“We are now living outside of the laws of nature where nature is now turning against man and becoming the enemy.” The Kogi Mamas
Last week the latest efforts to head off climate change started in
Lima, Peru. The aim of this latest conference (the twentieth, would you
believe) is to produce a draft agreement on action, to be finalised in
Paris next year. With time running out it doesn’t look hopeful. The
world is silent.
In 1990 Alan Ereira made a film for the BBC,
The Heart of the World: Elder Brother’s Warning.
In it the Kogi people of Columbia, having seen serious signs of climate
change in their territory, issued a plea to the rest of us: stop living
in our thoughtless, selfish way and wake up to what we were doing to
the Earth. (After so many years of it being available online, in the
last week this film has become unavailable due to “copyright issues”.
Had it suddenly been resurrected by climate campaigners, and has been
taken off by the powers that be because of the Lima Climate Conference?)
Apart from a procession of New Age eco-tourists flying out to
Columbia thinking, wrongly, that the Kogi would welcome them, few took
any real notice and they were soon forgotten. Some years later Alan
visited Glastonbury with an updated film. The Assembly Rooms were full;
almost all were young people asking questions about the Kogi’s sex
lives. What? The Earth is being ruined and they wanted to know how the
Kogi people screwed? I despaired.
I still despair at times, because the indigenous people of Central
and South America are showing us the way ahead, if only we’d listen.
Many of their countries have been paupered because of corporate-friendly
interventions by the IMF and the World Bank. The result, to the
annoyance of the US, is an increasing number of left-wing, socialist
governments.
Indigenous people have died in their hundreds trying to protect rain
forests from ranching, illegal logging, and mining, oil and gas
companies, the latest death just days before
a planned protest at the Lima talks. How convenient.
In 1994, in the Chiapas region of southern Mexico, the
Zapatista revolution took
place. These indigenous people objected to powerful outsiders taking
control of their land via the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) – ‘free trade’ standing for corporate profit. They haven’t yet
won their battle. On the other hand the Mexican government has failed
to control them. The Zapatistas govern by consultation. The decision
to take up arms was a collective decision. They do not elect leaders;
they
select those who will best voice community views, something the government could not understand, as the film
A Place Called Chiapas showed.
The US has tried to extend NAFTA into the Free Trade Area of the Americas (
FTAA).
There were massive demonstrations. Over 10 million Brazilians voted to
withdraw from the negotiations. While governments negotiate, the
people know that such deals will damage their lives and their beloved
Earth. There are
current trade agreements and almost all of them sideline the US and its corporate plans.
The
Campesinos have created a worldwide movement of peasant farmers, indigenous peoples and fishermen from small beginnings in
Paraguay, where they ‘illegally’ took over land in order to grow their food. Workers in
Brazil,
Argentina and elsewhere took over factories closed by absentee owners.
Many ‘peoples movements’ started in the Americas and right now members from across the world are attending the
Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change,
running parallel to the UN climate talks in Lima, parallel because
their voices won’t be heard at the ‘big table’. Neither will
young people be heard even though they will suffer more from climate change than those producing all the hot air. Other activists were
prevented from attending but then, even the UK climate change Minister, Amber Rudd,
has been barred from going.
And the talks themselves are almost invisible in the mainstream
media. Apart from the environment-friendly Guardian, only the Wall
Street Journal and the Financial Times featured articles about it in the
first week. Obviously the ‘economics’ of climate change are more
important than the future of the planet.
The LA Times limped in with a story about clashes between rich and
poor nations slowing down the talks. But that was basically it. The UN
News site had several items, it being a UN Conference. All other news
came from activists’ websites. The message? People care; power and
politics don’t. They will simply go on making money as long as they are
able
To see how determined indigenous people can be in trying to protect their resources and the Earth, one should look at Bolivia.
In 2000 many Bolivians fought against a private water company taking control of their water. The
Water War lasted
for four months, at the end of which the company fled and later
presented a large bill (compensation for lost profits) which remains
unpaid. This was followed in 2003 by a
Gas War, when the Bolivians resisted the corporate interests that wanted their vast natural gas resources.
This conflict rumbled on until 2005, when the millionaire President,
known for
speaking Spanish with an American accent, resigned. An indigenous
left-wing politician, active in the Water and Gas Wars, was becoming
prominent – Evo Morales. He was elected President and a whole new
agenda appeared. Suddenly people were demanding rights for Mother
Earth.
In 2009 Morales, backed by other nations, addressed the UN General Assembly in a
heartfelt speech,
pointing out that it is no use discussing the effects of the financial,
energy, food or climate change crises, without ever looking at the
cause:
“The origin of this crisis is the exaggerated
accumulation of capital in far too few hands. It is the permanent
removal of natural resources and the commercialization of Mother Earth…
Mother Earth gives life, water, natural resources, oxygen and
everything that supports the well being of our people. If we talk, work
and fight for the well being of our people we first have to guarantee
the well being of Mother Earth; otherwise it will be impossible to
guarantee the well being of our citizens. Mother Earth, Planet Earth,
will exist without human life, but human life cannot exist without
Mother Earth.”
He sought a UN treaty that gave legal rights to Mother Earth. He
asked for three things: that developed countries pay the climate debt
they owe; that there should be a Court of Climate Justice; and that
nations must declare and expand the rights of Mother Earth’s natural
regeneration. We’re still waiting on all that, but the UN did
designate 22 April as International Mother Earth Day. So that’s okay then.
In April 2010 Bolivia hosted a
World Peoples Conference in
Cochabamba. 35,000 people came from all over the world. It produced a
Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. This was followed
by an international gathering in Ecuador at which the
Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was formed.
In 2011 Bolivia passed into law an act protecting the rights of Mother Earth. It then took a
draft treaty to the UN, prompting outrage among all the right-wing corporate interests. Last year, during a
dialogue on harmony with nature ,
the General Assembly called yet again for real and rapid action that
would protect the Earth and the future existence of humanity.
Also last year, a UN meeting on the rights of the indigenous peoples produced a
document simply
‘inviting’, ‘requesting’ or ‘encouraging’ governments and corporations
to listen to, engage with and recognise the knowledge that indigenous
people have to offer. More hot air and no action. In June this year
Morales hosted a
G77 Summit which produced a Declaration titled “For a New World Order for Living Well”.
Unknown to the average person there have
many attempts,
some successful, to bring our treatment of the Earth within the law.
What Morales and his fellows have done is to keep pushing the Earth’s
rights into the debates. But debates alone will not heal the Earth or
guarantee our future.
And all this is looked upon with scorn by our governments and their
corporate allies. Who cares about peoples’ movements or Bolivia? And
Morales himself is the first full-blood indigenous leader, for God’s
Sake! What does he know about running the world? Come to that, what
does man’s world have to do with Mother Earth?
But indigenous people know how the Earth runs. Slowly we others are
realising that we can’t own the Earth, or the water, the air, the
forests and plains, or the fish in the sea. The Earth doesn’t belong to
us. If anything, the reverse is true; we belong to it, a position the
developed world spurns at its peril.
Will Lima produce anything other than another fudge? I doubt it.
Corporate interests still dictate our future and we are deaf to the
indigenous voices. And as Jared Diamond showed in
Collapse, civilisations have died out because of trashing their environments. We are now trashing the whole Earth.
Man’s drive to ‘develop’, his inventions that require yet more
resources, his desire to own everything in sight, to put his interests
before those of any other life forms – all this has led to an Earth
stripped of its flora and fauna, and its mineral riches without which we
cannot sustain our current way of life. Rivers run dry while the seas
rise.
We will not kill life on the Earth; life is here and will evolve in
strange and wonderful ways. But we are destroying everything that we
have come to know and love. And while the Earth weeps and begs for our
attention the world of men is silent in its selfishness.
