Julianne (left) with Global Exchange's Community Rights Director Shannon Biggs

The following post was written by Global Exchange intern Julianne Stelmaszyk:

As one of the many interns who has passed through the doors of Global Exchange, I experienced more than I expected while working there.

I had the opportunity to work on an upcoming book about the Rights of Nature with leaders and activists from around the world, calling for a completely new paradigm in humankind’s relationship with nature.

I was able to read, edit, and write about this concept and when my colleagues invited me to join them in Cancun for the COP16 UN climate negotiations, I was excited to be a part of the movement for climate justice and the Rights of Mother Earth.

As a student of Environmental Studies, in class we talk a lot about solutions to climate change, particularly the United Nations and its ability to bring collective action to problems and crisis’ at the global level.  Being someone who has only learned about the “problems of the world” when I got to college, the past few years have been a wake-up call for me.  I began to think about working with an international NGO or government where I could make a change.

Working at Global Exchange opened my eyes to another side of the environmental movement that is more than just carbon trading and buying green. Going to Cancun for the climate negotiations allowed me to make deeper connections to the work I have been doing in the office.

Panel during COP16

Before Cancun, I saw these conferences as a viable solution to climate change, but after being there I’m not so sure.  The Moon Palace, where the negotiations took place, was a good 30 minute drive away from the side events held for grassroots organizations. In Cancun, we split our time between two spaces that held panels and workshops on everything from indigenous women’s rights to the truths about REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).  The negotiations were spread out all over Cancun which hindered the potential opportunity for progress.

Activists marching in Cancun

There I was, amongst the world’s top activists who are making change in communities across the globe;  Maude Barlow, Tom Goldtooth, Bill McKibben, and thousands of informed indigenous people who know what is best for their land, but because the events were so sprawled out it was challenging for activists to fully participate.  Informative panels were held at the exact same time a few blocks away from each other. So many people came bursting with ideas and solutions, yet no one could participate in them, let alone those at the Moon Palace.

Aside from the disorganization, there was still a positive outcome in the fact that activists from around the world were gathering for a united cause.  On the day before I flew home, we all marched in solidarity with thousands of activists and indigenous people towards the Moon Palace and were greeted with a wall of Federales.  Then we gathered to hear people speaking on the change that needs to be made inside the negotiations and how the indigenous voices must be heard.  It was inspirational to be walking along side people from all over the world for the same cause.

My experience at the conference made me realize how the environmental movement is actually being capitalized…how carbon markets like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) only serve as another means to profit, another market to buy and sell while fueling the effects of climate change on vulnerable communities.  I am grateful that I was able to participate in such a movement and to stand alongside people from all walks of life in solidarity to demand change. I look forward to sharing my newly gained knowledge from my time at Global Exchange and the Cancun negotiations at my university back in Boston.

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.

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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 Carleen Pickard and fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world are in Cancun for COP16 where they are attending the La Via Campesina organized alternative forum among other climate events. Today, Irene Florez reports from the Alternative Forum:

In Mexico Walmart is quickly outpacing local abarrotes or grocery stores. Today one can walk 10 blocks in any direction and still be hard pressed to find a store devoted to selling fresh produce. In many cities Walmart has staked out key retail space near downtown urban centers. This helps explain why though sales at U.S. stores have dropped, Walmart maintains profitability. In the last quarter of 2010 Walmart’s international sales grew 9.3 percent to $26.9 billion mainly through their Mexico, Brazil, Japan and China locations.

I’m thinking about this as I attend the alternative climate summit hosted by Via Campesina.

The issues on the table are complex and even more, interrelated. It is not possible to talk about food justice for producers without talking about healthy food access for urban consumers. We cannot talk about food subsidies without being aware that many cannot access healthy un-packaged foods in their ancestral homes.

For many the intertwined nature of struggles is daunting. Here, talks dig right into the water-drop-like impacts of the various multinationals such as Walmart and Bimbo.

What will come out of the Cancun UN Climate talks? What will come out of the alternative forum? I think only signs like “Cambia tu vida, no tu clima” (Change your life, not your climate) can point the way and allow us to remain settled amidst the ominous climate warnings and environmental degradation.

The conclusion here is that the current crisis, global warming, is not a natural phenomenon. It is a result of economic strategies. In this sense surpassing this crisis will be achieved when multiple connected strategies are carried out; strategies that create new structures of power and develop long-term social capital that recuperates social justice histories.

Your thoughts?

“Si zapata vive, que chinga les pusiera!” the crowd chanted while snaking its way through downtown Morelia in the state of Michoacan. If Zapata (Mexico’s larger-than-life revolutionary leader) were alive, he’d open a can of woop-ass on you. That’s a rough translation, but you get the sentiment. Zapata would be invoked frequently throughout the journey.

After El Salto, the caravan conducted a rally and march through Morelia with chants like “si se ama, se defende” (if you love it, defend it) and “el pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido” (the people united, will never be defeated). Later, the caravan stopped in the little pueblo of Tepuxtepec in the state of Michoacan. As the caravan pulled up to the main square, it seemed the whole town had come out to greet us. A long row of school children lined the front of the square facing the municipal building, faces lit with curiosity.

Most workers of Tepuxtepec have lost their livelihoods at La Luz y Fuerte Central power company after the government fired 44,000 union workers last year. Over 90% of the economy of the town was lost. The SME, Mexican electrical workers union, has been in a struggle to regain their jobs and strategize. While many have taking a buy-out package, over 17,000 continue the struggle.

“We decided to fight and say no to the crumbs that the government throws at us,” said the secretary of the SME union Andres Servin Retana to the gathered crowd. “They are trying to break the unions, kill our union,” he continued. “We’re not willing to give up our rights. If we let down, then the next wave of “reforms” will be pushed through. We want to give future generations some hope,” another speaker proclaimed.

In the meantime folks have, some workers had been supporting their own family plus other relatives. Now the community is scrambling to make ends meet by sharing food and resources. We would later meet with SME union folks in Mexico City at their headquarters for the forum there, after which many joined the caravan. The community fed us in the community hall. Not sure how many pounds of rice I ate, but it was sufficient to get me to Mexico City!

A fellow caravaner named Albert, a Canadian of indigenous heritage, said he could relate to the struggle of the workers here. He is a power line worker in a small town on Hudson’s Bay in northern Canada.

After Tepuxtepec, we arrived in Toluca we stopped for a rally to raise the issues of the caravan and support the electrical workers union (SME). We arrived late to join a planton called El Malinche, where residents had taken over part of a neighborhood for a sit-in/lock-down. The government wants to build a Super Highway (Super Via) that would displace residents and local parks. The Super Via project would be a toll road used by those from one of the most affluent districts just west of D.F.

The residents say “Hell No!” I’ve rarely in my life been given such a warm and heartfelt welcome. When the caravan arrived they shouted chants, “Zapata vive, la lucha sigue sigue!” while shooting off fireworks.

A press conference was held with members of Frente Amplio, La Via Campesina, and other organizations speaking. “We want an urban development that is viable, that is for everybody, that is legal,” said a panelist from Frente Amplio.

Another said that we have to realize we are in a long struggle. “We have seen a disaster of the land we could never have imagined,” said Rafael Martinez of Frente Amplio. “Que jamas pasaran.”

“This is a struggle for all and mother earth. We are rebuilding real life, where vida is more important than money,” he said, contrasting this with the destruction of neo-liberalism.

After food and punch in the makeshift spontaneous community housing that included a kitchen, abundant art and displays of various struggles of local communities, we settled in to sleep wherever there was space.

Because there were so many people, some of us had to stay on a cold concrete roof with bunnies and chickens and barking dogs. But one cold night of warm solidarity is nothing compared to the struggles of some of these folks. We promised to bring their message to Cancun and beyond. And with heartfelt thank-yous and blessings for the road as warm as the welcome the night before, the caravans rolled toward the next destination, only now with a few more people and a few more voices of struggle to absorb and carry forward.

Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin, Shannon Biggs and Carleen Pickard are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Today, Global Exchange volunteer writer Ryan Van Lenning reports:

“Along the way you will be witness to what I have witnessed my whole life, some of the worst realities in Mexico,” said one member of National Assembly of People Affected by the Environment (Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales–ANAA). This perhaps set the tone for an itinerary that is not likely to be on the radar of any travel agency.

We were introduced to one such harsh reality in El Salto (in the state of Jalisco), where the International Caravan for Life and Environmental Justice was kicking off the first leg of the journey to Cancun.

We met last Sunday in El Salto, gathering in a small open-air building overlooking fields and a portion of the Rio Santiago. Community members spoke in particular of the local polluted river and the life that depends on it. The voices here are not professional environmentalists, nor staffers at the big environmental NGOs, they repeated.  Rather they have become “poor man’s environmentalists” by default, as Enrique Enciso of El Salto put it.

Rio Santiago is the lifeline of the region, but it is now a degraded and toxic waterway that brings perhaps as much illness as life.  The river looks gorgeous when looking down safely from the mirador in Guadalajara. But close up the smell is atrocious. You can smell the river from over a kilometer away in places.  Rio Santiago has the reputation of being among the most polluted rivers on the planet.  Untreated domestic sewage and industrial wastewater pours into the river daily. It has been shown to have high levels of organic waste, arsenic, sulfuric acid, mercury, and chrome.

Older members of the community spoke of a time when the river wasn’t polluted, when the trees and plants along the banks were abundant and when the food was healthy.

“I had the privilege to live here when nature was beautiful. Little by little I have been witness to these disasters,” said an older resident from the nearby pueblo of Juanacatlan.

He talked of swimming and fishing and drinking from the river and wells, something that is impossible now, or at least not possible without the threat of illness or death.  In fact, most people in the region know at least one family member who is sick.  “Not ‘how are you going to die, but which cancer are you going to get?’

The turning point were the 1970’s, they said. This is the time when the factories came in.  They promised jobs and progress.  The government promoted it and the community by-and-large welcomed them.  Now industries range from leather goods, petrochemicals, and jeans to pulp, paper and beverages.

Enrique Encizo, another resident of El Salto, said people started to get sick. Little by little there were no fish, no frogs, no otters, then trees started to go.  “Food used to be a banquet. We were poor but we ate good,” he said.

In fact, there has been a documented increase in cancers, neurological disease, and gastrointestinal diseases. Some people have skin sores that appear spontaneously.

Unlike the older members of the community who have lived long enough to see the transformation from a river of life to a river of death, the youth know only this reality. A local high school student spoke passionately about her commitment to struggle and find solutions. “Are we going to be born seeing this and smelling this and die seeing this?” she asked, pointing down the hill to the river. “No! If we don’t fight back, who will?” she asked. “We have to stop being victims. I’ve decided to fight.”

A polluted river is not the only water-related environmental disaster. The small pueblo of Temacapalin (Temaca) is threatened by the proposed El Zapotillo Dam. In addition to collecting polluted Rio Santiago water, Temaca would be flooded by hundreds of feet of water if the dam is built.  Though the government insured it will be treated, residents of the town are speaking out against the danger to their community.

Indeed, many in the community are fighting back in different ways. One way is to bring their message on the international caravan to Cancun for the Alternative Forum for Life and Environmental Justice. They want the government to ban the dumping of toxins into the river. Others want the industries to leave altogether. They are not sitting back and remaining silent, but coming together to defend their life, health, communities, and land.  They are talking and listening to one another, building bridges, and strengthening their social movements.

Another member of Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales (ANAA) said, “We are not against progress, we are against progress that is against life.”

A local woman drove home the point, “You can’t pay back mother earth in dinero.” (No se puede pagar a madre tierra en dinero.”

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.

Global Exchange’s Medea Benjamin, Shannon Biggs and Carleen Pickard are joining fellow climate justice campaigners, environmentalists and social justice advocates from around the world for COP16 in Cancun. Today, Carleen Pickard reports:

After leaving Mexico City at 6:30am on December 1, reporting from the road proved challenging for the caravanistas, traveling day and night crossing eastern Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula. Only one short article appeared in La Jornada, reporting only on the crossing; listing the locations where they had stopped; saying that the caravans had grown to 20 buses and the participants were well.

All of this was good news, as I read it on the plane to Cancun. Although I like to fashion myself as an intrepid traveler and can continue through anything, I wisely decided to step off the caravans in Mexico City. Fighting a terrible cold, it seemed irresponsible to take down a bus of climate justice activists. Thanks to those of you on the caravan and off that counseled my ‘self care’!

So, I arrived in Cancun on Dec 2 and by following the buses’ eastern travel with text messages, myself and a contingent of North American activists from the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance organized into a mini-caravan and met the mega-caravan in the spiritual centre of Chichen Itza. Programmed by the Via Campesina team, the caravans were to stop there and share a ceremony with local indigenous leaders.  With the en route delays, however, the caravan arrived too late to access the site and after a brief confrontation the municipal authorities provided the town square of near by Piste to the caravans for the programmed ceremony.

At 7pm the ceremony began. A Mam elder welcomed everyone and spoke about the actions of so many to protect Mother Earth. She said that climate change was a result of Mother Earth being upset at all the damage being done to her. She said that the increased storms in her community are a result of Mother Earth’s tears. She noted that under the Mayan calendar today was a celebration of Mother Earth and Women, who are created in her image. All this time a small altar was being created with offering from the earth – corn, palm leaves, water and coffee. Copal (incense) was burning and we were passed out burning candles.

IEN members from the Ponca and Dakota Nations also offered blessings and song and Casey Camp named it as “sharing ceremony with relatives”.

Before boarding the buses for one last time, I had the chance to catch up with my former caravan compa, Angela Adrar, who summed up what they had seen en route and what’s next: ‘We are moving and we are getting to Cancun, I hope that Cancun is ready.”

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.

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.