Earthbytes

Morales: 'The Central Enemy of Mother Earth is Capitalism' | CommonDreams.org

"The main cause of the destruction of the planet Earth is capitalism and in the towns where we have lived, where we respected this Mother Earth, we all have the ethics and the moral right to say here that the central enemy of Mother Earth is capitalism," said Morales, who is Bolivia's first fully indigenous head of state in the 470 years since the Spanish invasion.

Morales is the leader of a political party called Movimiento al Socialismo, the Movement for Socialism, which aims to give more power to the country's indigenous and poor communities by means of land reforms and redistribution of wealth from natural resources such as gas.

"The capitalist system looks to obtain the maximum possible gain, promoting unlimited growth on a finite planet," said Morales. "Capitalism is the source of asymmetries and imbalance in the world."

via www.commondreams.org

Planeta o Muerte — Evo Morales and the Revolutionary Politics of Mother Earth - World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth

In a 21rst century twist on “Revolucion o Muerte” (Revolution or Death), the slogan that powered Latin American revolutionary movements of the 60’s and 70’s, the generally soft-spoken Morales opened the conference by shouting “Planeta o Muerte!” (Planet or Death). Morales slogan drew raucous responses from the diverse and mostly dark-skinned crowd filling a stadium that bore more flags of indigenous nations than it did of nation states like Bolivia. Having sung just prior to Morales invocation the song “Oye-amigo-tu-tierra-esta-en-peligro” (Listen friend, your earth is in danger), a variation on the Spanish language version of “The people united will never be defeated”, the crowd was ready to accept Morales’ challenge.

via envivo.cmpcc.org.bo

Cathie's notes: Great article that highlights key issues that brought people to Bolivia for the People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

This is What Development Looks Like?, or Better Dead than REDD? « Climate Connections

Somewhere at the heart of this gathering, and in the buzz one hears in conversations in the crowded conference rooms, are profound contradictions that must be confronted in constructing the “other world” that the global social movements insist is possible. Yesterday at the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a call for Member States “to promote development while respecting the values and traditions of indigenous peoples.” Yet what does this mean in practical terms? Of all the challenges to dominant paradigms that exist among the social movements, perhaps the most profound is the challenge to the concept of development itself.

via climatevoices.wordpress.com

Cathie's notes: Follow the World People's Conference at Climate Connections here, or their Conference Twitter feed here.

Will new hydrogen sulfide rules keep their rotten smell?

I found this article yesterday at Environmental Leader:

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is considering requiring industrial facilities, including concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), to report releases of hydrogen sulfide to the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) under the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA). This action is consistent with EPA’s targeting CAFOs for priority enforcement of other environmental laws. Further, if EPA takes final action on this proposal, as appears likely, owners and operators of CAFOs will have to track, measure and publicly disclose hydrogen sulfide emissions. Finally, this action may portend additional regulatory requirements for CAFOs and increased scrutiny by environmental and citizen’s groups.

via www.environmentalleader.com

CAFO's can inflict major impacts on air and watersheds, and for many years escaped tighter pollutant discharge regulation than other industries. A requirement for industries to notify the public when this particular stinky, toxic gas escapes their operations has been in limbo since 1994 under an "administrative stay" by the EPA.

In February this year, the EPA released a notice of intent to consider lifting the stay and open the issue of reporting under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) to public comments (now due by May 12, 2010). EPA says this reconsideration of the administrative stay is based on completion of their review of new data that became available after their initial listing of H₂S on their Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) list in December of 1993:

EPA’s technical evaluation concluded that hydrogen sulfide can reasonably be anticipated to cause chronic health effects in humans and can reasonably be anticipated to cause, because of its toxicity, significant adverse effects in aquatic organisms. In addition, EPA does not believe that an exposure assessment is appropriate for determining whether hydrogen sulfide meets the EPCRA section 313 listing criteria for chronic human health effects or environmental effects. Based on these findings, EPA believes that there is no basis for continuing the Administrative Stay of the reporting requirements for hydrogen sulfide, and that the Administrative Stay should therefore be lifted.

These feed lot operations are not the only sources of hydrogen sulfide (H₂S). The EPA notice lists some 64 industries (by NAICS code) that "may be affected" by the new rule. I spent some time tracking down some of the codes listed in the April 14th notice, but it's not that easy to tell, at this point, how many industries known to release H₂S will actually have to comply.

I was especially interested to find out if the proposed rule would apply to natural gas drilling. For people who live near oil and natural gas drilling, production and processing operations, the answer could be a matter of life and death. H₂S is of interest because of its connection to "sour gas" -- natural gas containing hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide or mercaptans (used in comparatively small quantities to add a detectable odor to propane and natural gas).

Exposure to sour gas has caused human and animal deaths, as well as illness and birth defects. There are also significant social, economic and environmental justice issues involved. According to a 2007 report of the Oil and Gas Accountability Project (Earthworks):

Hydrogen sulfide leaks are another serious air quality concern resulting from oil and gas development. In 1997, Carol Browner, former Administrator of the EPA admitted in no uncertain terms that hydrogen sulfide was eliminated from the Clean Air Act list of extremely hazardous substances by powerful oil and gas lobbying. This elimination occurred in spite of the EPA study, Hydrogen Sulfide Air Emissions Associated with the Extraction of Oil and Natural Gas, which documented a large number of oil and gas related accidents occurring in North America and concluded that accidental releases of hydrogen sulfide pose a great risk to public health. [page 14, paragraph 2 and footnotes]

I'm wondering if the oil and gas industry has already weaseled their way out of accountability for some H₂S releases under the proposed rule. I did not find their NAIC code listed in the EPA notice, although there is the caveat, noted by EPA, that the list there is not exhaustive. I'm planning to ask EPA about oil and gas drilling specifically before I submit my comments. I'll post any answer I get as an update to this blog.

Here are some links to explore if you are interested in some of the economic, social and environmental justice issues involved:

Barbara Sha Cox leads the statewide fight against CAFOs

Earthworks Hydrogen Sulfide page

The Oil and Gas Industry's Exclusions and Exemptions to Major Environmental Statutes (pdf)

Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board sour gas info gateway

H2S Q and A page - Michigan DEQ

Drayton Valley Women Finally Get Their Say on Sour Gas Wells

The Smell of Money: British Columbia's Gas Rush (has a great cartoon)

Alberta Gas: Battle Over Wells Wages in Pristine Valley

Gas Leaks Sour Landowners

The April 14th Federal Register EPA H₂S notice (pdf) can be accessed here.

Lands, sacred spaces part of US human rights review « SpeakEasy

The “listening session” held by the U.S. State Department on March 16 at the University of New Mexico Law School drew more than 100 Native leaders, legal scholars and human rights activists, many of whom called on the United States to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Testimony from presenters spanned an array of key issues including rights to self-determination, land, natural resources, sacred sites and religious freedom.

via blogs.alternet.org

Cathie's notes: Lands and sacred spaces  is an important environmental justice issue for many people and communities.  Valerie Taliman's article has plenty of links to other info.

Environmental Protection: Moving toward a higher law

Reading Paul Verhaeghe's On Being Normal and Other Disorders a few years ago had a profound impact on the way I think about myself as a psychoanalyst, Earth citizen, and activist for social and environmental justice. At about the same time, I was researching the impact of surface coal mining on Tennessee's headwaters.

During this process, I had some Eureka! moments of intersection between these fields of knowledge that seemed to spiral around Verhaeghe's main thesis: Our psychological identity is co-created with that of an "other" (say, a parent, a culture, a nation, a planet). If this is so, argues Verhaeghe, then the way we define any deviation from "normal" must also acknowledge that pathology is based on this self-other matrix and does not rest upon (or within) just one of the subjects.

In everyday life, such an idea is not of much consequence unless we want to "fix" a "problem." Then we have to remind ourselves that all treatment approaches depend upon a therapeutic relationship to be effective.

My Eureka! moment had to do with a realization that this healing principle operates whether I am working as a psychoanalyst to alleviate the suffering of a person, or as an activist to alleviate the exploitation and oppression of people and nature.

An example that came to mind was the difficulty activists often have when we engage with governmental and legal systems around protection of our homelands. Just as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) names psychological suffering in a way that takes us further from the sufferer, so does the naming of remedies in the limited language of environmental policy and law take us further away from the trauma of exploitation.

NWP 21 hearing in Knoxville, TN on October 13, 2009 [photo by Cathie Bird]

As I have written in other posts, the formulation of arguments in that setting is forced to mesh with the language of the laws that govern environmental assessment, regulation and enforcement. In recent years, political and regulatory bodies have claimed to make a space for "environmental justice" but, to date, we still have many examples of failure to protect land, air and water, in spite of our testimony.

I think we can look at these failed environmental "treatments" in the same way as failed therapies. Somehow, our diagnoses have been pinned to an environmental equivalent of the DSM. We need a new way of doing things that allows all parties in the relationship to be a subject in this intersubjective process. My "!" at the end of Eureka was that we have failed as a human collective to protect the environment because we have failed to see land, air, water, plants, animals  as subjects – as opposed to objects -- that not only exist, know and act, but have a right to do so.

For a time on the North American continent, this higher law was known and lived by citizens of the First Nations. After initiation of First Nations genocide by European colonists, governing documents and laws of the United States evolved to protect white male privilege. To the extent we allow such laws to remain on the books, we collectively and unconsciously endorse structural racism that inherently denies subjective freedom, especially for people of color and our shared environment. Environmental law specialist, Robin Craig, says that until citizen's rights to a clean and healthy environment are amended to the U.S. Constitution, it’s likely that scientific, economic and social justice will fail to receive due consideration.

Our collective task now is to figure and feel our way out of this mess. And though we don't often hear about it through mainstream media – or our public schools -- there is a lot of evidence that all has not been lost.

The ancient wisdom of a higher law continues to be held in trust for the national collective by our brothers and sisters of the First Nations and other Indigenous peoples of Earth. As a start we could demand that our local, state and federal governments at least consider the protection-production model of relationship to the environment practiced by First Nations citizens.

Earth and its citizens are moving – however slowly -- toward higher ground, though much of this journey and its long history remain unconscious. Which brings me back to Verhaeghe. In his Preface, Verhaeghe describes a certain polarization of surface and depth, with a pendulum's swing between what information has more value: what we can see at the surface or what is hidden but operates on human consciousness nonetheless.

"The sheer complexity of human behavior," notes Verhaeghe, "demands that we reconsider the nonvisible mental constructions directing it.”

So far -- in my own psychoanalytic explorations of humankind's relationship to nature -- it seems clear that such a process is a key to discovery of mental, emotional, structural and spiritual resistance that prevents planet-wide liberation of people and nature.

t r u t h o u t | Indigenous Peoples Fight for Rights, Buoyed by New Report

A grandmother of seven, Colleen Swan, along with 400 members of her Eskimo community are preparing to leave their homes on the 8-mile barrier reef off the coast of the Chukchi Sea in Alaska.

The sea ice that once protected the Kivalina village melts quickly because of rising temperatures which also cause storms, flooding and changes in the migratory patterns of the animals needed for subsistence hunting.

“We’re angry, we shouldn't have to live like this,” said Swan, when reached by phone in Alaska. “Our impact on the environment is minimal but we live with the reality of climate change.”

via www.truthout.org

Cathie's notes: This is a great article that quotes several Indigenous people speaking for themselves, as one person puts it. There's nothing like hearing from folks on the front lines to help make Earth changes real in the hearts and minds of people who are not yet being so directly affected. Once a thing is real in one's heart -- that another human being is suffering -- it is harder to ignore the situation and not help change it.

See the whole article here.

See the UN report (a little more than 250 MB) here or view the document's release page here.

Are 'Carbon Cowboys' Running Amok With Cap and Trade Speculation? | | AlterNet

The worldwide carbon market for forests is ripe for corruption, experts say.

"We consider that the carbon trading market is vulnerable to fraud on a number of fronts," said Peter Younger, environment crimes specialist of Interpol, the world's largest policing agency.

"UK cases involving VAT fraud have already been uncovered," he told SolveClimate. "And we are aware of two other significant investigations involving forgery of land deeds to claim ownership of remote forest and subsequent acquisition and sale of carbon credits."

via www.alternet.org

Cathie's notes: This is a long article, but interesting in that the picture of what can go wrong with "cap and trade" is slowly being fleshed out in more articles and reports from around the world.

Here are links to some of my previous posts on cap and trade:

New Video Details Cap and Trade's Devils

(I took the video trailer out of the sidebar but you can see the whole thing here.)

Carbon Markets Threaten Indigenous People's Rights

You can read about an alternative idea, Cap and Dividend, here. There are two free downloads (scroll down towards the bottom of the page), both excellent resources that explain different economic alternatives to deal with CO2 reduction, as well as other articles and information.

Climate Change from the voice of Indigenous Peoples (vimeo)

via vimeo.com

Cathie's notes: I'm working on some longer posts on indigenous paradigms for living on Earth and why grassroots activists -- no matter what our focus, be it energy, climate, water, mountaintop removal or whatever -- need to be sure that solutions that look good from one point of view are also consistent with indigenous Earth wisdom. I hope to have some of these ready for posting soon. Until then...

I found this video by following links sent by a friend for Robby Romero's Prayer Song.

This video and others from Robby and Native Children's Survival (NCS) are also available on Eagle Thunder Entertainment's vimeo or YouTube channel pages.

The Native Children's Survival page at their website has lots of interesting links and information on the environment and indigenous rights.

Carbon Markets Violate Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Threaten Cultural Survival -- IEN Newsletter

Indigenous leader kidnapped and forced at gunpoint to surrender carbon rights for REDD in Papua New Guinea

 

For More Information Contact:

Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director

Indigenous Environmental Network

(218)760-0442

 

New York, USA --- As carbon traders hawk permits to pollute at the Second Annual Carbon Trading Summit, Indigenous Peoples denounced that selling the sky not only corrupts the sacred but also destroys the climate, violates human rights and threatens cultural survival.  

"Carbon trading and carbon offsets are a crime against humanity and Creation," said Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network. “The sky is sacred. This carbon market insanity privatizes the air and sells it to climate criminals like Shell so they can continue to pollute and destroy the climate and our future, rather than reducing their emissions at source.”

 

“This Carbon Traitors’ Summit comes on the heels of the failed UN Copenhagen climate conference which put forests in carbon markets by creating a mechanism called REDD or REDD-plus (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).” According to Goldtooth, “Most of the forests of the world are found in Indigenous Peoples’ land. REDD-type projects have already caused land grabs, killings, violent evictions and forced displacement, violations of human rights, threats to cultural survival, militarization and servitude.”

 

A recent World News Australia television exposé sheds light on the risks of REDD, carbon traders and the shocking kidnapping of a Papuan New Guinea native leader. Abilie Wape, a leader of the Kamula Doso Peoples claims he was forced at gun point to surrender the carbon rights of his tribe’s forest.  Watch Video: CLICK HERE

 

A visibly shaken Wape told reporters, "They came and got me in the night… police came with a gun. They threatened me. They forced me to get in the vehicle. Then we came in the night to the hotel. They told me, “You sign. Otherwise, if you don’t sign, I’ll get a police and lock you up.”

 

via www.mynewsletterbuilder.com

See the Indigenous Environmental Network's Carbon Trading, Carbon Offsets and REDD page here. The news release above is available as a word or pdf (in both English and Espanol!) document on that page. Lot's of videos and other information as well.