Peru Suspends Decree That Fueled Amazon Violence

compiled from reports by Agence France Presse, Indymedia, and Democracy Now!
Peruvian lawmakers suspended one of several controversial laws that eased restrictions on lumber harvesting in the Amazon rain forest, days after it sparked clashes between police and indigenous protesters, killing dozens of people.

The legislature agreed by a 59 to 49 vote to suspend Decree 1090 -- dubbed the "Law of the Jungle" -- that covers forestry and fauna in Peru's northeastern Amazon rain forest, said Javier Velasquez, the head of Peru's single-chamber Congress.

Ten decrees opening indigenous lands to resource extraction are vehemently opposed by the approximately half-million Indians of 65 ethnic groups who live there. They see the development of the jungle as an assault on their way of life and have been holding protests since April across the region. The decrees were issued in 2007 and 2008 by Peruvian president Alan Garcia to bring Peruvian regulations in synch with conditions imposed by the US-Peruvian Free Trade Act.

The Amazon protest peaked Friday and Saturday when some 400 police officers moved in to clear protesters blocking a highway near the northern city of Bagua. Protesters fought back. According to Indymedia, a raid by police to free 38 police hostages taken by protesters resulted in the deaths of nine of the hostages. (AFP reports that the hostages were killed by the protestors). Subsequent reports on Indymedia say that as many as 84 protesters have been killed, with another 150 arrested.

The decrees were originally to be suspended for 90 days, but in the final vote legislators agreed on an indefinite suspension "to negotiate without pressure," said Aurelio Pastor, a legislator with
President Alan Garcia's APRA party.

Angry legislators with the opposition Nationalist Party (PNP) called for the decrees to be overturned, and waved signs as they held a protest in the chamber after the vote.

"No to transnational (corporations) in the Amazon," read one sign. "The land and water are not for sale," read another.

The vote suspending the decree is seen as a compromise allowing the government to resume talks with the protesting indigenous groups who have been blocking key regional highways, said spokesmen for legislators that voted for the measure.

The vote also comes on the eve of a strike called by the country's powerful leftist labor umbrella group, the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP). Other protest marches, including those held by indigenous protesters in Amazon cities and towns, are planned in Peru's main cities.

Internationally, groups supporting the protesters are calling for solidarity protests at Peruvian consulates and embassies and revocation of the Peru FTA. Amazon Watch asks individuals to send protest emails to key people in the Peruvian government through this link: http://amazonwatch.org/peru-action-alert.php

Meanwhile some 3,000 Indians from 25 ethnic groups continue to block a key Amazon highway linking the cities of Tarapoto and Yurimaguas, some 700 kilometers (435 miles) north of Lima.

"We want an immediate derogation of those laws," said Segundo Pizango, an apu -- indigenous leader -- at a roadblock near Yurimaguas.

The repercussions of the violence have rocked the government, with Women's Affairs Minister Carmen Vildoso resigning Monday in protest over the government's crackdown, and Prime Minister Yehude Simon planning to resign at a future date when protests ease.

The crisis even extended its reach to foreign affairs after Nicaragua granted political asylum to Alberto Pizango, the main indigenous protest leader, who earlier took refuge in Managua's
embassy in Lima. The Garcia administration has issued an arrest warrant for Pizango on charges of sedition, conspiracy and rebellion.

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Pennsylvania Town Fights Big Coal on Mining Rights

by John Hurdle. Published by Reuters June 15.
A small Pennsylvania town is trying to ban coal mining in a battle being played out across the state as rural communities try to assert control over mining, gas drilling and other businesses.

Blaine Township, a community of 600 about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, hopes to trigger a legal battle that could determine the rights of municipalities throughout the United States to control corporate activity.

Some legal experts say the township is highly unlikely to win that fight. For now the dispute is in federal district court, where major energy companies have sued the township over three ordinances that would ban coal mining and require companies in any business to disclose their activities to local officials.

Penn Ridge Coal LLC, a unit of Alliance Resource Partners, and Allegheny Pittsburgh Coal Co., a unit of Allegheny Energy, say Blaine's laws violate their corporate rights.

The companies say the ordinances would prevent them from mining 10.6 million tons of recoverable coal beneath the township -- enough to supply electricity for 2 million people for a year.

The township has gone further than any of the 120 U.S. municipalities -- most of them in Pennsylvania -- that have passed ordinances to curb corporate activity such as factory farming or spreading sewage sludge, said its lawyer, Tom Linzey of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

Of three townships sued by corporations over their ordinances, only Blaine has refused to back down, Linzey said.

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, towns are resisting efforts by energy companies to extract natural gas from the massive Marcellus Shale formation amid fears that toxic chemicals used in drilling are contaminating ground water and endangering human health.

Creeks Diverted
In Blaine, residents are seeking to prevent coal mining -- which they expect to begin there in 2011 -- because they fear it will ruin their houses and disrupt water supplies, as they say it has in surrounding areas.

They want to block longwall mining, a technique that rips tons of coal from underground without putting anything in its place, causing the land above to sag. The practice, which has been used in coal-rich southwest Pennsylvania since the 1970s, has cracked the walls, roofs and basements of homes and opened fissures in the land, diverting or draining creeks and ponds.

In neighboring Morris Township, Tammy Bowman pointed to a pile of broken wood and concrete -- all that's left of an outbuilding she said was destroyed by shifting ground from mining beneath her 19th century farmhouse.

"It just started to drop and drop," she said. "It got so bad, you couldn't even walk in the door."

One section of her house is held up with mechanical jacks.

Near the village of Graysville, the 62-acre (25-hectare) Duke Lake, once used for fishing and boating, now sits empty after the shifting ground opened a crack in its retaining wall, environmentalists say.

Blaine's three ordinances, passed in 2006, 2007 and 2008, also assert that communities have a right under the U.S. Constitution to control business within their boundaries and that corporations do not have constitutional rights as "persons" to sue municipalities for passing laws that would hurt corporate interests.

"This illegitimate bestowal of civil and political rights upon corporations prevents the administration of laws within Blaine Township and usurps basic human and constitutional rights guaranteed to the people of Blaine Township," says the township's Corporate Rights Ordinance of 2006.

To implement the ordinances, township supervisors are now campaigning for "home rule," a legal code that transfers some powers from state to local control and is commonly used to raise taxes or increase the number of supervisors on a board.

Establishing Home Rule
Blaine supervisors want to use home rule to establish what they say is the township's constitutional right to control corporate activity. Voters on May 19 approved a plan to set up a commission to study the proposal and recommend whether to adopt it.

A third lawsuit has been brought by Range Resources, a natural gas company, asking the court to invalidate Blaine's demand that corporations disclose their activities.

Penn Ridge Coal and Allegheny Pittsburgh Coal are asking U.S. Judge Donetta Ambrose of the Western District of Pennsylvania to declare Blaine's ordinances invalid and unenforceable.

In April, Judge Ambrose denied the township's motion to dismiss the case. She is expected to rule late this year.

Linzey predicted the case will eventually go to the U.S. Supreme Court because it pits energy companies who want to exploit one of America's richest coal seams against residents who are determined to resist what they see as rapacious mining.

He conceded the court is unlikely to overturn more than 100 years of established law that gives corporations rights as "persons" under the constitution, but he said the expected outcome would become a springboard for a popular campaign for a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of those rights.

Blaine's supervisors said they want to establish a principle of local self-government that will inspire other communities.

"Who dictates how we are going to live here?" asked Board spokesman Michael Vacca. "Should it not be us?"

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Cynthia Osterman)© 2009 Reuters

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Newfield, Maine, joins neighbor Shapleigh in banning large scale water extraction

Video from Portland's WCSH-6 news is available here.

NEWFIELD (NEWS CENTER) -- The town of Newfield is now the second in Maine to ban large-scale water extraction.

Saturday's vote was 228 in favor of the new ordinance and 146 against. The vote is a reaction to interest from Poland Spring Water and its parent company, Nestle, in pumping water from an aquifer shared by Newfield and Shapleigh.

Shapleigh voted for the same ban on water extraction two weeks ago. However, there is some concern that that ordinance could be overturned in court. As a result, townspeople voted on a different ordinance at town meeting Saturday that would lay out what a water company would have to do to be able to extract water from the aquifer.

That ordinance, which environmentalists felt was too weak, passed by a single vote.

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Ted Glick: Don't Just Mourn, Escalate

by Ted Glick

“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”
Albert Schweitzer

My Thanksgiving holiday and the days right after it weren’t the greatest, and it’s not because I didn’t enjoy spending time with my extended family in Pennsylvania. It’s because, literally right before I left home to drive there, I read a couple of emails about the intensifying climate crisis that had a deep personal impact. And then, upon arriving home afterwards, I found a couple more that only added to my feeling of, well, verging-upon-hopelessness, that’s the best way to describe it. Is it really too late? I kept wondering, all weekend and for most of last week.

One of the articles was a powerful piece by George Monbiot on November 25th focused on summer arctic ice sea melt and its connection to rising emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from melting permafrost in the northern latitudes. Another was a piece in the scientific journal, “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”, which reported that it looks like the oceans--a major absorber, along with soil, of carbon out of the atmosphere--are acidifying 10 times faster than was originally predicted which, among other things, means that they are absorbing less carbon dioxide. A third article predicted that, primarily because the ocean is “filling up” with CO2, a larger volume of carbon emissions will stay in the atmosphere for a much longer time than has been the case up to now, thousands of years as compared to hundreds historically.

And my mood wasn’t helped by problematic reports from the opening of the International U.N. Climate Conference in Poland. One particularly troubling piece of news was that the leadership of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a well-connected, politically “moderate” group, was expressing public skepticism about, or even the importance of, negotiation of a stronger international climate treaty by the time of the next U.N. Climate Conference in late 2009.

Fortunately, and crucial to my finding the inner strength to keep going, the climate movement, both in the USA and internationally, is very much moving and growing. It’s a movement that may be mourning what is happening in the world because of the power of the oil and coal companies and governments subservient to them, but it is also a movement which is stepping up its tactics. It’s a movement that isn’t just mourning, it’s escalating.

In an article in the November 21st issue of the Christian Science Monitor, Brianna Cayo Cotter of the Energy Action Coalition is quoted, saying, “In the last year it just exploded and went from being a very sizable amount of people, several thousands of very active youth all around the country, to just hundreds of thousands of young people. I feel like the floodgates are about to open. We have the numbers. We have the skills. We have the passion.”

Thank God for the Energy Action Coalition and those who support them.

It is also heartening that this year’s 4th Annual International Day of Climate Action over this weekend saw upwards of 90 countries where actions happened, up from 70 last year.

Then there is the loosely-connected but concretely-effective no coal movement, made up primarily of local groups around the country that have been fighting to prevent new coal plants from being built. This no coal movement--connected through a nonewcoalplants email listserve--has helped to cut in half the number of new coal plants that were projected as being built in the USA as of less than two years ago.

Representatives of that movement met in Charleston, West Virginia about two weeks after the November elections to develop plans for stepping up--for escalating--its tactics. Out of this inspiring and productive meeting attended by over a dozen Appalachian groups and about the same number of national groups emerged the decision to organize an intensive campaign, “100 Days of Action to Move Beyond Coal.” Each day, from January 21st to April 30th, one or a dozen or more communities will make a call for an end to dirty coal-- from destructive coal mining to dangerous coal waste disposal. Citizens across the US will gather with friends to work for clean energy, demand that their politicians declare coal is dirty, or march in solidarity with communities impacted by coal mining, coal burning and coal waste disposal.

More information on this major initiative can by found by going to www.theallianceforappalachia.org.

Probably the biggest four days of the 100 Days campaign period will be the Feb. 27-March 2nd Power Shift 09 conference being organized by the Energy Action Coalition (EAC) at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C. A year ago, in November of 2007, EAC organized the first Power Shift conference, attended by 6,000 young people from around the country. The organizers of Power Shift 09 anticipate from 10,000-15,000 in attendance at this second youth climate conference.

In addition to speakers, workshops, skills-trainings and other conference activities, there will be two major actions on the final day, March 2nd. That morning conference participants will swarm all over Capitol Hill, demanding that the federal government get serious right now about strong action on the climate crisis. That afternoon 1,000 or more of them will risk arrest in a symbolic attempt to shut down a coal-fired power plant that supplies some of the power to the U.S. Capitol.

This action was initiated by Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network and is being co-sponsored by a growing number of other groups. The call for this event explains that the aim is to turn a new corner for the climate movement--we have already won the battles showing that climate change is real and that politicians and industry/people must act; now we are reflecting the urgency and depth of the required responses. Civil disobedience has played a vital role in every social movement for justice, and echoing the recent calls of people like Al Gore, James Hansen, Wendell Berry and others--we feel it is time to escalate our tactics and our demands, and show the new administration that the American people are demanding and taking action in response to the urgency and seriousness of the climate crisis.

To find out more and to get involved, write to matt.leonard@greenpeace.org or josh@ran.org.

Then there are developing plans for major actions in the fall. On an international level, there will be major demonstrations around the world during the 2009 U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Groups in Europe have already begun meeting to plan large-scale nonviolent direct actions in Copenhagen, and it is likely that similar actions will develop in the USA and elsewhere.

There are also discussions beginning among U.S. climate activists about the idea of a national march on Washington that would involve hundreds of thousands of people, in either late spring or the fall.

As important as all of this escalated climate activity is, it is also important that the climate movement escalate its demands in response to the growing scientific evidence that dangerous climate change is speeding up.

Over the past several months, a number of individuals and organizations in the climate movement--James Hansen and Bill McKibben among the most prominent--have gone public calling for a system of carbon emissions reduction other than the “cap and trade” system. Cap-and-trade is currently supported by most established environmental organizations and almost all Congressional advocates of climate action.

“Cap and dividend,” or “cap and cash back,” or a revenue-neutral carbon tax--these are the different names for a similar system supported by Hansen, McKibben and others. The primary difference between this system and cap-and-trade is simple: there’s no trading involved, no opportunity for gaming the system. Instead, a steadily increasing price--a tax--is put on producers of oil, coal and natural gas, and the revenue raised from that tax is then either returned in total by way of dividends or rebates to individual taxpayers to help them deal with the rising costs of carbon-based fuels, or there’s a mix of dividends/rebates and government investments to help the shift to a green-jobs-creating, renewables-based economy.

This growing doubt about cap-and-trade is based upon hard evidence--the problems with the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union’s system, both of which are cap-and-trade--as well as the very real difficulties of generating enough political support in the U.S. Congress to pass cap-and-trade.

A December 2nd Reuters article by Timothy Gardner summarized the results of a recent General Accounting Office study:

The GAO report said some carbon offset investments’a central feature of cap-and-trade--went toward projects that probably would have happened otherwise. A key tenet of emissions markets is that such offsets help fight global warming only if they would not have occurred.

Some offset credits were awarded for projects that would have occurred even in the absence of the [the offset program], despite a rigorous screening process, the report said.

The GAO report urged Congress to consider that carbon offsets can undermine the integrity of a cap-and-trade system, given that it is not possible to ensure that every credit represents a real, measurable and long-term reduction in emissions.

The climate movement also needs to get behind the general goal of Al Gore’s proposal that the U.S. undertake an initiative to get 100% of our electricity from renewable energy within 10 years, by 2018. Gore has put forward a specific set of plans for how this objective can be achieved (see www.repoweramerica.org). Of political significance, a poll of hunters and fisherman this summer found that ¾ of them supported the goal of a 100% renewables electricity system by 2018.

Finally, and critically, the climate movement needs to do very broad outreach to a wide range of constituencies and groups. At the same time, those groups which do not see themselves as primarily climate groups need to realize that, in a very real sense, if we don’t get moving right now to solve the climate crisis on the scale needed, we’re going to be overwhelmed with an escalating series of climate disasters that will make forward progress on other fronts virtually impossible. The climate issue is literally everyone’s issue.

As importantly, the process of mobilizing the human, political, economic and spiritual resources to solve the climate crisis can lead us toward a very different kind of society, one in which social, economic, racial and gender justice is increasingly widespread, oil and resource wars are a thing of the past, and human solidarity and connection to the earth replaces competition and power-seeking as the root ethic of our culture.

Ted Glick is the Policy Director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network/U.S. Climate Emergency Council. More information can be found at www.tedglick.com.

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Rural Communities Act to End Corporate Domination

by Ruth Caplan

Corporate Destruction of Nature & Grassroots Solutions to Save the Planet
Justice Rising - Summer 2007, Vol 3, #1
July 1, 2007
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/html/eng/2439-AA.shtml

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The Alliance was created to "End Corporate Domination." When corporations invade every nook and cranny of our existence, where do we begin to respond to this daunting call to action? The answer lies with action that can be taken right in our own communities, which, when such actions reach a critical mass, have the potential to overturn "settled" law created by our courts and drive the rights of nature straight into the U.S. Constitution.

It all began in the most unlikely of places— rural, conservative Pennsylvania townships. This was not the result of progressives getting together. In fact, it was in reaction to a coalition made up of labor, environmentalists, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, and the Democratic governor, which succeeded in getting a law passed to establish regulations that would reduce the pollution from CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations).

Trouble was, farmers did not want these corporate hog farms in their communities period. They called Thomas Linzey with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in rural Chambersburg and said they wanted him to help them keep the CAFO’s out. Well, Linzey knew from his previous legal assistance to communities that the regulatory system was not going to do it. Together they took a radically different approach. The towns passed local ordinances that banned corporate farming altogether, with an exception for local family-based corporations. Instead of focusing on the regulatory action, the ordinances focused on the corporate actor.

These towns did not get down on their knees and plead with the corporations to be "responsible" or "accountable" to the community. They asserted their local authority over the corporations in order to protect their local farms and the health and welfare of their communities.

Then two teenagers drove their all-terrain vehicles over a field freshly spread with sludge from municipal treatment plants. Within days, Daniel Pennock, one of the teenagers, was dead from inhaling toxics from the sludge. It was a wake-up call. Farmers had been sold a bill of goods. What was supposed to be a boon to farmers—free fertilizer— was in fact laced with an unknown mix of toxins. Townships now knew how to respond. They banned corporations from spreading sludge in their towns.

The idea spread to western Pennsylvania, deep in mining country, where the coal companies were using long wall coal mining techniques to tunnel horizontally deep under homes and farms without supporting pillars. Homes cracked. Ponds disappeared. Water had to be trucked in to feed the livestock. Blaine Township, knowing that in the not too distant future the long walls would be coming to their township, has taken the incredibly brave step of passing an ordinance banning corporate mining in their town. Are our towns that brave?

As with the 19th century Populists, these farmers were learning just how the system of corporate domination works. They learned about how corporations had gained protection as "persons" under the Bill of Rights through "settled" law and they learned how in our history citizens have created movements to overturn "settled" law—the abolitionists and the suffragettes. In some townships they themselves took on "settled" law by denying corporations the rights of persons within the township as part of their ordinances against corporate farming or sludge spreading or coal mining.

Today over 100 communities in Pennsylvania have passed laws grounded in asserting community rights over corporate rights.

Inspired by Pennsylvania, the citizens of Barnstead NH became the first town in the country to pass an ordinance banning corporations from taking their water. The ordinance also denies corporations the rights of persons in Barnstead, as well as denying them protection under the commerce clause and contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution or similar provisions in the NH Constitution. The Alliance’s Defending Water for Life campaign triggered local interest in taking this approach and provided strategic support such as sponsoring a Democracy School in Barnstead.

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Speaking Out For the Rights of Nature

by Ruth Caplan

Corporate Destruction of Nature & Grassroots Solutions to Save the Planet

Justice Rising - Summer 2007, Vol 3, #1
July 1, 2007
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/html/eng/2439-AA.shtml

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When was the last time you read the US Constitution—read it carefully? Did you take note of how the Constitution protects the rights of persons to own property, even the right to own slaves as property, although the "S" word is never used. Did you remind yourself that the Fifth Amendment requires "just compensation" for any taking of private property for public use and that the Fourteenth Amendment says "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law."

Now search for any language referring to protection of nature. Nothing—Nada. This is why Congress resorted to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution—"The Congress shall have the Power ...To regulate Commerce...among the several States...."—as a justification for passing national environmental laws. A bird flies across state lines. A stream feeds a river that eventually crosses state lines. Air knows no state boundaries. The environment as an article of commerce!

If the abolitionist movement was about driving freedom for slaves into the Constitution; if the women’s suffrage movement was about guaranteeing women the vote as part of their Constitutional rights; then why isn’t the environmental movement about driving the rights of nature into the Constitution? This is the logic followed by environmental attorney Thomas Linzey with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) when he asserts that there is no environmental movement in this country.

So where is this new approach taking root? In the work of the national environmental organizations? No, it began in the rural town of Tamaqua, located in the anthracite coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania. On September 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough Council unanimously passed a law banning corporations from spreading sludge in the borough and recognizing that ecosystems in Tamaqua possess enforceable rights against corporations. Who will enforce these rights? The ordinance "establishes that Tamaqua residents can bring lawsuits to vindicate not only their own civil rights, but also the newly-mandated Rights of Nature."

Just a week later, the Board of Supervisors in nearby Rush Township passed a similar sludge ordinance recognizing the rights of nature. Then in early December the East Brunswick Board of Supervisors passed a similar ordinance. Three towns in three months in rural Schuylkill County took this radical action. The East Brunswick ordinance goes one step further: "In the Ordinance, the Township Board of Supervisors declared that if state and federal agencies—or corporate managers— attempt to invalidate the Ordinance, a Township-wide public meeting would be hosted to determine additional steps to expand local control and self-governance within the Township."

As CELDF historian Richard Grossman notes, "East Brunswick has joined other Pennsylvania municipalities in contesting the constitutional, legal and cultural chains that bind communities to the corporate system. They have heroically nullified corporate privilege delivered from on high by exercising democratic rule of law from below."

In April, Linzey joined with Wild Law author Cormac Cullinan to speak at a conference on "Earth Jurisprudence: Ethics, Ecology, and Law" hosted by the Barry and St. Thomas University Law Schools. In 2006, the law schools had joined to launch the Center for Earth Jurisprudence, whose mission is to "re-envision law and governance in ways that support the well-being of the Earth community as a whole, and to foster mutually enhancing relationships among humans and nature and recognize the rights of nature."

It is time to stop treating nature as property, to stop trying to protect the environment by treating air, water and wildlife as articles of commerce. It is time to build a real environmental movement! Ruth Caplan is the national coordinator of AfD’s Defending Water for Life Campaign. She will help lead a pre-convention Democracy School in Tucson this Fall.

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