers rather than consumers, and that suggests a new economic model for society.” In practical terms, San Francisco University researcher Dorothy Kidd notes that “the open source software movement offers a good model for how decentralised network structures can work. It is an example that contradicts the ideology that says that public institutions are not flexible and dynamic enough to work.” She believes that these practices need to be incorporated into social movements’ practices and their articulation of alternatives.

There will be challenges in doing this – and it is important not to over-romanticise movements like the Free and Open Source Software movements. Jeff Juris, an analyst on new media technologies and social movements says: “Open source movements can still replicate hierarchies seen in traditional systems. This time the divisions are not just around the usual issues of power and money, but also based on a divide between “tecchies” and activists.” Others note that open source models and corporate power are not mutually exclusive, citing the prominent role of IT company SUNS in projects like the Firefox browser. Collaborative models have the potential to flatten structures of hierarchy and weaken corporate power but this still requires a firm political commitment from the participants.

In an interview by digital magazine Wired with one of Pirate Bay’s collaborators, Pete (surname undisclosed) tells the reporter: “It's not the problem of the pirates to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system... Our job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.” Therein lies the challenge for social movements and activists to take the redefinition of piracy a stage further – to turn the image of a pirate from an eye-patched destroyer to one of a digitally-inspired pioneer determined to use creativity to build new collaborative and just economic and social models of living.

This article is based on conversations, papers and webpage links and resources pulled together by participants of the Networked Politics and Technology seminar held at Berkeley University, 5-6 December 2008.
>Coverage of the trial on Wired Magazine
>Steal this film - good intro to the issue and for this article
>http://www.networked-politics.info/berkeley/

Bolivia's new constitution

2009-02-06T17:25:14-08:00

I have had the following piece published for TNI on the approval of Bolivia's new constitution. The photo is by Ben Dangl of upsidedownworld which has some good coverage of the build-up to and the day of the referendum.

On 25 January, three days before the world’s business and political elites gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, a very different crowd was forming in the Andean capital of Bolivia. Whilst Davos’ leaders appeared bereft and lost at the failure of their prized economic model, Bolivians danced to mark its defeat. The occasion was the celebration of the country’s new constitution, which in its opening words “puts behind us the colonial, republican and neoliberal state” and which commits itself to building a state “based on principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equal distribution and redistribution of social goods.”

Against a barrage of opposition media propaganda funded by Bolivia’s elites, the new constitution was approved with 61% of the popular vote. Given the extent of the financial crisis in the US and Europe, the clear lack of popular confidence in Bolivia in the free market model is unlikely to have ruffled many feathers, but it is none the less very significant. Bolivia was once the prized pupil for its wholesale application of policies encouraged by the IMF and the World Bank. Now it is one of the countries articulating an alternative.

Post neoliberal constitution

This is evident in the 100-page document which rejects the dominance of private capital and reasserts the role of the state in the economy. All of Bolivia’s natural resources such as gas and oil are declared the patrimony of the state, with the state given the unique right to administer strategic resources and to run basic services such as electricity and water. Private monopolies of goods and services are forbidden, and the state is required instead to develop policies directed towards reducing social inequalities, focused on the domestic market and favouring small-scale farmers and micro-industries.

At a time when monolithic systems (whether US empire or capitalism) are under increasing challenge, and in recognition of a re-assertive indigenous identity in the Americas, the constitution also declares Bolivia a pluri-national state. This means it recognises the 36 indigenous nations and languages that make up Bolivia, and the right of indigenous communities in their territories to run their own judicial, health, educational and communication systems and to exercise distinct forms of communitarian democracy. Moreover, the constitution commits to making key indigenous values such as “living well” (idea of living justly with neighbours and in harmony with the planet) integral to the country’s identity and therefore promoted in all its institutions and policies.

In addition, the constitution picks up on many demands at the forefront of social movement campaigning in the last decade: the prohibition of foreign military bases on Bolivian soil, the recognition of household work as an economic activity, the wide and full recognition of political, social, economic and cultural rights, the rejection of trade agreements that endanger peasant producers or small businesses.

Heavy costs

Nevertheless, the struggle that Bolivia’s social movements have been through to get to this stage has been very costly. It was in 1990, that a group of indigenous marchers from the east of the country first put forward the demand for a new constitution that would properly recognise Bolivia’s ethnic and cultural diversity. It took many years of persistent protest and enduring brutal repression, and then the hard graft of debating and discussing proposals in countless meetings, for the new constitution to take shape. Morales’ successful election in December 2005 was strongly tied to his firm commitment to facilitate a constituent assembly that would reshape Bolivia.

Morales’ victory gave new energy to social movements, but sparked even fiercer resistance. The last three years have witnessed a constant barrage of attacks led by a landowning and business elite who are mainly based in the eastern lowland regions of Bolivia. Manipulating regional sentiment, racism and fear of centralised government (along with the usual bogeymen of communism and Venezuelan interference), they have created enough popular support to stall any government attempts at structural reform. They have backed this up with the use of ‘shock’ troops of young men who have attacked the constitutional assembly itself, government institutions, social movement leaders, and indigenous people in general. In one such attack, during September 2008, a group of henchmen linked to the governor of the northern province of Pando killed more than 30 campesino farmers.

Whilst the MAS government has frequently shown that it has popular backing at the ballot box (winning four electoral victories so far), the Right’s attacks have been sufficiently destabilising to make it very difficult for the government to advance its agenda. It proved impossible for some of the ministries, in particular the vice-ministry of land, to do their work in some regions of the country. Legislation was constantly blocked in the opposition-controlled senate. At times the threat of civil war seemed a frightening possibility to many Bolivians.

Compromised document

Against this background, in October 2008, the government agreed to over 100 changes to the constitutional document to enable it to pass the Senate. This included changes such as agreeing that land size restrictions would not be applied retroactively, the dropping of an overall prohibition on genetically modified organisms, allowing mixed public-private companies to be involved in service provision, and weakening the rights of indigenous communities to completely block exploitation of resources within their territories.

This angered many on the radical and indigenous left. “This constitution is the definition of vagueness and surrender,” said Pedro Portugal of the newspaper Pukara. Social movements, including those supportive of MAS, expressed concern that the government’s negotiated compromises with the opposition had made land reform proposals meaningless. The government’s valiant efforts to avoid violence and negotiate compromises can be seen by their bases as betrayal of their promise to deliver radical change.

Yet even the watered down constitution proved too much for many of Bolivia’s elites, who continued to campaign against it. Even after the vote, Ruben Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz is calling the results a “draw” as four out of Bolivia’s nine provinces had voted against the constitution. He warned of “unyielding resistance”. Branco Marinkovich, a food industry tsar and implacable opponent of Evo Morales, blamed the results on fraud and Venezuelan interference and said that the country needed a two-state solution, rather like the Hong Kong-China arrangement. The opposition still has plenty of tools for disruption.

Building a new hegemony

Against this bitter opposition, Bolivia’s government now has to develop the laws, and entrench the authority of the constitution – in other words create a hegemony for the ideas, visions and principles within the constitution. This will be a struggle that will take place in congress, in the courts, on the media waves and on the streets. Leny Olivera, a student activist in Cochabamba, says: “We have learnt that changing laws is not enough, we need to change people’s minds and attitudes and this is a long process.”

For the MAS government, it will be critical to start to winning this battle in the four regions (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija) where the majority voted against the constitution. This will be difficult as these regions are tightly controlled by the opposition. Whilst opposition leaders are unable to articulate an alternative national vision, they are clearly determined, at least, to ensure that the new constitution is not applied within their regions.

Yet the fact that more than 30% of citizens in these regions have consistently voted for the process of change, in an atmosphere of fear and intolerance, suggests that the Right’s support is not as solid as they purport. In addition, the 80% of the population who voted in favour of restricting land ownership to a maximum of 5000 hectares (50 square kilometres) shows that, aside from party polarisations, that there is a broad spread support across the whole country for redistribution of land and wealth.

Ongoing struggle

Ultimately, the lesson of the constitutional vote is that documents and institutions alone won’t bring about lasting change. A stalwart leader of social movements, like Evo Morales, knows that, as do many in the social movements that back him, frequently referring to the more than five hundred years of struggle that still inspire today’s struggles.

Oscar Olivera, who helped lead the water war in Cochabamba that threw out multinational Bechtel and a strong critic of the government from the left, says: “The yes vote won, which could have been predicted, but this doesn’t mean that there is one box in which we can find the solutions to our sufferings and therefore create wellbeing. The YES must be understood as the possibility, still, of using this space as a way of continuing to reflect, to think, to struggle, to continue hoping, believing, living in order to create by our own means the life we want, that we have longed for with such passion, as we marched to La Paz, or from San Sebastian, or when we took over factories, and led strikes.” In Bolivia, the struggle for economic and social justice is far from over.

Water birth

2008-10-28T20:33:05-07:00

I am happy to announce the safe arrival of Sumaya Elyse Buxton, born on 18 October 2008. Click on the photo for a gallery of some images. Below are some words that the birth inspired me to write:

Water Birth

For Sumaya Elyse Buxton

I sit like a fisherman expectant,
Gazing at her rose-pink surface,
Which quivers, ripples out,
One arm flickers, a faint egret cry,
Her body returns to stillness.

I see mirrored reflections
Of the eddying
That rolled across Juliette’s watery womb.
Our attempts then at imagined connection
Touching limbs through gossamer-thin skin.

Through a canal of a few inches
Her and our world turned inside out.
The ghostly black-white of ultrasound
Exposed in raw light into
The flushed-red of a perfectly detailed being.

Our imaginings have become the
Reality of nurturing new and vulnerable life.
We have become extensions of her reflexes,
Reacting instinctively
To the crumpling and softening of her face.
Future and past reduced to the present moment.

On my first outing
I find myself walking,
Sumaya cocooned in my sling,
To a nearby nature reserve.
Autumnal dusk feathers the sky,
Flocks of geese arc so close,
Their wings compress the air around us.
We look out at the water’s edge
Squinting towards a shared future.

28 October 2008