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!

Tap Water Worries Have You Buying Bottled? Safeway Loves You!

by Jonah Owen-Lamb. Published June 2 by the Merced (California) Sun-Star, and posted on Commondreams.org
 
Wells are drying up across the county from an overtaxed and sinking water table.

Drought and climate change threaten the future of local water supplies.

And Merced has been selling its tap water since 2002 to a water bottling plant, which then sells that water at rates far above what it costs the plant to buy it from the city.

The Safeway Inc.'s water bottling plant in Merced -- one of the top five commercial/industrial water users in the city, which bottles Safeway's in-house purified and spring water brand Refreshe -- uses roughly 50,000 gallons a day, five days a week, for its bottling operation.

The plant, which provides most Refreshe drinking and spring water to Safeway stores in the state, filters city water, puts it in bottles and sells it as purified water. The bottles note that the water was bottled in Merced, but not that it was pumped out of the ground by the city. (Refreshe spring water is shipped in from a spring and then bottled in Merced.)

Some say the operation is just like any other business that buys water from the city. But others claim it represents a troubling trend. Environmentalists and water rights activists contend that the increasing commercialization of public water and the selling of tap water not labeled as such isn't how water pumped out of the ground by cities is meant to be used. They claim that bottled water sells itself as safer and healthier than tap water, but in many cases is not.

The Sierra Club's Water Privatization Task Force noted that the growth of the bottled water industry -- spearheaded by companies like Nestle, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola -- is not only depleting aquifers and springs across the country, but also represents a step toward increasing water privatization.

The task force also noted that the industry advertises bottled water as better than tap water -- even though much of the water in bottles comes from the tap. "The bottled water industry promotes bottled water as a healthy, trendy drink, without mentioning that it can cost 500 to 4,000 times more than tap water," commented the task force.

In Safeway's case they pay more than $1,000 a month for more than a million gallons of water. The retail cost for that much purified bottled water at Safeway is just under $3 million. Safeway would not say how much it costs them to produce their water.

Despite these concerns, the public's taste for the stuff is growing.

According to a 2009 report on the industry by Bottled Water Reporter, bottled water sales in the U.S. accounted for more than $11 billion in 2008. Over the last decade bottled water consumption jumped from more than $4 billion in 2000 to double that by 2008. According to Food & Water Watch, over 112 bottling plants exist in the state and over 1 billion gallons of bottled water are sold in California every year.

In the report, tap water was distinguished from bottled water. "Clearly," noted the report, "consumer perceptions matter, and consumers regard bottled water very differently from tap water. Even where tap water may be safely potable, many people prefer bottled water, which they regard as superior in taste."

Safeway spokeswoman Teena Massingill said that criticisms about commercializing municipal water and replacing it with expensive bottled water are baseless and unfounded. "There will always be critics of products," she said. "We are providing a product that did not exist previously. So I think that the argument that they are making is unfounded," she said.

As for the Safeway's operation in Merced, Merced spokesman Mike Conway said the city treats Safeway as it would any other industrial water consumer.

"There's no difference between any kind of water user who uses our water to process a product -- whether it's bottled water or anything else," said Conway.

"As for some additional perspective," wrote Conway in an e-mail, "if the city pumps about 21 million gallons of water a day, and Safeway uses 50,000, that works out to be 0.238 percent of our total gallons pumped."

But the plant doesn't only use water. It also produces waste. The plant's purification process discharges roughly 52,000 pounds of salts a year into the city's wastewater system, according to their permit.

Safeway's in-house brand Refreshe, bottled in Merced with well water, doesn't say on its label that it was originally municipal tap water.

Massingill's reply is simply that the product that Safeway provides -- fresh water -- isn't tap water.

But a new law could force water bottlers to at least let consumers know the source of their bottled water -- not just where it was bottled.

Assembly Bill 301 would require bottling facilities to register with the state and disclose the source of their water. Currently, the state's Department of Public Health only requires that bottled water labels list where the water was bottled, not the actual source of that water.

Another area of concern with bottled water, says Ruth Caplan, the national coordinator for the Defending Water for Life campaign, is that while bottled water sells itself as better than tap water, it contributes to pollution and has been found to be less healthy than tap water -- at least in some cases.

Many of the bottles end up in landfills, Caplan added, and in some cases contain industrial chemicals and bacteria above state and industry standards. According to the Sierra Club, nine out of 10 plastic water bottles end up as garbage or litter.

The National Resources Defense Council tested a wide array of bottled waters in the late '90s and found the majority contained either industrial chemicals and other contaminants, such as chloroform, that were above levels set by the state and the industry. The study included Safeway-brand bottled waters whose labels indicated they had gone through reverse osmosis filtration like the purified water in Safeway's Merced plant.

Safeway's Massingill declined to comment on NRDC's study, but said that Safeway is fully conscious of its environmental footprint and the healthfulness of its products. The company uses as little packaging as possible in its products. For instance, its plastic bottles are among the thinnest in the industry.

In addition, Safeway uses wind and solar energy on a wide scale. "We operate in the most environmentally conscious manor possible," she said. Safeway is one of the largest retail users of renewable energy in the United States as well, she said.

On top of the company's efforts to be green, Massingill said it provides jobs for roughly 70 people at its Merced plant. It's also actively involved in the community through the sponsorship of events, among other contributions.

The Wild West was founded partly over water wars. It's clear some are still being fought, even inside the bottle.

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!

News from the World Water Forum: 24 Hours in Police Custody

The fifth World Water Forum began this week in Istanbul. While the forum is billed as a venue for international work to avert water shortages, activists have denounced it as a front for multinationals promoting privatization of a common good for private gain. The following is a report from two activists who were arrested and deported for protesting at the forum. You can read daily updates from those critical of the World Water Forum's narrow approach and non-inclusive debate at WorldWaterForum.blogspot.com

Account of 24 hours in police custody in Istanbul from 10am on March 16,
2009 to the morning of March 17, 2009

By Ann-Kathrin Schneider, International Rivers

On March 16, 2009 at 9.30am, Payal Parekh and me unfolded a banner that read "No RISKY DAMS" just before the opening ceremony of the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. We also shouted "No Risky Dams" about five times. We were in the middle of the balcony of room 7 at the Sütlüce Conference Center in Istanbul.

The banner stayed up for about one minute -- after that, security forces took the banner. One minute later, security forces asked us to leave the room. We stayed outside of the conference room with about ten security and police officers for some minutes, while they checked our IDs, which they kept.

After that, they escorted us to a police room inside of the Sütlüce Conference Center where they wrote a statement of events, in Turkish. They asked us to sign the statement, which we refused because we didn't understand what the statement said. We asked for a translation of the statement, sentence by sentence, which we did not get.

After that, they led us to a car and drove us to a hospital. They did not take our cell phones away from us, so we were able to inform our friends about the developments. At the hospital, they led us to a doctor who asked us whether we had suffered any injuries, we said that we hadn't, she signed some papers, and we were escorted back to the car.

The police drove us to Hadic Merkezi Police Station in Beyoglu, Istanbul. There, a female policy officer did a body search on the two of us and they took our jewellery and our money, recorded everything we had, and gave it back to us.

Two lawyers, organized with the help of Turkish friends, arrived. We told them what had happened. The police finalized their statement and asked us to sign it. The lawyers translated the Turkish statement sentence by sentence. Since some details of the statement did not correspond with how we recalled the events of that morning, we refused to sign the statement and asked to give our own account of the morning's events.

Payal then reported the events of the morning to a policy officer. The lawyers helped translating her English into Turkish and the police officer wrote down the statement in Turkish. The lawyers translated the statement for us and both Payal and me signed the statement.

We then waited until about 5pm when our lawyers were called to talk to the head of the police station. The lawyers came back informing us that we had to leave the country within a couple of hours if we did not want to be put in prison for more than one year. They explained to us that our crime was that we tried to influence public opinion with the unfolding of the banner.

With the help of friends from Turkey and abroad we organized plane tickets for Payal to go back to the United States and for me to go back to Germany in the morning of Tuesday, March 17.

We were then taken to another police station and had photographs and fingerprints taken and were measured and weighed. After about one hour, we were sent back to the other police station, where we had spent the early afternoon, and spent the night there on some chairs in an office. We declined the invitation to sleep in the downstairs women's cell. A Turkish friend brought us our luggage from the hotel and we left the police station at about 6am in the morning towards the airport, in a police car.

We reached the airport at around 6.30am on Tuesday, March 17 and spent another one and a half hours at the police station at Istanbul airport, before being escorted to the check-in desk and the gate by a police officer.

The customs officer told me that I was banned from entering Turkey for two years. At the gate, the police officer gave me my boarding pass and ID.

We did not receive any documents describing what crime we were convicted of and the charges. We do not know who ordered our deportation, whether it was the police or a public prosecutor.

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!

Thomas L. Friedman: The Inflection Is Near?

Published March 8 in the New York Times

Sometimes the satirical newspaper The Onion is so right on, I can't resist quoting from it. Consider this faux article from June 2005 about America's addiction to Chinese exports:

FENGHUA, China - Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the "sheer amount of [garbage] Americans will buy. Often, when we're assigned a new order for, say, 'salad shooters,' I will say to myself, 'There's no way that anyone will ever buy these.' ... One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless [garbage]? I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I've made for them," Chen said. "And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible."

Let's today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it's telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall - when Mother Nature and the market both said: "No more."

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can't do this anymore.

"We created a way of raising standards of living that we can't possibly pass on to our children," said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows.

"You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior," added Romm. "But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, 'This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...' Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy."

Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year - more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit. "Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."

One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment - when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once - "The Great Disruption."

"We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder," he wrote me. "No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply." We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let's grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

Gilding says he's actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea's new national paradigm for development is called: "Low carbon, green growth." Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes - and we're seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways.

In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: "When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, 'What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?' " Often in the middle of something momentous, we can't see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker - the year when 'The Great Disruption' began.

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!

'Globalization From Below' Tackles the 'Great Recession'

The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

by Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Tim Costello, posted on Commondreams.org on January 26, 2009

[As tens of thousands of activists from around the world gather in Belem, Brazil for the World Social Forum, social movements everywhere are debating how to respond to the ever-deepening economic crisis. This article is excerpted from the longer Discussion Paper "GLOBALIZATION FROM BELOW" TACKLES THE "GREAT RECESSION" prepared by Global Labor Strategies.]

At the pit of the Great Depression in 1930, an American country music group named the Carter Family recorded a song called The Worried Man Blues. It began:

"I went down to the river and I lay down to sleep
When I woke up there were shackles on my feet."

Though many subsequent verses describe the horrific outcome, there is no explanation of what had happened or why – just an awakening to a seemingly endless catastrophe. The song immediately became an unprecedented national hit. It's hard to imagine that its success didn't have something to do with capturing the sense of being the helpless victim of incomprehensible disaster that so many felt in the face of the Great Depression.

The seemingly sudden collapse of the global economy in 2008 has similarly left millions, indeed billions of people all over the world a victims of a catastrophe that appears both inexplicable and unending.

But what's now being dubbed the "Great Recession" is neither incomprehensible nor irremediable. On the contrary, it can be understood as an expectable result of a capitalism that has been globalized and at the same time "freed" by neoliberalism of control in the public interest.

The economic globalization that transformed the world at the turn of the century promised, according to its advocates, a glorious vista of prosperity that would provide unprecedented economic growth and raise billions of people out of poverty. In practice it generated personal and national insecurity, growing inequality, and a race to the bottom in which every community, nation, and workgroup had to reduce its social, environmental, and labor conditions to that of its most impoverished competitor.

But economic globalization also gave birth to a new convergence of global social forces that opposed this kind of globalization. People all over the world fought back against this "globalization from above" with their own "globalization from below." They used asymmetrical strategies of linking across the borders of nations and constituencies to become a counter power to the advocates of globalization. They created a movement – variously known as the global justice movement, the anti-globalization movement, global civil society, or as we call it, "globalization from below" -- that some in the media even characterized as "the world's other superpower."

The anti-globalization/global justice/globalization-from-below movement developed in response to the expansive phase of globalization and neoliberalism. Now the global economy has entered the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial crisis has turned out to be the start of a cascade of other economic crises that are reshaping the global economy as definitively as an earthquake reshapes a city. Current leaders of the world's nations have utterly failed to develop a solution. The likely impact of their failure on ordinary people around the world is incalculable.

The advocates of globalization from above propounded as an article of faith that markets are self-regulating and that all would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if only governments, labor unions, citizens organizations, and the unruly mob let them alone to do their thing.

The times they are a-changing. US government officials long known as market fundamentalists seize banks, buy mortgage and insurance companies, and commit $7.7 trillion – half of the US annual product -- to government intervention in financial markets.

The Clintonite "moderates" who once gutted the social safety net and sacrificed commitments to jobs programs in order to build up budget surpluses now propose vast public works programs financed by budget deficits. The IMF, scourge of "irresponsible" countries that didn't balance their budgets, advocates a trillion-plus dollars in global government deficits and claims to have replaced "structural adjustment conditionalities" with condition-free loans.

These programs may well fail in halting the downward spiral of the global economy. But they open the door to new forms of more social and public economy. That's one reason conservatives normally oppose them – and one indicator of how serious the present crisis really is. The economic crisis makes it possible to put proposals on the table that have long been ruled inadmissible.

While economists have asserted with great confidence that one after another trillion dollar "solution" would save the global economy, one after another has failed, raising the specter that it cannot be saved in its present form. Peter Boon and Simon Johnson of the website baselinescenario.com recently raised that possibility in the Wall Street Journal. They note that economists generally believe even the Great Depression of the 1930s could have been stopped by proper monetary policy. But, Boon and Johnson argue, governments may simply not be able to prevent such huge deflationary spirals. "Perhaps the events of 1929 produced an unstoppable whirlwind of deleveraging which no set of policy measures would truly be able to prevent." Their implication seems evident: The same could be true today.

The multi-trillion dollar rescues and bail-outs so far just attempt – possibly futilely -- to save the status quo. But what can we do if the status quo can't be saved? Can globalization from below really provide an alternative solution to the great recession?

It has already started to do so. A landmark was the meeting of a group of social movements and NGOs in October, 2008 on the occasion of the Asia-Europe People's Forum in Beijing that developed a sketch for a "transitional program for radical economic transformation." The "Beijing Declaration" laid out alternatives that are "practical and immediately feasible" that put the "well-being of people and the planet at their center." This requires "democratic control over financial and economic institutions." It includes proposals for finance, taxation, public spending and investment, international trade and finance, environment, and agriculture and industry. It provides a brilliant first expression of a globalization-from-below alternative to the failures of globalization from above.

The basic vision of the Declaration is summed up in its title: "The global economic crisis: An historic opportunity for transformation." Its goal, in other words, is not to shore up the status quo and return to the destructive form of globalization that preceded the crisis. Its objective is almost the opposite of the eight-trillion-dollars-and-counting of bail-outs, rescues, and subsidies provided to business in recent months by the world's governments. It aims instead to provide "a transitional program for radical economic transformation" to a "different kind of political and economic order."

"Transitional program" may sound like antiquated socialist rhetoric – a call to take state power and nationalize industry. But both the goals and the methods are very different. Indeed, the Declaration points a path between merely reestablishing the status quo and assuming that actions must be "revolutionary or nothing."

No "maximalism" here. "To capture people's attention and support" the Declaration argues, proposals must be "practical and immediately feasible." That is possible because, even under the domination of globalization from above, people have been developing alternatives within the world's nooks and crannies. The unfolding economic crisis provides the opportunity "to put into the public domain some of the inspiring and feasible alternatives many of us have been working on for decades."

The goal linking these alternatives is "the well-being of people and the planet." And that requires a focus not primarily on restoring the financial system, but first and foremost on the great human and environmental crisis the world is facing in relation to food, climate, and energy.

Such common human interests are not the principal concerns of the people and institutions that now call the shots in national governments or the global economy. The "well-being of people and the planet" will not be achieved by economic jiggering. Instead, "democratic control over financial and economic institutions are required."

The vision of such democratic control, however, is not of either a centralized national or a centralized global economy. It is closer to what Walden Bello elsewhere described as the "co-existence" of a variety of "international organizations, agreements and regional groupings" that would allow "a more fluid, less structured, more pluralistic world with multiple checks and balances" in which nations and communities can "carve out the space to develop based on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice."

The current economic crisis creates opportunity for transformation, the Declaration argues, because it severely weakens the power of the US, the EU, and the IMF, World Bank, and WTO. It undermines the legitimacy of the neo-liberal paradigm. And, where global pseudo-consensus once asserted that "there is no alternative" to liberal capitalism, the future of capitalism is now becoming an open question.

Of course, this moment can also be seized by "fascist, right wing populist, xenophobic groups" who will try to "take advantage of people's fear and anger for reactionary ends."

What is the agency for pursuing constructive alternatives and resisting destructive ones? It starts with the "powerful movements against neo-liberalism" that have been built over past decades. These will grow along with public anger at the abuse of public funds for private subsidy, the crises of food, energy, and the environment, and the deepening recession.

As social movements from around the world converge in Belem, Brazil at the end of January for the World Social Forum, they will be in a position to take the next step toward realizing their potential as the world's "other superpower." Indeed, it is the convergence of the already existing networks and understandings of globalization from below with the new outrage at what neo-liberalism has done to the world that provides the opportunity to show that another world is indeed possible.

Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith are the co-founders of Global Labor Strategies, a resource center providing research and analysis on globalization, trade and labor issues. GLS staff have published many previous reports on a variety of labor-related issues, including Outsource This! American Workers, the Jobs Deficit, and the Fair Globalization Solution, Contingent Workers Fight For Fairness, and Fight Where You Stand!: Why Globalization Matters in Your Community and Workplace. They have also written and produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? GLS has offices in New York, Boston, and Montevideo, Uruguay. For more on GLS visit: www.laborstrategies.blogs.com or email smithb28@gmail.com.

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!

Ted Nace: The demise of California's Measure T is bad news for the environment

Humboldt County's groundbreaking restrictions on out-of-county corporate campaign contributions to local elections, has been declared "null and void" through an agreement with the County Board of Supervisors and Pacific Legal Foundation, a pro-business legal group. We've posted a press release on the defeat, by Measure T sponsors Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, on our e-news blog here. Ted Nace wrote the following, which was posted to Grist on November 13.

"Market failure" is one cause of environmental problems, but "democracy failure" is even worse.

Russia and China aren't the only examples. It also happens closer to home, as illustrated by last week's decision by California's Humboldt County to abandon Measure T, a local law banning non-local corporate money from local elections.

For years Humboldt County, like many rural counties in lumber or mining areas, was dominated by a single corporation -- Pacific Lumber, a subsidiary of Texas-based Maxxam, Inc.

For local voters, the last straw came when Maxxam spent several hundred thousand dollars on a recall initiative against District Attorney Paul Gallegos after Gallegos prosecuted Maxxam for fraudulent timber harvest filings. In 2006, after Gallegos survived the recall, the grassroots campaign that had organized to support him pushed through Measure T on a 55-to-45 percent vote.

The drafters of Measure T were aware of the U.S. Supreme Court's Bellotti decision (1979), which established the precedent that corporations could enjoy First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. In Bellotti, the Court invalidated a Massachusetts statute similar to Measure T that prohibited corporate spending on referendums. But the author of the Bellotti decision, Justice Lewis Powell, suggested that in situations where the "relative voice of corporations has been overwhelming" or where corporate influence has threatened "the confidence of the people in the democratic process and the integrity of government," limits on corporate political money would be acceptable.

Both exceptions seemed to fit the situation in Humboldt. For example, in 2004, research conducted by Humboldt State University indicated that four out of five local voters felt that heavy corporate contributions made political corruption more likely.

Not only was Measure T popular with local voters, it was seen as a template for anti-corporate activists across the country. That makes all the more stunning last week's capitulation by the Humboldt County board of supervisors in response to pressure by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-wing think tank. In a settlement signed on November 7 [PDF], the supervisors not only declared the ordinance null and void, but also promised to pay the Pacific Legal Foundation $44,000 within 60 days.

Why did Humboldt County cave on a matter that had passed by such a large majority and that had been crafted to meet the requirements of Supreme Court precedent? The probable answer is that the county simply couldn't afford the fight. In September, Federal District Court Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee, had granted PLF's request for an injunction [PDF] against Measure T, agreeing that the measure was "underinclusive" (because it targeted only non-local corporations) and that it should have made an exception for ballot initiatives (ignoring Powell's statements in Bellotti). Faced with the likelihood of spending large legal fees on a case where the judge appeared to have made up her mind, the County decided to bow out of the fight.

What's sad about the demise of Measure T is that the principle that corporations don't belong in politics was actually a mainstream feature of American law for the first 200 years of the country's history. As late as 1970, for example, the state of Wisconsin had a statute that stated, "No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office" (Wis. Laws, Lection 4479a (Sec. I, ch 492, 1905).

It is only since the late 1970s that Supreme Court decisions have established new corporate First Amendment rights, extending the Fourteenth Amendment rights won by corporate attorneys in the 1880s. This sort of corporate hegemony is bad for public morale, bad for democracy, and ultimately bad for the environment.

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!

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!

Ecuador voters approve rights of nature

On September 28, Ecuadorian voters approved a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable ecosystem rights, or Rights of Nature.

The Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly developed the new constitutional provisions with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which is pioneering similar work in the US by helping more than a dozen local municipalities in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia with drafting and adopting similar laws.

"Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights," stated Thomas Linzey, CELDF's Executive Director.

Article 1 of the new "Rights for Nature" chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: "Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies."

The Ecuadoran declaration is a departure from settled U.S. law, in that all of the major environmental laws in the U.S. - including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws - treat nature as property, with no rights in and of itself. These laws legalize environmental harms by regulating how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur. Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, these laws instead codify it.

The Rights of Natures laws developed by the Legal Defense Fund for local municipalities in the U.S. represent changes to the status of property law, eliminating the authority of a property owner to interfere with the functioning of ecosystems that exist and depend upon that property for their existence and flourishing. These local laws allow certain types of development that do not interfere with the rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish.

These local laws - and now Ecuador's constitution - recognize that ecosystems possess the inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that people possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of ecosystems. In addition, these laws require the governments to remedy violations of those ecosystem rights.

Read more!

Ecuadorian Assembly approves constitutional rights for nature

Published on July 10 at climateandcapitalism.com

On July 7, the 130-member Ecuador Constitutional Assembly, elected countrywide to rewrite the country’s Constitution, voted to approve articles that recognize rights for nature and ecosystems.

“If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” says Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

The following clauses will be included in the constitution that will be submitted to a countrywide vote, to be held 45 days after Assembly finishes its work later this month.

Chapter: Rights for Nature

Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

“Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.

Read more!

Living A New Vision For The Future

Alliance Co-chair Lou Hammond and his wife Pat, Alliance Mid-Atlantic regional representative, have now realized their dream of creating an environmentally sustainable co-housing community -- www.HundredfoldFarm.org .

Completely off the grid with full treatment and recycling of wastewater, the community located just outside Gettysburg PA already has seven homes occupied with seven more in the pipeline.

Click here for a full description and tour.

Read more!