People’s Movement for Mother Earth Rights
More than 35,000 people from around the world gathered at the “World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth” held in Cochabamba, Bolivia this past April. Bolivia’s indigenous President, Evo Morales, called the conference in response to the failure of world leaders to provide leadership at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 15) held last December in Copenhagen. The participants succumbed to a corporate agenda producing a non-binding and weak accord that will potentially increase global warming by more than 2 ° C, and threaten all life on this planet. The predictable outcome would be increasingly dramatic climate change, millions of environmental refugees, dramatic impact on global food production, and increasing global instability.
In contrast to the gulag gray and somber crowd-controlled Copenhagen accords, the colorful and chaotic People’s Conference was very positive and upbeat. Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Former UN President of the United Nations General Assembly said to me, "I think this conference marks the beginning of something that is real and for service. I believe you will see very shortly, a movement not only at the level of grass roots trying to awaken their governments into doing something, but you will begin to see people coming together with the idea of gathering a majority of the general assembly of the UN security council." Many people attending this conference felt it was the start of a global people’s movement of unprecedented power and commitment! There was a visceral sense of hope and possibility as we left the conference.
But did anything get accomplished? You can read the closing document at www.AreWeListening.net. This document is particularly critical of the impact of capitalism, which has evolved into an economic system based hyper-consumerism, which exploits the natural resources of our planet. Bolivian President Evo Morales suggested that a democratic system respecting the Rights of Mother Earth must now supersede current economic and political models – Capitalism, Communism, and Socialism. Many experts from around the world came to Cochabamba to work on a draft resolution to present to the UN at COP 16, the climate change conference to be held in Cancun, Mexico in December. Unlike Copenhagen, this was a truly democratic process that attempted to hear and take into account all the voices of the participants, a very messy, loud and chaotic undertaking that certainly didn’t satisfy everyone. We shall see what happens when the shirtsleeves meet the suits at the end of the year.
In the meantime there is a no question that a powerful people’s movement is underfoot. As Paul Hawken has said there are now over 2 million organizations worldwide that are working on environmental and social justice issues. The question is: can these groups coalesce into one voice, one movement, that can put its shared intention, purchasing power, and collective will against the military, industrial, corporate machine to bring about real change?
President Morales is a powerful and charismatic leader who has put Bolivia on the map in spite of the nearly total black out of news from this conference by the US media. Other than KVMR, Amy Goodman and a handful of bloggers this conference was virtually absent from US mainstream media. At the opening of the conference, in a packed football stadium, Evo (as his admirers call him) said, "We need to recover the values of the indigenous people," and shared with people the probable outcomes of business as usual. It is too late for the glaciers of Bolivia, which supply a majority of it’s water, but is it too late for a global awakening that can shift the perilous path we are on towards an earth friendly, peaceful co-existence with all life on this planet? To most of those attending this conference, there is an inspiring sense of possibility.
The conference in Bolivia was attended by some of the greatest scientific, legal and academic minds on the planet, and through a democratic process, they set bold intentions for slowing global climate change. After the carbon trading bullies of the over-developed North virtually shut out the smaller nations (those most impacted by exploitation of resources by economically more “powerful” countries) at Copenhagen’s COP 15, it seemed hopeless to many, but Bolivia has created a people’s renaissance of hope and possibility.
The four main categories of concern that participants in the study groups identified as most needing to be addressed by the UN, world governments and the global community were (1) That we need to establish a legally binding “Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights”, (2) That a “Climate Justice Tribunal” be established with the power to invoke legal and political consequences on the polluters, (3) That the poorer countries that were not responsible for the bulk of pollution should receive compensation in the form of financing, technology and reparation for the “Climate Debt” of the polluting countries, and (4) That a democratic process needs to be instituted so all people can express their views equally (“World People’s Referendum on Climate Change”.)
While these are very loft aspirations, the people attending this conference in Cochabamba Bolivia demonstrated that, while messy and chaotic, the democratic process can work, something like that of the Iroquois nations, which inspired our own early democracy. All of us who hold justice, compassion and hope in our hearts must now stand up, be heard, and know that our voice makes a difference!
