photo: project survival media

By Pablo Solon

After 9 days of negotiations there is no doubt that we saw this movie before. It is the third remake of Copenhagen and Cancun. Same actors. Same script. The documents are produced outside the formal negotiating scenario . In private meetings, dinners which the 193 member states do not attend. The result of these meetings is known only on the last day.

In the case of Copenhagen it was at two in the morning after the event should have already ended. In Cancun, the draft decision just appeared at 5 p.m. on the last day and was not opened for negotiation, not even to correct a comma. Bolivia stood firm on both occasions. The reason: the very low emission reduction commitments of industrialized countries that would lead to an increase in average global temperatures of more than 4° Celsius. In Cancun, Bolivia stood alone. I could not do otherwise. How could we accept the same document that was rejected in Copenhagen, knowing that 350,000 people die each year due to natural disasters caused by climate change? To remain silent is to be complicit in genocide and ecocide. To accept a disastrous document in order not to be left alone is cowardly diplomacy. Even more so when one trumpets the “people’s diplomacy” and has pledged to defend the “People’s Agreement” of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth held in Bolivia last year.

Durban will be worse than Copenhagen and Cancun. Two days before the close of the meetings, the true text that is being negotiated is not yet known. Everyone knows that the actual 131-page document is just a compilation of proposals that were already on the table in Panama two months ago. The formal negotiations have barely advanced. The real document will appear toward the end of COP17.

But more importantly, the substance of the negotiations remains unchanged from Copenhagen. The emission reduction pledges by developed countries are still 13% to 17% based on 1990 levels. Everyone knows that this is a catastrophe. But instead of becoming outraged, they attempt to sweeten the poison. The wrapper of this package will be the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and a mandate for a new binding agreement. The substance of the package will be the same as in Copenhagen and Cancun: do virtually nothing during this decade in terms of reducing emissions, and get a mandate to negotiate an agreement that will be even weaker than the Kyoto Protocol and that will replace it in 2020. “The Great Escape III” is the name of this movie, and it tells the story of how the governments of rich countries along with transnational corporations are looking to escape their responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of becoming stronger, the fight against climate change is becoming more soft and flexible, with voluntary commitments to reduce emissions. The question is, who will step up this time to denounce the fraud to the end? Or could it be that this time, everyone will accept the remake of Copenhagen and Cancun?

The truth is that beyond the setting and the last scene, the end of this film will be the same as in Copenhagen and Cancun: humanity and mother earth will be the victims of a rise in temperature not seen in 800,000 years.

Pablo Solon is an international analyst and social activist. He was chief negotiator for climate change and United Nations Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (2009-June 2011). http://pablosolon.wordpress.com/

On the way to participate in a rally organized by the international peasant group Via Campesina in Cancun, a Bolivian indigenous farmer took some coca leaves out of his hand-woven satchel and pressed them into my hand. “You will need these during the climate talks in Cancun to keep you from getting tired or hungry,” he insisted. “Pachamama—mother earth—gives us these leaves. She takes care of us if we take care of her.” Bonding as we chewed the bitter leaves together, the wizened Bolivian farmer shared his hopes that the negotiators would listen to his president, Evo Morales, and come up with an accord that would allow the world to live in harmony with nature.

The climate agreement that was ultimately hashed out in Cancun did not reflect the viewpoint of Bolivia’s indigenous community, their President Evo Morales, or Bolivia’s passionate UN negotiator, Pablo Solon. The Bolivian government and its grassroots allies wanted a binding agreement that would force significant reductions in greenhouse gases. They wanted an agreement that respected indigenous rights. They wanted an agreement grounded in a new concept – the rights of nature – that acknowledges that she who gives us life and abundance (and coca leaves) has as much right to exist as humans.

Many mainstream environmentalists were quick to defend the Cancun agreement, insisting that a weak agreement is better than nothing, since it allows the international process to go forward and allows activists to keep fighting for better outcomes in the future rounds, including at next year’s talks that will take place in Durban, South Africa. No agreement, they suggest, would have stopped the process cold.

But we should be clear that the minimalist agreement from Cancun is totally inadequate to address the climate crisis. It acknowledges that deep cuts on global greenhouse gas emissions are required, but does not set binding targets. This is due, in large part, to the refusal of the United States—from the time of the Kyoto Accords—to agree to mandatory cuts.

The agreement sets up a much-needed Green Climate Fund to help poor nations obtain clean technologies but does not lay out clear sources of financing or how the fund will be controlled. The governments agreed to give an interim trustee role to the World Bank, a move that angered groups in the global south that have suffered at the hands of the Bank and activists who have opposed the Bank on a policy level.

The agreement embraces a policy on “deforestation mitigation” known as REDD, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This gives polluters in the north a chance to buy carbon credits for protecting forests in the global south. Bolivia, and most organizations on the ground and in the streets of Cancun for the past two weeks, object to REDD on the grounds that it commodifies the forests of the global South, endangers indigenous control over the forests and their right to livelihood, and allows northern polluters to keep polluting. Bolivian negotiator Pablo Solon said handing out carbon credits for protecting forests makes it easier for industrialized nations to achieve their emissions reductions targets without taking domestic action to rein in greenhouse gases. “We want to save the forest, but not save developed countries from the responsibility to cut their emissions,” Solon said.

At the 11^th hour, the negotiators—desperate for an agreement—were annoyed at what they saw as Bolivia’s obstructionism. “The experts that know about climate change know that we are right,” Solon insisted. “This agreement won’t stop temperature from rising by 4 degrees Celsius, which is just not sustainable. But they just want an agreement, any agreement, so they are pushing this through.” While inside the confines of Cancun’s Moon Palace Bolivia was left isolated, outside Bolivia was seen as the superhero standing up for the poor, the indigenous communities, and the rights of nature.

Addressing a news conference in Cancun on December 9, Bolivian President Evo Morales—himself an indigenous former coca farmer–made some dire forecasts. “We came to Cancún to save nature, forests, planet Earth, not to convert nature into a commodity or revitalize capitalism with carbon markets.” He predicted that without strong, mandatory emissions reductions, the world’s governments would be “responsible for ecocide”.

I think Evo and my Bolivian coca farmer friend would agree that if we are to avoid ecocide, we cannot rely on government officials meeting in plush golf resorts. Instead, the solutions will come from organic farmers and social entrepreneurs. They will come activists who confront corporate polluters. They will come from passionate environmentalists putting even more pressure on their governments. They will come from those fighting for climate justice in their communities around the globe. Ultimately, they will come from a grassroots global movement steeped in the values of mother nature.

For more COP16 updates, check back here on our Climate Justice blog. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

Some Global Exchange staff and volunteers are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Today Shannon Biggs reports:

Months before civil society boarded planes or hopped on buses and bikes destined for Cancun (yes, we met up with a small contingent of cyclists arriving from West Virginia) — it was clear that we weren’t really very welcome.

Far too few of us were even approved as credentialed NGO observers.  The Moon Palace conference site was miles and miles away from the city center, and those without credentials were left out in the Cancun sun.  When La Via Campesina attempted to set up their gathering site nearby, the permits were denied.

For anyone who might have thought we could ingratiate ourselves upon arrival with a heartfelt message from the people of planet Earth, those notions were quickly set straight: We were eschewed, ignored, stopped, searched, silenced, kicked out, barricaded, and banned.

Despite Bolivia’s introduction to the UNFCCC of the People’s Accord that emerged from 35,000 people gathered in Cochabamba earlier this year, it mysteriously disappeared from the negotiating table in Cancun.  Police detained caravans of campesinos and internationals en route carrying messages from communities across Mexico who themselves could not come to Cancun.  When some 20 caravans finally converged for a spiritual ceremony at the ancient Mayan temple of Chichen Itza two hours west of Cancun, they were turned away at the gates. Intense police barricades stopped the civil society march miles from the official space or the public eye.  Those who dared to enter the Moon Palace to publicly oppose the market-based mechanism of the carbon trading scheme REDD were silenced, hauled away and some had their credentials revoked.

OK we get it.  Go home already.

Last year’s talks in Copenhagen made it clear that the official United Nations FCCC process is based not on the root causes of environmental exploitation—but ‘market fixes’ to the same corporate-­led economic model and ‘endless-m­ore’ value system that have driven us to the cliff’s edge.  In Cancun it has become clear that even the modest goals set forth in Kyoto can’t stand against the juggernaut of economic growth at all costs.

There were voices of reason at the table. Bolivia’s UN Ambassador and negotiator to the talks, Pablo Salon, in taking seriously the People’s Accord and Rights of Nature Declaration that came out of the Cochabamba World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth is being called an agitator stalling progress within the official negotiations.

Yesterday, Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke eloquently about the need for a radically new path forward: “In past decades, the United Nations approved human rights, then civil rights, economic and political rights, and finally a few years ago indigenous rights. In this new century, it is time to debate and discuss rights of Mother Earth. These include the right to regenerate biocapacity, the right to life without contamination.”

But the Bolivians who came to the negotiations to represent social movements and to seriously address the failure of the market to protect the planet have been isolated, sidelined and ridiculed along with the rest of us who stand outside. As Bolivia’s official statement from this morning pronounces “History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.”

Many came to bring the message of Cochabamba to Cancun. But where do we go from here if the lessons of Copenhagen and Cancun are that our leaders are deaf to the cries of the planet?

The UNFCCC may have it right—we should just go home.   It is time to deliver the message of Cochabamba to the people who are capable of creating change, of creating 1,000 Cochabambas.

Last month with the help of Global Exchange partners the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Pittsburgh, PA became the first major U.S. city to ban natural gas drilling while elevating community decision-making and the rights of nature over corporate “rights.” They join over 125 communities who are also taking local control of their destinies, refusing to become sacrifice zones for the good of the market and the destruction of the environment.

Along with CELDF, Global Exchange is working with dozens of communities here at home to do the same thing, from Mt. Shasta CA to Big Sur to Santa Monica. Buffalo New York.  New Mexico. Maine. Washington State. Ecuador. Bolivia. In all of these places, a new set of rules is being put into place.

If we want to be heard at the UN, then we need to go home and build the revolution of change in the places where we live.   That is what Global Exchange came to Cancun for — to link arms with our friends on the outside toward building a real movement for rights—for nature and for our communities.

Global Exchange, the Council of Canadians and Fundacion Pachamama‘s new report for Cancun, “Does Nature have Rights? Transformi­ng Grassroots Organizing to Protect People and the Planet” explores the grassroots movement for the rights of nature taking root. The way forward is in our own backyards.

For more COP16 updates, check back here on our Climate Justice blog. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

Last night in the wee hours, a regressive, non-binding, dangerously unbalanced climate agreement was pushed through with “consensus” by all delegations except Bolivia. Following is the statement of response from the Bolivian government.

From the Plurinational State of Bolivia:

The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.

There is only one way to measure the success of a climate agreement, and that is based on whether or not it will effectively reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. This text clearly fails, as it could allow global temperatures to increase by more than 4 degrees, a level disastrous for humanity. Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

Last year, everyone recognized that Copenhagen was a failure both in process and substance. Yet this year, a deliberate campaign to lower expectations and desperation for any agreement has led to one that in substance is little more than Copenhagen II.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.
While developing nations – those that face the worst consequences of climate change – pleaded for ambition, we were instead offered the “realism” of empty gestures. Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

Bolivia came to Cancun with concrete proposals that we believed would bring hope for the future. These proposals were agreed by 35,000 people in an historic World People’s Conference Cochabamba in April 2010. They seek just solutions to the climate crisis and address its root causes. In the year since Copenhagen, they were integrated into the negotiating text of the parties, and yet the Cancun text systematically excludes these voices. Bolivia cannot be convinced to abandon its principles or those of the peoples we represent. We will continue to struggle alongside affected communities worldwide until climate justice is achieved.

Bolivia has participated in these negotiations in good faith and the hope that we could achieve an effective climate deal. We were prepared to compromise on many things, except the lives of our people. Sadly, that is what the world’s richest nations expect us to do. Countries may try to isolate us for our position, but we come here in representation of the peoples and social movements who want real and effective action to protect the future of humanity and Mother Earth. We feel their support as our guide. History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.

For more COP16 updates, check back here on our Climate Justice blog. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

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In the middle of week two at COP16, protests have begun to erupt, both inside the halls of the Moon Palace, and outside in the streets of Cancun. When la Via Campesina, the world’s largest movement of peasant and smallholder farmers, called for a global day of action yesterday, people around the world responded. Actions in 30 U.S. states and over a dozen countries resonated with the sentiment among civil society in Cancun that the way forward for climate equity and climate stabilization does not lie with the elites, but with people in their communities on the ground.

Along with La Via Campesina, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Ricardo Navarro of Friends of the Earth International, and a number of social movement representatives and government officials from the ALBA countries held a press conference to condemn the false solutions and backroom deals being pushed in the negotiations, and to call for mobilizations worldwide. The key demand they pronounced was for climate solutions based on traditional indigenous knowledge, community-based practices, human rights and the rights of nature.

Miguel Lovera of the Paraguayan delegation offered a cogent summary of what many here see as a fundamental failure in approach at COP 16: “There is a lot of talk here in Cancun about money, about chainsaws, and about plantations, but there is little talk about forests, or about the real work of the people who confront climate change everyday.”

Indigenous Rights Protest at the Moon Palace in Cancun

In a similar vein, there is a lot of talk about markets, as signified by the Copenhagen Accord, but very little talk about rights, signified by the Cochabamba Agreement. Indeed, the conference began with the wholesale removal of the Cochabamba Agreement’s rights-based framework from the negotiating text.

The word on the street is, “This is not a climate conference, it’s a trade conference.” As Anne Petermann of Global Justice Ecology Project said, “In 2003 we came here to fight the World Trade Organization. Now we have to fight the World Carbon Trade Organization.” One way of looking at the problem, writ simply, is that there is a fundamental conflict between markets and rights.

By “markets,” we do not mean the simple exchange of money, the buying and selling of things, the basic transactions of the cash economy. Markets have always been places, physical places, where goods and services are exchanged, but where other forms of social and cultural exchange exchange take place as well. In any number of ways marketplaces, like our farmers markets today, have always been strongly allied with the commons – places where, despite the hand-to-hand exchange of money for goods, other things go on as well.

In contrast, when we talk about “markets” in the climate debate, we mean financial speculation, and the creation of commodities out of things that previously have been kept out of the market: water, air, Co2, biodiversity, cultural practices; investment for the sake of profit and development for the sake of economic growth.

These kind of market mechanisms, simply put, are incompatible with human rights and the rights of nature. A significant piece of the civil society struggle in Cancun is to make sure that rights are not mowed down altogether, nor taken as an afterthought, as “safeguards” in agreements like REDD, but are central to the way forward on climate.

La Via Campesina Speaks On Rights and Their Exclusion from UN Events

Natalia Green, Program Coordinator of the Fundacion Pachamama in Ecuador, is one of many people here in Cancun promoting the Rights of Nature. “The indigenous perspective that we are not apart from nature, but a part of nature has been taken up by many people,” she says, “because our juridical system that excludes nature is driving the planet to an ecological crisis. In Ecuador we worked through the political system in 2007 and 2008 to become the first country in the world to recognize rights for nature.”

The rights of nature paradigm is too complicated to explain in a blog post; for the newest material on it, see the new report “Does Nature Have Rights: Transforming Grassroots Organizing to Protect the People and the Planet.”

Ricardo Navarro of Friends of the Earth expresses concern for promoting human rights safeguards within multilateral policies, as opposed to building policies on a foundation of rights. “In regards to safeguards,” says Navarro, “what would you say if Pinochet said he would give safeguards for human rights; who’s going to believe him, by God? It’s a bank, for Christ’s sake, why would we expect a bank to promote human rights?”

Navarro continued, “We have to understand one thing; human beings are children of the Mother Earth. We often say that Mother Earth is where we live, but it’s more than that. We are like a creature in the womb of the mother earth. So, if we have rights, how is it that our mother doesn’t have rights? Its totally illogical. Mother Earth must have rights. The Government of Bolivia is absolutely correct in promoting the rights of Mother Earth. I hope other governments start to understand!”

Indigenous Environmental Network and Ruckus Society Fly a Banner

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

The Via Campesina march began today surprisingly on time, at 9am. We approached the intersection just outside the space where hundreds are camping with Via members from across the Americas to a sea of green. Green scarves, flags, shirts, hats and banners – all denouncing Monsanto’s invasion of genetically modified corn into Mexican traditional strains, and celebrating campesinos.

After walking through the streets of downtown Cancun, several hundred people boarded buses and we were moved out of town towards the COP16 talks at the Moon Palace. Throughout the week decisions were being made about the specific route of the march, and it appeared that we would be advancing towards the official UNFCCC site.

I boarded a bus with the Bolivian civil society contingent and talked with elders on the bus about their journey to Cancun and their thoughts on the talks compared to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba. They shared some cocoa leaves with Medea Benjamin (Global Exchange and Code PINK Co-founder) who joined us in the downtown march, and we were strengthened for what was to be a long day.

As we gathered on the highway to the airport (and blocked a full lane of the road), thousands joined us and the chants began. The air was filled with drumming and chants of ‘globalizamos la lucha, globalizamos la esperanza’ (globalize struggle, globalize hope), ‘REDD no! Coahabamba si!’, ‘del norte al sur, del este al oeste, ganaremos esta lucha, cuesta lo que cueste!’ (from the north to the south, from the east to the west, we will win this struggle, it will take whatever it takes!)

We continued for 6 miles until we were met by a line of riot police and behind them a heavily fortified road block.

An indigenous man carrying a ‘No REDD’ banner walked to the federal police and pleaded for their compassion and understanding, explaining that we were there in legitimate protest to have the people making crucial decisions listen to us.

We spread out onto both sides of the highway and once a makeshift stage was set up with a microphone, the crowd was greeted by Bolivia’s Ambassador to the UN Pablo Solon who reported on the attempts being made by the Bolivian government to have the Rights of Nature/Rights of Mother Earth recognized on the inside. Two brief videos of his talk to the crowd are here and here (in Spanish).

A member of the official delegation from Uruguay also spoke, as did Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network, their official delegate to the UNFCC and a member from CLOC in Guatemala.

Below are more pictures from today and a quick shout out to the folks in Toronto, Canada for their solidarity action this afternoon.

Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin, Shannon Biggs and Carleen Pickard, along with some Global Exchange volunteers, are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Jeff Conant writes for Global Exchange and is collaborating media outreach with the Global Justice Ecology Project and the Indigenous Environmental Network during COP 16. Here’s his report:

At COP 16 this week, the tone has been tense and difficult, both inside the negotiations at Cancun’s opulent Moon Palace, and on the margins where social movements, NGO’s, and indigenous peoples’ groups have gathered to raise their voices in opposition to the increasingly crushing decisions of global elites. After last year’s fractious meeting in Copenhagen, and with echoes of the 2003 rout of the WTO here still lingering, Cancun at the beginning of the week was an armed encampment. Between the armored vehicles patrolling the outside and the labyrinthine and exhausting process to get anywhere near the inside, a clear attempt has been made to marginalize civil society, if not to neutralize it altogether. The title of an article in Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper last week summed up the mood well in a play on the literal meaning of the name given to this artificial Caribbean paradise: Cancun is indeed a nest of snakes.

After a year of contentious wrangling between an immovable object and an unstoppable force – the Cochabamba People’s Agreement, ratified by 35,000 people last April, and the Copenhagen Accord, rammed through by the U.S., China, and a small group of economic heavyweights last December – and with countries left and right threatening to abandon the Kyoto Protocol like rats from a sinking ship, it is more than clear that no significant agreement will come out of Cancun next week. But, given the nature of any possible agreement that might be reached, the pertinent question may be: so what?

Coming into Cancun, the refrain from Northern governments and the media has been that there are low expectations for COP 16. From the U.S., for example, the Obama administration will send the Secretaries of Energy and of Agriculture, showing a lack of will to move forward at a high diplomatic level, even as the Wikileaks diplomatic cable scandal undermines whatever vestiges of trust may have existed in the international community. In response to these pronounced ‘low expectation’, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations pointed out in an article in the UK’s Guardian, “I wonder whose expectations they are talking about? The reality is that the talk of ‘low expectations’ is a ploy by a small group of industrialized countries to obscure their obligations to act.”

While the U.S. and other powers appear to be doing ‘not enough’ on climate change, in fact they are doing more than enough – blocking the agreements, bullying the other Parties, implementing militaristic anti-immigration policies to further repress those forced to flee environmental and social collapse in the global South, and pushing climate-readiness doublespeak through false solutions like agrofuels, GE trees, and deeply dubious policies like REDD (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

REDD – one of the key policy proposals on the table in Cancun – is indicative of the difference between Copenhagen and Cochabamba.  Far too complex to explain in a few sentences here, REDD proposes putting a price on forests based on the value of the Co2 they capture, in order to keep trees standing by making them worth more as trees than as timber. A fundamental market-based approach to mitigating the climate crisis, many indigenous people and campesino groups, including la Via Campesina and the Indigenous Environmental Network, see REDD as a Trojan Horse concealing within its byzantine innards potentially the largest land grab of all time. Indeed, many of the indigenous delegates I’ve talked to view it as a both a violation of the sacred and the next phase of the genocide they’ve survived for centuries.

Indeed, when the U.S. negotiators yesterday proposed that the words “indigenous peoples” be replaced in the negotiating text with “indigenous groups” – reversing with the stroke of a pen decades of work to gain collective rights for precisely those peoples most affected and least responsible for the climate crisis – they might as well have offered some smallpox blankets to go with it.

With the language from the Cochabamba Agreement sacked entirely from the negotiating text, leaving little but market fundamentalism on the table, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now giving attention to geo-engineering despite the recently called global moratorium, with murky politics and backroom deals standing in for the “commitment and compromise” called for by the UNFCCC, and with armed federales patrolling the streets to intimidate and criminalize dissent, it is frankly difficult to see how we’ll climb out of the viper pit.

Check back here on our Climate Justice blog for updates from Cancun and COP16. If you’re on Twitter, follow @globalexchange for related COP16 updates from Global Exchange, and use hashtag #COP16 for general COP16 tweets.

At the conference, Global Exchangers met with heads of state and several social movement representatives in working groups to discuss adaptation, migration, climate debt, action strategies and a host of other issues. The Director of our Rights-Based Organizing Campaign, Shannon Biggs even spoke on the main stage about our Rights of Nature work, like the work she has been doing with the community of Mt. Shasta, California.

In meeting different groups of social movements and speaking with people directly affected by climate change, Global Exchange was able to produce this latest video, Planet and People First, as a report back from Cochabamba. The video features interviews with Conference participants from around the globe including Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow, as they share some of the hope and energy that came out of Bolivia.

Watch the must-see film for you and your community on the vital work of Global Exchange and communities around the world to end addiction to oil and ensure real action is taken globally towards climate equity.

Planet and People First: A Global Exchange report Cochabamba, Bolivia 2010 from Global Exchange on Vimeo.

After watching the film, check out Global Exchange’s Top Ten List of Ways to Save the Climate.

Join Global Exchange, our friends at 350.org, and hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens around the world who are making October 10th the biggest day of climate action ever! Take part in the Global Work Party, celebrate climate solutions, join an event already happening, get outside and get to work! When the day is done, join Global Exchange supporters and host a Party for the Planet & help us raise $10,000. (Find out how you can donate directly.)

Be a part of the movement! Organize a Party for the Planet film screening fundraiser followed by a discussion.  Hosting a great film screening fundraiser isn’t hard!  Just follow these easy steps:

Get the Video: Fill out an online form to receive Planet and People First– a short (13 minute) film from the first People’s Climate Conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia this spring. It is a must-see film for you and your community on the vital work of Global Exchange and communities around the world to end addiction to oil and ensure real action is taken globally towards climate equity.  Receive a copy of the film.  You must order by October 1st in order to guarantee arrival by October 10th.

Invite Your Friends:  Invite your friends over.  You can prepare light refreshments, or have a potluck and share the workload.  Check out our party planning resource page for downloadable invitations and other helpful tips.

Start the Conversation: Once you and your guests have viewed the film, take a moment to have a discussion around the issues of global climate change and climate equity.  See our list of questions and tips.

10 – 10 – 10 Donations: Our fundraising goal for 10-10-10 is to raise $10,000 dollars.  Ask your guests to give $10, $10(0), $10(0)(0) or more.  If you’re shy about asking for donations, don’t worry – our website offers great tips and resources to make you into a pro.

Please join us in making this important day into a success. Even if you can’t host a house party, consider donating to Global Exchange’s work directly.

We look forward in you joining us in this global movement!

In his latest film, South of the Border, Oliver Stone explores those conversations and reveals a revolution in South America that most of the world does not know about.

In casual conversations with seven sitting presidents, Stone gains unprecedented access to and sheds new light upon the exciting transformations in the region.  Mr. Stone was most struck by the extent to which the presidents are committed to determining the future of their own nations without undue outside influence and control.

I saw a screening of this film last week and highly recommend it. It highlights the often skewed representations of these countries by mainstream US media and attempts to shed light on the political and social movements taking place in South America that often go unnoticed amongst the general American public.

A big focus of the film is that of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez and the changes taking place in the country. Global Exchange has had a strong Reality Tours program in Venezuela for many years and has brought people together to learn more about the progressive model of socioeconomic development that has been shaping Latin America’s future. This is done by meeting with the grassroots that is really helping to shape and build the foundation for these changes. Find out more about our Venezuela delegations.

See the story of Venezuela and Latin America unfold on the big screen. The film is showing in several cities nationwide and is opening in more cities in the coming weeks. To our Bay Area friends, be sure to head to the theatres this weekend for its opening and see the provocative film that everyone is talking about.

South of the Border Channel on YouTube.