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.

Read more!

Fasting for our future, climate activist enter fifth week of hunger strike

A hunger strike for strong climate legislation has entered its fifth week just as a weak climate action bill begins its Congressional mark-up.

Seven people—Kathleen Breault, SKCM Curry, Ted Glick, Jere Locke, Cathy Luna-Desaulnier, Vincent Pawloski and Diane Wilson, acting as part of Fast For Our Future, today criticized the draft legislation released last Friday by Congressman Henry Waxman and scheduled for “mark up” beginning today.

“This legislation is very problematic,” said fast coordinator Ted Glick. “It’s not even close to being a solution to our urgent climate crisis. 60% or more of the potential revenues that would come from putting a cap on carbon emissions are given free to coal, natural gas, oil and energy-intensive industries. The whole idea of a cap is to increase the price of carbon-based fuels to drive the transition to clean, renewable energy, and this legislation doesn’t do that.

“Further, the requirement for utilities to get their electricity from renewable sources is so weak it might be worse than having no federal renewables requirement at all, given the number of states that have enacted stronger renewable mandates. This is in no way the kind of legislation we need.”

Jere Locke, Director of the Texas Climate Emergency Campaign, criticized the weak target for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. "The world’s climate negotiators are calling for the world’s industrialized countries to reduce their emissions by at least 25-40% by 2020, with 1990 as the baseline year. This bill would require no more than a few percentage points. As someone with close ties to Africa and Asia and who has worked internationally for many years, I fear for those people in the countries of the Global South who have had little to do with the carbon pollution in the air who will be seriously hurt if we don’t act soon and strongly to address the climate crisis.”

Organizers of the Fast For Our Future intend to issue a call later this week for a worldwide “rolling fast” that would continue for the next seven months leading up to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in mid-December.

Read more!

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.

Read more!

Maine Town Takes a Stand: Closes Tap on Water Privatization

Residents say no to Nestlé's plan to pump local water, and to their Board of Selectmen's attempt to regulate water takings

By Edward D. Murphy. Published March 1 by the Maine Sunday Telegram; reposted on CommonDreams.org

Shapleigh residents have banned companies from drawing or selling its water.

During a special town meeting Saturday morning, residents voted 114 to 66 to adopt the ban drafted by Protecting Our Water and Wildlife Resources, which had opposed Poland Spring's efforts to test, draw, bottle and market the town's water.

The ban had been opposed by the town's Board of Selectmen, which had favored instead a set of regulations on drawing water in the town that will be on the warrant for the regular town meeting on March 14.

"The problem in Shapleigh is that all three selectpeople want Nestlé (Poland Spring's parent company) in here," said Shelly Gobeille, one of the leaders of POWWR. "This vote says they can't come in."

In September, residents adopted a six-month moratorium on water testing, which was seen as a precursor to Poland Spring's plans to set up a pumping operation. The town's planning board used the time to work on rules and regulations for drawing the town's water, but POWWR wanted to ban all major water extraction operations.

When the Board of Selectmen refused to put POWWR's proposed ban on extraction on the town meeting warrant - arguing that two legal opinions said it was unconstitutional - proponents circulated a petition that led to the special town meeting.

Gobeille said POWWR is now concerned that the selectmen could seek to derail the ban, but Bill Hayes, one of the three selectmen, said he's inclined to let the ban go into force without the selectmen getting involved. However, he said, others could challenge its legality.

"The townspeople voted to enact it," Hayes said. "If they want to incur the legal expenses of defending it if it's challenged, that's up to them."

Hayes said that if Poland Spring wants to draw the town's water, it would be better to regulate the company's operations and make sure the town benefits financially. He said talks with the water bottler never got to the point where a dollar figure was discussed, but the amount the town would earn "would have been significant. This would have been an opportunity to defer" some property taxes.

Mark Dubois, natural resource manager for Poland Spring, said he was disappointed by the vote at the special town meeting.

"It's kind of disconcerting as a company with 400 jobs right now in York County," he said. "It's our home, too, and we're very discouraged we can't have a basic discussion about what we do and do well."

Dubois said the company draws water from nine sites in the state now and has sufficient supplies of water for its current needs. He said the company would have been looking to draw water from Shapleigh in 2011 or 2012, but noted that it takes a long time to gain the state and local permits that are needed.

Read more!

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.

Read more!

Maude Barlow on the global water crisis

Recently named to the new post of senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues, Maude Barlow discusses the water crisis with Canadian journalist Erin Anderssen. First posted October 25 at the Toronto Globe and Mail

"What does it take to frighten people?" Maude Barlow wonders.

She rattles off a grim list of worries, barely pausing for breath: water supplies in Africa guarded by dogs and chain-link fences while families go thirsty, the vital Murray-Darling Basin in southeast Australia crumbling into desert, the mighty Colorado River in the United States drying up to a trickle.

"The water crisis is deepening everywhere," sighs the 61-year-old activist and head of the Council of Canadians, who has tasted tear gas and faced down stun guns in defense of universal access to clean water. What scares her most is that the problem will not get fixed for her grandchildren.

This week, Ms. Barlow was named senior adviser to the United Nations on water issues - a new position created by General Assembly president Miguel d'Escoto, who raised the subject of water as a human right in his first UN speech in September. Ms. Barlow, who has been meeting with Mr. d'Escoto unofficially since August, agreed to take the position without pay.

"With my heart and soul, I believe it is the single most important environmental and human-rights threat of our time, and it's the one hitting now," she says on the telephone from Winnipeg, where she was attending a conference. "There is nothing 'in the future' about this [issue]."

Raised in Digby, N.S., where her father was the town's first social worker, Ms. Barlow has become a prominent opponent of the privatization of water - a June article in the Australian newspaper The Age said she was "to H2O what Al Gore is to CO2" - but she first made her name in Canada as an outspoken activist fighting the North American free trade agreement. She received more than her share of criticism, and her more dire predictions have not come true, but on that subject she has a practised answer: "My mother used to tell me, 'Serious people make serious enemies.' "

And Ms. Barlow is nothing if not serious. She has written 15 books - her most recent, Blue Covenant, on the global water crisis, was published last year. She travels continually and not, as one colleague pointed out, on luxury junkets. While her calendar is swamped with speaking engagements, she is not one to linger at conference centres.

"She is just tireless," says Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch, an organization Ms. Barlow chairs.

In India, Ms. Hauter recalls, Ms. Barlow sat for two days in a small village with mothers who were holding a silent vigil to protest against a Coca-Cola plant that was siphoning off their water to bottle it. She was tear-gassed during an anti-globalization rally at the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong in 2005.

In Johannesburg, water services have been privatized, prepaid meters have been installed by the French company Suez, and the supply cut off to those who can't afford to pay. When local townships formed a protest march, Ms. Barlow and her staff moved to the front of the line, hoping to deter the police from using stun guns. A few days later in the Orange Farm township, she confronted some visiting Suez executives, who eventually hopped back on their bus and left without taking their tour.

This is the same doggedness that Ms. Barlow now vows to bring to her new post at the United Nations, where her main focus will be developing a new convention that sees water not as "a commodity to be sold on the open market like running shoes," but as a public resource held in trust by the government and provided as a human right to its citizens.

She says issues around water cover all the areas she feels most passionately about: gender, poverty, the environment, social justice. She describes returning from a trip in which she visited Nairobi's huge Kibera slum, where people use "flying toilets" (you defecate into a plastic bag and throw it in the street), and counting up her faucets and water lines in her Ottawa home. "I could turn them all on and run them for days, and nobody would say a word. We just take it for granted."

When she began studying the politics of water, she had to unlearn much of what she had been taught about the resource - beginning with the idea that it is infinitely renewable and that Canada is overflowing with it.

"We are a planet running out of clean water," she says. "We all learned that couldn't happen back in Grade 6. But it is happening."

And she notes that many Canadians still believe that their country has 20 per cent of the world's water supply and is therefore safe from shortages. (In fact, scientists now say Canada holds closer to 7 per cent of the planet's fresh water, and much of that is too far north to be accessible.)

Consider the ready examples that belie our myth of abundance, she says: The Great Lakes are becoming increasingly polluted as their water levels fall, many aboriginal communities have limited access to drinking water and the oil-sands expansion continues to damage the ecosystem of northern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Canadians rank among the biggest per-capita users of water in the world. "We treat our water badly," Ms. Barlow sighs.

But while the battle for a UN convention declaring water access a human right, similar to freedom of assembly and speech, will probably be long, she has reason to be hopeful.

After four years of silent vigil, the women in India managed to get their case against Coca-Cola to court and its plant was closed. As quickly as bottled water became a fad in the West, it is now becoming a faux pas; for instance, cities such as London have banned its use at municipal functions and many schools in Canada have stopped stocking it.

Blue Covenent opens with a disaster scenario: a future world where the poor continue to die from dirty water, corporations have made water a luxury of the rich and climate change is ravaging the land. Asked whether she is optimistic that the world can act in time, Ms. Barlow offers the only answer, perhaps, that a woman with four grandchildren can give: "We have to have the courage to see the crisis as it is. But anyone who knows me will tell you, I was born with a smile on my face."

In deep water: Statistics on the global water crisis from Blue Covenant

1.1 billion people have no access to clean drinking water.

The World Health Organization has found that contaminated water contributes to 80 per cent of all sickness and disease worldwide. Half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.

In China, 80 per cent of major rivers are so polluted that they no longer support aquatic life.

By 2050, based on a population growth of three billion people, humans will need an 80-per-cent increase in water supplies to feed themselves.

In 2006, 200 billion litres of bottled water were consumed globally - a 200-per-cent increase since the 1970s.

For the price of one bottle of Evian, the average North American could buy roughly 4,000 litres of tap water.

Less than 5 per cent of plastic bottles around the world are recycled.

Read more!

Lawsuits expected to follow bottled water study

by Scott Sabatini, published on Legal Newsline on Thursday, October 16. You can read the Environmental Working Group's report, which is referenced in the article below, here.

Laboratory tests of popular brands of bottled water will result in at least one California lawsuit against retail giant Wal-Mart, according to the non-profit organization that conducted the study.

The study, released on Tuesday, found 10 U.S. bottled water brands contain mixtures of 38 different pollutants, including bacteria, fertilizer, Tylenol and industrial chemicals, according to an executive summary issued by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.

The study asserts that Wal-Mart's label brand, Sam's Choice, fails to meet California's legal limits for bottled water contaminants.

The environmental group filed a notice of intent to sue Wal-Mart on Tuesday, alleging that the mega-chain failed to warn the public of illegal concentrations of trihalomethanes, which are cancer-causing chemicals.

Abraham Arredondo, a spokesman for the attorney general's office confirmed with Legal Newsline that they had received the letter from the Environmental Working Group and were taking it under advisement. He could not comment on the attorney general's interest in the case at this point, he said.

The study found that all brands met federal health standards, even though they fell short of the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry. California's standards exceed federal standards for water purity.

The Environmental Working Group sent a letter to California Attorney General Jerry Brown notifying him of the study and its implications for California. Brown has been a vocal critic of the bottled water industry.

This summer the threat of a lawsuit from the attorney general's office blocked a plan by Nestle, the nation's largest manufacturer of bottled water, for construction of a plant that would draw millions of gallons of water from the pristine McCloud River in Northern California. Nestle has since agreed to rework its construction and plan, lower levels of production and make further environmental concessions.

In an earlier interview Brown told Legal Newsline that Americans need to rethink their allegiance to bottled water.

"We take our pristine waters and cart them off to Maine or someplace," Brown said. "It's like carrying coal to New Castle, or ice to Alaska. It represents a level of waste that, at least, ought to be acknowledged. Hopefully, consumers will find more efficient ways to hydrate."

Officials from the Environmental Working Group said the bottled water industry has convinced consumers its product is superior, contrary to these study results.

"It's buyer beware with bottle water," said Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at EWG. "The bottled water industry promotes its products as pure and healthy, but our tests show that pollutants in some popular brands match the levels found in some of the nation's most polluted big city tap water systems. Consumers can't trust that what's in the bottle is anything more than processed, pricey tap water."

More than 25 percent of all bottled water comes from the same sources as tap water, municipal water supplies. Sam's Choice of Wal-Mart comes from Las Vegas' municipal supply.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts.

"The industry is spending millions, millions, on these advertising campaigning to get people think that bottled water is better than tap water." Executive Director Richard Wiles said.

Though the study did not focus on the cost and environmental impact of the bottled water industry, the group's recommendations focus on a change of mindset for consumers.

The average cost per gallon of bottled water, "$3.79 per gallon, is 1,900 times the cost of public tap water. A carbon filter at the tap or in a pitcher costs a manageable $0.31 per gallon," the EWG report states. "Consumers should drink filtered tap water instead of bottled water."

The environmental impact is also a concern, according to the report. Water bottle production in the U.S. uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per every year, according to a U.S. Conference of Mayors' resolution passed in 2007, enough energy to fuel 100,000 cars for a year. Roughly one in four bottles of the 36 billion sold each year is properly recycled, according to a 2007 study.

The study's recommendations call for "full disclosure of all test results for all contaminants," in bottled water, and made readily available to the public.

Read more!

The Earth Charter: A Declaration of Interdependence

As you read this article by Robert Dodge, and the BBC article below on the economic value of ecosystems, please also check out the Alliance's Tapestry of the Commons Project. This interactive workshop can be adapted to all ages and degrees of familiarity with environmental and social justice issues. It's a great way to start the "commons conversation" where you live. Download our 2-minute audio thoughts on the commons, too.)

This article was posted at Commondreams.org on Friday, October 10

Communities around the world will come together this Saturday to celebrate this year's Earth Charter International Summit. Global climate change is the theme of this year's Earth Charter International Summit, in keeping with the United Nations designation of 2008 as the International Year of Planet Earth.

The Earth Charter - a declaration of interdependence - articulates the shared responsibility we have to one another and to the planet itself. It is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history.

Created by the largest global collaborative process ever associated with an international declaration, the Earth Charter was drafted over a 10-year period by thousands from 77 countries.

It was launched at The Hague Peace Palace in 2000. It was subsequently endorsed by thousands of organizations representing millions of individuals worldwide. Ventura County, California is the first U.S. county to have endorsed the charter.

• The principle areas of the Earth Charter include:
• Respect and care for the community of life
• Ecological integrity
• Social and economic justice
• Democracy, nonviolence and peace
  

Summits from Tampa, Florida to Ventura, California to Ghana, Africa and Barcelona, Spain will join others in presenting and honoring individuals whose efforts best exemplify these principles and their connection.

This years partial list of speakers and honorees include:

Alexander Likhotal, President & CEO of Green Cross International and Advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, and Earth Charter Commissioner at the Tampa, FL Summit,

Dr. Gary Yohe, 2007 co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize (with Al gore) for his work with the International Panel on Climate Change, at the East Haddem, CT Summit,

James Hansen, NASA scientist and professor at Columbia University who revealed in 2007 that the White House edited climate-related press releases to make global warming seem less threatening, at the New York, NY Summit,

Majora Carter, MacArthur-winning activist for "greening the ghetto" and urban renewal, advocate for national "green jobs" agenda, and co-host of the Green on Sundance Channel at the Washington D.C. Summit,

Puri Canals, Vice-president of IUCN as well as the chairperson for the World Conservation Congress and will be speaking on Role of Women & The Environment from the ICUN conference in Barcelona.

Jackson Browne, musician and activist, for his work throughout his career on behalf of the planet, lending his support, voice and talents raising awareness to the perils of nuclear power, peace and the environment at the Ventura, CA Summit where eight other local heros will be recognized for their courage and work.

These remarkable individuals and the incredible work they do have made the connection and are making a difference. The world is indeed better for their efforts.

Each of us might ask ourselves: What will be our commitment in realizing this opportunity?

Participants at this year's summit will be encouraged to make a commitment to an ongoing action in the year ahead to reduce their environmental impact and help sustain the planet.

The Earth Charter concludes with a challenge called "The Way Forward": "Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life."

We invite you to join us in this effort.

For more information on the Earth Charter Community Summits in your community, or the Earth Charter itself, contact: www.earthcharterus.org or www.earthcharter.org.

Read more!

Nature loss 'dwarfs bank crisis'

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona. Originally posted Friday, October 10.
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study.

It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion.

The figure comes from adding the value of the various services that forests perform, such as providing clean water and absorbing carbon dioxide.

The study, headed by a Deutsche Bank economist, parallels the Stern Review into the economics of climate change. It has been discussed during many sessions here at the World Conservation Congress.

Some conservationists see it as a new way of persuading policymakers to fund nature protection rather than allowing the decline in ecosystems and species, highlighted in the release on Monday of the Red List of Threatened Species, to continue.

Capital losses
Speaking to BBC News on the fringes of the congress, study leader Pavan Sukhdev emphasised that the cost of natural decline dwarfs losses on the financial markets.

"It's not only greater but it's also continuous, it's been happening every year, year after year," he told BBC News. "So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today's rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year."

The review that Mr Sukhdev leads, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), was initiated by Germany under its recent EU presidency, with the European Commission providing funding. The first phase concluded in May when the team released its finding that forest decline could be costing about 7% of global GDP. The second phase will expand the scope to other natural systems.

Stern message
Key to understanding his conclusions is that as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free.

So the human economy either has to provide them instead, perhaps through building reservoirs, building facilities to sequester carbon dioxide, or farming foods that were once naturally available. Or we have to do without them; either way, there is a financial cost.

The Teeb calculations show that the cost falls disproportionately on the poor, because a greater part of their livelihood depends directly on the forest, especially in tropical regions. The greatest cost to western nations would initially come through losing a natural absorber of the most important greenhouse gas.

Just as the Stern Review brought the economics of climate change into the political arena and helped politicians see the consequences of their policy choices, many in the conservation community believe the Teeb review will lay open the economic consequences of halting or not halting the slide in biodiversity.

"The numbers in the Stern Review enabled politicians to wake up to reality," said Andrew Mitchell, director of the Global Canopy Programme, an organisation concerned with directing financial resources into forest preservation. "Teeb will do the same for the value of nature, and show the risks we run by not valuing it adequately."

A number of nations, businesses and global organisations are beginning to direct funds into forest conservation, and there are signs of a trade in natural ecosystems developing, analogous to the carbon trade, although it is clearly very early days. Some have ethical concerns over the valuing of nature purely in terms of the services it provides humanity; but the counter-argument is that decades of trying to halt biodiversity decline by arguing for the intrinsic worth of nature have not worked, so something different must be tried.

Whether Mr Sukhdev's arguments will find political traction in an era of financial constraint is an open question, even though many of the governments that would presumably be called on to fund forest protection are the ones directly or indirectly paying for the review. But, he said, governments and businesses are getting the point.

"Times have changed. Almost three years ago, even two years ago, their eyes would glaze over. Today, when I say this, they listen. In fact I get questions asked - so how do you calculate this, how can we monetize it, what can we do about it, why don't you speak with so and so politician or such and such business."

The aim is to complete the Teeb review by the middle of 2010, the date by which governments are committed under the Convention of Biological Diversity to have begun slowing the rate of biodiversity loss.

Read more!

The Story Of Stuff

Click here to watch the video.

Go to Original

The Story of Stuff
By Robert Weissman
ZNet.org

Thursday 06 December 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120907E.shtml

Right now, representatives of the governments of the world are meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate international agreements to forestall climate change.

Necessarily, these negotiations will revolve around technical, arcane matters. What targets should be set for reduced greenhouse gas emissions? Which countries should adhere to which targets? Should there be emissions rights trading, and if so, how should trading systems work? What financing mechanisms will be established to help developing countries transition to cleaner production methods and leapfrog over polluting technologies? Will there be special mechanisms established to protect forests? How should global trading rules be altered? And on and on.

The world desperately needs these negotiations to succeed, for science-based emission targets to be set, and for principles of social justice to shape the allocation of rights, duties and financial obligations needed to avert climate catastrophe. And whatever progress can be achieved in Bali, the better.

But we also need something else, which will almost surely precede global agreements and serious commitments to undertake the massive economic and social reorganization that the threat of global warming - and other pending ecological catastrophes - commands.

That something else is a broad public understanding of how the system all fits together. Not just how important it is to change from incandescent to compact fluorescent light bulbs or the value of recycling - though these things are vital - but how the present system of making, transporting, selling, buying, using and disposing of things is trashing the planet. If we're going to save ourselves from global warming, we're going to have to do things differently.

That's where The Story of Stuff comes in.

"The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard" is an engaging new short film that explains the "materials economy" in 20 fun-filled minutes.

Yes, fun-filled.

Produced by Free Range Studios, which developed "The Meatrix" - an animated short about factory farming that ranks among the cleverest uses of Internet technologies to deliver a politically progressive message - The Story of Stuff features the wonderful Annie Leonard, amusing graphics, lots of humor, and a complicated analysis presented in an easy-to-understand conversational tone.

You can watch the whole thing by clicking here. You'll have to watch the film to enjoy the humor - there's no easy way to convey the playful cartooning with serious purpose. But I guarantee chuckles even for the most austere.

The core themes of the Story of Stuff are:

1. The world is running up against resource limits.
   
   "We're running out of resources. We are using too much stuff. Now I know this can be hard to hear, but it's the truth and we've got to deal with it. In the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet's natural resources base have been consumed. Gone. We are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing the place so fast that we're undermining the planet's very ability for people to live here."
   
   
2. Corporate globalization is premised on externalizing costs - making someone other than the companies that make things pay for the environmental and human costs of production.
   
   "I was thinking about this the other day. I was walking to work and I wanted to listen to the news so I popped into this Radio Shack to buy a radio. I found this cute little green radio for 4 dollars and 99 cents. I was standing there in line to buy this radio and I was wondering how $4.99 could possibly capture the costs of making this radio and getting it to my hands. The metal was probably mined in South Africa, the petroleum was probably drilled in Iraq, the plastics were probably produced in China, and maybe the whole thing was assembled by some 15-year-old in a maquiladora in Mexico. $4.99 wouldn't even pay the rent for the shelf space it occupied until I came along, let alone part of the staff guy's salary that helped me pick it out, or the multiple ocean cruises and truck rides pieces of this radio went on. That's how I realized, I didn't pay for the radio."
   
   Who did? The people who lost their natural resource base, factory workers, those who are made sick from factory pollution, and retail workers without health insurance.
   
   
3. The corporate economy rests on the artificial creation of need - "the golden arrow of consumption."
   
   "Have you ever wondered why women's shoe heels go from fat one year to skinny the next to fat to skinny? It is not because there is some debate about which heel structure is the most healthy for women's feet. It's because wearing fat heels in a skinny heel year shows everyone that you haven't contributed to that arrow recently so you're not as valuable as that skinny heeled person next to you or, more likely, in some ad. It's to keep buying new shoes."
   
   
4. Things can be different. And they must be made to be different.
   
   "What we really need to chuck is this old-school throw-away mindset. There's a new school of thinking on this stuff and it's based on sustainability and equity: Green Chemistry, Zero Waste, Closed Loop Production, Renewable Energy, Local Living Economies. Some people say it's unrealistic, idealistic, that it can't happen. But I say the ones who are unrealistic are those that want to continue on the old path. That's dreaming. Remember that old way didn't just happen by itself. It's not like gravity that we just gotta live with. People created it. And we're people too. So let's create something new."

If you worry these claims are too broad, go to the website. It has supporting evidence and links to a vast array of additional resources and materials.

Is The Story of Stuff just preaching to the converted? No. (Though note, as a friend says, that there's a reason and rationale for the clergy to preach to the congregation every week - it reinforces, deepens and sustains commitment and understanding.)

The Story of Stuff is something you can show to anyone (or ask anyone to view online). It's persuasive but not a sermon. It's sophisticated but not esoteric. Its tone is light but its content is serious. It's narrated by the irrepressible Annie Leonard with passion but no pretense.

Annie, who is a former colleague and good friend, casually mentions at the start of The Story of Stuff that she spent 10 years traveling the world to explore how stuff is made and discarded. This doesn't begin to explain her first-hand experience. There aren't many people who race from international airports to visit trash dumps. Annie does. In travels to three dozen countries, she has visited garbage dumps, infiltrated toxic factories, worked with ragpickers and received death threats for her investigative work. Her understanding of the externalized violence of the corporate consumer economy comes from direct observation and experience.

The Story of Stuff is a short film about the big picture. Give it a look, and encourage others to check it out.

If negotiations like those in Bali are ultimately going to succeed, we need lots more people to internalize the message of The Story of Stuff, and mobilize, as Annie says, to create something new.

---

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, DC-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.

Read more!