climate justice tribunal calls for social movements to unite against climate change and capital

Work seems to be never ending here and quite mundane for the last few weeks, which has been a bit of an impediment to getting round to updating the blog. I am sorry to report that I am still trying to find a strategy to make myself less attractive to the dog, who is still trying to mount me with relative frequency. He went through a brief period of relative calm when his owner started to get him trainer, but the trainer mysteriously disappeared and since then, the firmer I am with him, the more turned on he seems to get by what he appears to interpret as a dominatrix act.

It’s been raining for days and in the colonial part of Bogotá where we’re living the streets are frequently like small rivers and there’s a nasty smell of blocked drains permeating just about everything. Still, with a decent pair of wellies and an umbrella, life pretty much continues as normal (if you don’t mind the fact that your clothes never dry and start to smell of wee).

Higher up, on the outskirts of the city, where displaced communities have settled the steep mountain slopes, this sort of rain has the capacity to destroy people’s homes. Elsewhere in Colombia too, the poorest people in urban areas live in the places with the least protection against flooding, water contamination and so on, whilst small-scale farmers in rural parts of the country are most vulnerable to unpredictable weather conditions.

This week, we took part in a people’s Tribunal into Climate Justice. And this was one of the issues the Tribunal sought to highlight: that climate chaos (of which this unusually bad weather seems to be a symptom) is a social justice issue.

If you read the last update, you could be forgiven for thinking that Colombian social movements have gone tribunal crazy, with yet another tribunal – this time into climate justice – on top of the series of people’s hearings into crimes against humanity by specific multinational corporations that we talked about last time. However, the idea behind people’s tribunals is to define the responsibilities behind specific issues, as well as to move towards repairing damage caused and preventing future violations. And one difficultly with combating climate chaos is that responsibilities aren’t talked about enough.

Environmental catastrophes have the biggest effect on poorer communities, who are most vulnerable to floods, food shortages, disease, the extinction of species and so on. However, responsibility for climate change lies almost exclusively with the richest people and with a model of accumulation based on endless growth, consumption and the exploitation of nature, which has involved the privatisation of just about everything and dispossessing communities of collective resources – not only lands but even the atmosphere, which has effectively become the private property of a minority. As a spokesperson for the Process of Black Communities – one of the groups who organised the tribunal – put it, those who promote the dominant model of ‘development’ care very little for those they run over in the process.

Nowadays, those responsible for climate chaos accept the existence of the problem and even conservative analyses accept that climate change is due to human activity. However, they fail to accept the responsibility of corporations and their allies and this model of ‘development’ and wealth accumulation. The World Bank for example relates environmental problems to ‘poverty, uncertainty and ignorance’, and assume that businesses will automatically ‘do the right thing’ to tackle climate change, even though the figures make it clear that rich corporations are the main polluters (for example, research by Friends of the Earth found that just one company, US oil giant ExxonMobil and it’s predecessors, caused 4.7-5.3% of human-produced carbon dioxide emissions between 1882 and 2002).

Instead of accepting responsibility and challenging the model that causes climate change and dispossession the world over, governments and international institutions rely on the market and technology – part of the problem – to provide a solution.

Market ‘solutions’ to climate change tend to take the form of carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol, with corporations from rich countries literally buying the permission to pollute – either through purchasing ‘carbon credits’ from poorer countries who pollute less or by funding ‘clean development’ projects – often involving monocultures of plants that absorb the extra carbon but destroy biodiversity and displace local populations. These market solutions treat nature as simply another form of capital with an owner and a purchase price, without any sense of the dangers of resource exploitation, the interconnectedness of nature and so on.

Technological ‘solutions’ involve the promotion of a variety of ‘clean’(er) forms of energy. One of the most popular ‘alternatives’ amongst corporations and governments is the promotion of crops for agro-fuels – in Colombia, these take the form of African Palm, which covers huge swathes of the Colombian countryside, and, increasingly, sugar cane and yucca. These monocultures have been imposed by the means of the violent displacement of small-scale farming communities and the production of food staples by right-wing paramilitary death squads linked to the Colombian state and corporations (see attached report for the Schumacher institute by a member of Espacio).

In theory, agro-fuels are ‘greener’ than fossil fuels as they are ‘carbon-neutral’ – i.e. the carbon emitted by burning plant oils is absorbed from the atmosphere by the plants when they are growing, they still emit carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change, as well as destroying biodiversity and the survival of rural communities.

Of course technology can sometimes be life-saving, but – as the Tribunal concluded – it will not bring sustainability and social justice where political and economic power remains in the hands of corporations and their government allies, who will ultimately defend the accumulation of wealth and the possession of political power in few but strong hands. A solution to climate change and other forms of dispossession means peoples’ sovereignty over resources and a radical change in the way societies define and organise their aims with regards to their means. The real solutions are social, political, economic and cultural, and will be proposed by communities fighting for their survival and social movements advocating peoples’ sovereignty.

Numerous participants at the Tribunal also pointed out that, if these struggles are to be successful, ecological activists need to join together with people involved in other struggles against the dominant economic and political model. One achievement of power has been to make social movements believe that we are involved in separate struggles around single issues (such as poverty, war, gender, sexuality, human rights, the environment and so on). There’s not point waiting for or trusting solutions coming from the establishment, which ultimately will defend the accumulation of wealth and the ongoing holding of political power in few but very strong hands.

Although people in Britain are mobilising around climate chaos and groups like Rising Tide do see this as an issue of social injustice and are critical of business-led solutions, it seems that the connections with social movements and communities fighting for survival in the ‘global south’ are still waiting to be made. In Britain the Rising Tide network probably does have a fairly unique approach to climate change, but the Tribunal highlighted that social movements in Colombia and other parts of the world have shared that approach for a long time.

In Spanish, people talk a lot about ‘articulation’ between social movements – which conveys the idea of social movements modifying part of their identity in order to take aspects of the demands and identity of other movements. So we’re passing on the call from Colombia that for international and cross-cultural links of solidarity against climate change and capitalist globalisation (not just because we’re tired of the rain and our clothes smelling of wee).

(Confession: quite a lot of this was copied and pasted from a report I wrote with Guayabo for Indymedia. See http://www.bristol.indymedia.org/newswire.php?story_id=26987)