Celebrations of Earth Day has garnered some more of the world's attention to the environmental crisis threatening the health of the global community and our planet, but we must not forget that working towards a sustainable future is a responsibility that will require dedication all 365 days of the year. And while some corporations have jumped on the eco-bandwagon in an attempt to attract the green consumer, we would like to call attention to the unsung heroes. The individuals, communities, and national leaders who have continually shown a dedication to environmental activism, not driven by profit or personal gain, but by the mission of ensuring we have something to celebrate in the decades to come. We, along with our partner Rainforest Alliance, encourage you to join them, because even though there may be little acclaim for the individual in doing the right thing for the planet, your efforts will lead to rewards that extend far beyond your time.
Environmental advocates from around the world gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia, this week and resolved that, a year from now, they would hold a world's people referendum on climate change to marshal support for the rights of the planet.
"Although it is hoped that some states will cooperate, the participation of governments will not be essential to the referendum, as civil society organizations are to plan it according to their own lights and the traditions and customs of each local area," reports Franz Chavez for Inter Press Service.
The conference's democratic, citizen-oriented format starkly contrasted with March's United Nations-led summit in Copenhagen. The conference at Cochabamba emphasized inclusion and a diversity of voices, providing an antidote to processes like the U.N. climate negotiations, where smaller countries were excluded from key discussions.
No official United States delegation attended the conference, but this week, the country held its own celebration of the environment: the 40th annual Earth Day. On Thursday, arguments over climate change were put on pause, as environmental leaders recognized both accomplishments and the unfinished business of cleaning up the air, land, and water.
"Environmentalism isn't such a mysterious thing anymore. People are looking more at environmental values as being things that are tangible and relate to how we live our lives," Pete Carrels of the South Dakota Sierra Club told Public News Service.
The mystery, now, lies in finding a way to shore up defenses against old environmental hazards-dirty water, dirty air, diminishing resources-and to agree on a path towards a low-carbon future that avoids the worst calamities of climate change.
At Cochabamba
"Bolivian music, indigenous ceremonies and the Bolivian army's honor guard were on hand to greet the first indigenous president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales," Democracy Now! reported from Tiquipaya, the town just outside Cochabamba where the actual conference is being held.
In a stadium crowded with fifteen thousand people, President Morales opened the event Tuesday morning with exhortations to choose life for the planet. Franz Chavez of Inter Press Service reports:
"The stadium, ablaze with the multi-coloured traditional garments of different Andean and Amazonian native communities and the flags of people from different countries around the world that contrasted with the cold formality of presidential summits, served as the stage for Morales, of Aymara descent, to call for an "inter-continental movement" in defence of Mother Earth."
You can get a sense of the atmosphere in this GRITtv report or the below video from Yes! Magazine.
vimeo]
Too many cooks?
One of the main goals of the summit was to draft a "universal declaration of rights of Mother Earth," envisioned as a complement to the United Nations declaration on human rights. There were also 17 working groups that dealt with issues like climate migrants, the Kyoto protocol, and technology transfer. Any conference participant could participate in up to five working groups.
The open format was, at times, chaotic. Cormac Cullinan, an environmental lawyer from South Africa who provide the baseline text for the declaration of rights, told Democracy Now! that on one day of the conference four hundred people were contributing revisions to the text. Another day, that number jumped to one thousand.
"The challenge is to make sure we integrated all the different comments and point of view," he said. "We're essentially expressing an entirely new world view from an indigenous perspective in legal language."
Many voices, but what are the solutions?
Elizabeth Cooper affirms this emphasis on a diversity of voices in a report for Yes! Magazine. "This issue of valuing the knowledge and abilities of indigenous peoples and those from the South was an undercurrent to the rest of the afternoon as it is to the Summit as a whole," she writes.
But this scale of participation also meant that conversations could veer from essential topics. Also at Yes! Magazine, Jim Shultz asks, "If forcing rich countries to pay a climate debt is a dead end, what is the plan to move "climate debt" from a catchy idea to a real proposal with a chance of delivering some results?"
"At a workshop today on that topic, there was an abundance of declarations about why climate debt is important, but few ideas of how to make it real," he reports.
The need
There's a need, though, for people to participate in these discussions, even if the conversations don't take a smooth and tidy course. At The Nation, Naomi Klein writes that "Bolivia's climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness."
At a conference like Copenhagen, the worries and priorities of smaller countries were ultimately excluded from the debate. In Bolivia, Klein explains, glaciers-the water source for two major cities-are melting. Yet that problem did not earn the country a place in the Copenhagen discussions that could determine its fate. Cochabamba's goals were, in part, to reestablish a more democratic system for decision-making about climate reform.
As Regina Cornwell documents at the Women's Media Center, left to its own devices, international bodies like the United Nations easily exclude interested groups from the conversation.
"In early March, just as the entire area of Manhattan around the UN was crawling with women wearing their blue Conference for the Status of Women tags, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced a "High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing" composed exclusively of men," she writes.
Earth Day 2010
The conferees at Cochabamba traveled to Bolivia because they saw a gap in leadership after UN climate talks at Copenhagen crumbled. The ideas developed this week could prompt the world's leaders towards brave action on climate change. Strong leadership can make the difference between real change and status quo.
At The Nation, John Nichols reflects on the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson, who helped create Earth Day. Nelson, was "a bold progressive who recognized the need to make the health and welfare of human beings, in the United States and abroad, a priority over the profits of multinational corporations," he writes. Nelson's vision for Earth Day was to produce an outpouring of empathy for the environment "so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy."
It worked. The first Earth Day is credited with driving action on the environmental institutions that still protect Americans today: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency.
Today's leaders
Today, other leaders are fighting the same fight as Nelson did. At Cochabamba, these climate leaders, profiled by Colorlines, are marshaling their communities to push back against global warming, as are these conference-goers. They lack official titles but are leading nonetheless. Young people, like those honored by the Brower Youth Award, are coming up with amazing ideas to ensure a healthy future for the planet, reports LinkTV. At The Progressive, Winona LaDuke explains how native communities are working to produce a new energy economy.
And all over the world, individuals are working to minimize their impact and the impact of their societies on the environment. AlterNet suggests "five ways you can help save life on earth," and Care2 has two other suggestions: eat less meat and reduce use of water bottles.
For more inspiration, check out the climate rally on Sunday, April 25 on the Mall in Washington, DC; organizers are promising the largest climate rally ever, along with an awesome line-up of speakers and performers.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
It's Earth Day and in addition to all of the other lists advising you to turn off the lights, get green power, and pay attention to what you are buying (all of which are very important) there are five more concrete things you need to do today, that can have a huge impact on the health of the planet. Best of all, they will take you about 10 minutes.
Let's begin.
1. Call Senator Harry Reid at 202-224-3542.
Senator Reid gets it. He said that clean energy and climate legislation 'may be the most important policy we ever pass.' He is going to be facing a TON of pressure to compromise, and accept half-measures. He needs to know that you have his back on passing a comprehensive bill to bolster clean energy and address climate change.
California passed a bill back in 2006 that would bring its greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. It is easily the most aggressive climate law in the country, and it could pave the way for other states and other nations to follow suit - BUT Valero, Tesoro, and other big oil interests are trying to pull an Enron and dupe the people of California into passing a proposition that would stop the whole thing.
Whether you are in California or not, sign up and lend a hand.
Yep, join them on Facebook too. I can't emphasize how critical this will be for the country. If California, the 8th largest economy in the world can get a handle on its emissions (not to mention reap the HUGE benefits that will come with the 2 million jobs and billion in investments that are already starting to show up there), it will show the rest of the world, that it can be done, and that doing it will make us all better-off.
4. Join the boycott of big oil companies who meddle in state politics.
Write Valero, an email, and let them know you will be boycotting them until they keep their dirty money out of state politics.
5. Share this blog on your Facebook and Twitter.
Lets face it, this stuff only works if we are aggressive about increasing the numbers of people who take actions like these. If you want to get credit yourself, I hereby give you permission to post this blog under your name.
Let's get serious about doing all we can for our planet now. Thanks for reading and thanks for getting in action!
With the 40th anniversary of Earth Day just around the corner, a renewed sense of activism and attention is cast around the present state of our natural environment. What started as a local grassroots effort to increase environmental awareness and provoke action from our political leaders has not only led to significant policy changes, but has also developed into an international celebration of our planet. As we remember what this day first meant, it is important we not only look back on our past with a critical eye, but also look at our world with the hope that is needed to make the future better than today. We, along with our partner Rainforest Alliance, are calling on you to take the action needed to help make that dream a reality. Because as the recent events involving the rainforest show us, we hold the power for both tremendous improvement and colossal destruction.
On Monday, climate activists, nonprofit leaders, and governmental officials will gather in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to look for new ideas to address climate change. The conference, organized by leading social organizations like 350.0rg, "will advocate the right to "live well," as opposed to the economic principle of uninterrupted growth," as Inter Press Service explains. In the absence of real leadership from the world's governments, the conferees at Cochabamba are looking for solutions "committed to the rights of people and environment."
The United States certainly isn't stepping up. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), were supposed to release their climate legislation next week, just in time for Earth Day. But yesterday the word came down that the release was being pushed back by another week, to April 26.
No matter when it finally arrives, like other recent environmental initiatives, this round of climate legislation falls short. Even if Congress manages to pass a bill-and there's no guarantee-it will likely leave plenty of room for the coal, oil, and gas industries to continue pouring carbon into the atmosphere. And a wimpy effort from Congress will hinder international work to limit carbon emissions: As a prime polluter, the United States needs to put forward a real plan for change.
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman
Although the text of the bill is not public yet, it is likely that this attempt at Senate climate legislation will limit carbon emissions only among utilities and gradually phase in other sectors of the economy. On Democracy Now!, environmentalist Bill McKibben called the bill "an incredible accumulation of gifts to all the energy industries, in the hopes that they won't provide too much opposition to what's a very weak greenhouse gas pact."
Climate reform began with a leaner idea, a cap-and-trade system that limited carbon emissions while encouraging innovation. The Nation's editors document the transformation of climate reform from the Obama administration's original cap-and-trade proposal to the behemoth tangle it has become. Both the House and the Senate fattened their versions of climate legislation with treats for the energy industry. The Senate's new idea to gradually expand emissions reduction through a bundle of energy bills only opens up more opportunities for influence.
"Some of these pieces of legislation may pass; others may fail; all are ripe for gaming by corporate lobbies," the editors write. "Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also skew subsidies in the wrong direction, throwing billions at "clean coal" technologies, nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, a questionable gambit favored by the Obama administration to garner support from Republicans and representatives from oil-, gas- and coal-producing states."
Even with these goodies, the climate bill may not pass. The Washington Independent rounds up the D.C. players to watch as the next fight unfolds, including the Chamber of Commerce's William Kovacs and the Environmental Protection Agency's Lisa Jackson.
Green leftovers
In theory, the climate bill should not be America's only ride to a greener future. But the other vehicles for green change choked during start-up. The EPA was going to regulate carbon emissions, but Congress has reared against that effort. The climate bill could snatch away that power from the executive branch.
If companies won't limit their carbon emissions, individuals still have the option for action. But as Heather Rogers explains in The Nation, carbon offsets, one of the most popular mechanisms for minimizing carbon use "are a dubious enterprise."
"To begin with, they don't cut greenhouse gases immediately but only over the life of a project, and that can take years--some tree-planting efforts need a century to do the work. And a project is effective only if it's successfully followed through; trees can die or get cut down, unforeseen ecological destruction might be triggered or the projects may simply go unbuilt."
The pull of carbon offsets should diminish as energy use in buildings, cars, food, and flights gains in efficiency and uses less carbon. But if the green jobs sector is any indication, that revolution has been slow in coming. ColorLines reports that "there are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills-in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago-and who nonetheless can't find jobs."
Cochabamba's unique approach
These failures and setbacks don't just affect Americans; they keep our leaders from negotiating with their international peers. The United Nations led a conference last winter in Copenhagen that promised to hash out carbon limits, yet produced no binding agreement. This coming winter, the UN will try again in Mexico, but if the United States shows up with the scant plan put forward by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman, those negotiations have little promise.
In Cochabamba, leaders from inside and outside the government will attend a summit to discuss the future of climate change action. In The Progressive, Teo Ballve writes that,
"One of the bolder ideas is the creation of a global climate justice tribunal that could serve as an enforcement mechanism. And conference participants are already working on a "Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights" meant to parallel the U.N.'s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948."
With U.S. government action paling, it might take outside ideas like these to revitalize the push towards a green future. By the end of next week, we'll see if the Cochabamba group made any more progress than the bigwigs at Copenhagen.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Seriously. It was a primary last Tuesday. No one in the world of hardcore election geekery was going to be distracted by some trivial thing like the fate of the planet. But indeed, the 22nd of April was also Earth Day, when people who aren't election geeks pretend to be distracted by the fate of the planet -- a thing to which so much importance is accorded that it gets an entire 1/365th of the calendar devoted to paying it lip service.
If I sound bitter about that, it's only because I am.
Also, since I was off engaged in election geekery and all manner of making a living/moving house type endeavors last week, I didn't say much of anything about it, either. (Yes, my finger is already pointing back at me, save yourself the effort.) So here's the news from a few people who did ...
- Check out Celsias' netroots Earth Day podcast and a look at our amazing buildup of electronic waste.
- The coal industry has principles. If you guessed that those principles are organized around ensuring the continued existence and profitability of the coal industry, you get a lollipop.
- Some House allies have principles, too. They're not perfect, but hey, they'll give you a little hope if you clicked over to see what the coal industry would have in store for all of us.
- Some people spent Earth Day getting a date with Citi executives to fly over the mountaintop removal their bank is funding.
- Other people were celebrating milestones in changing the institutions they're part of.
- The EcoCity World Summit was held by other people who also don't want a green future to mean a mud hut future.
- Even pine beetles can contribute to global warming. Frak.
- Here are a bunch of things you can do to prevent poisoning your pets with common household toxins. For one, don't overheat your non-stick pans, it can kill your birds. For another, avoid using insecticide on your lawn, it can damage pets' nervous systems. But I'm sure all that stuff they mention is perfectly harmless to humans. (Courtesy, an ad at I Can Has Cheezburger)
- An instructional designer for corporate training considers her profession's environmental impact: "Did you know that you would need to plant just over 200 trees to offset one year of CO2 emissions for a small PC training room equipped with 20 PCs, 1 laser printer, and 1 photocopier (all ENERGY STAR rated)?" Huh. Well, I did not know that.
Anyway, happy belated Earth Day. We will now return to your regularly scheduled election wonkery.
