Earth Day in Bolivia

As this historic Cochabamba Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, attended by over 35,000 participants, comes to a close on this Earth Day there is a great deal of hope and possibility in the air. President Evo Morales welcomed representatives of 90 governments including several heads of state to present the findings from the 17 groups working on issues such as Mother Earth Rights, Creating a Climate Tribunal, Climate Debt, Just Finance, Agricultural Reform and other related topics. Four representatives, from Australia, USA, Malaysia, and Bolivia gathered the findings and presented them to this auspicious gathering.

While the Copenhagen accord set a non-binding agreement to hold climate temperature rise to 2 degrees C the finding of these working groups felt the target should be 1-1.5 degrees and holding CO2 emissions to 300ppm to save the island states and many others already heavily impacted by climate change. Another major issue was Eco Debt which people felt very strongly needed to be addressed in the upcoming COP 16 UN conference on climate change. There was strong agreement that the development model offered by Western (capitalist) society was severely flawed and that a new global model that was based in honoring the rights of Mother Nature had to be created. How can a system built on continuous growth (hyper-consumerism) continue with finite resources?

It was suggested that at it’s heart this is a spiritual issue. How can we stand by and protect our privileged way of life, while so many of our brothers and sisters around the world are suffering. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed and one-third is starving.  Perhaps we think this doesn’t impact us, but in reality it makes the world less safe, more unstable, leads to hording, greater separation,  denial and spiritual disharmony. The working groups put Mother Earth rights first, because human rights and all the other issues are a subset of it.

Another critical issue that was addressed was agricultural reform, food is a primary example of our lack of honoring the rights of Mother Nature. Factory farms, fast food, Genetically modified crops, privatization, pesticides and toxic chemicals, the patenting of seeds and our disregard for the preciousness of our water were examples of being out of touch with nature. Indigenous wisdom was called on to find solutions to help us return to balance with the needs of our Mother. It was felt that the capitalist system has used nature as a slave instead of a live being that supports all life on this planet. They suggested that this is why the rights of nature must come first and it is the duty of all people to fight for her rights.

Climate Justice and debt were big topics of this conference. It was decided that a new organization needed to be formed to regulate abuses to Mother Earth with a Tribunal to enforce the standards of living in harmony with the natural world. Many of the developed nations are calling for the cancellation of the Kyoto Accord, but this group will be calling for a commitment to adopting the protocol for the years from 2013-2017. They are looking for a 50% reduction from 1990 emission levels with no offsets or voluntary compliance. The consensus is that there must be legally binding commitments that can punish polluters and be upheld in a court of law.

The working groups also rejected REDD, the United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries, considered by the many in the group to be simply a way of making money from pollution through carbon trading. Twenty percent of the planet’s yearly greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation, more than the entire global transportation sector and second only to the energy sector. The group feels that this proposal takes the attention away from the real issue of respecting nature. The suggested solution is education and a global tree planting campaign. Of course that needs to be part of a larger plan that includes getting away from our dependency on oil. As my friend Nnimmo Bassey, president of Friends of the Earth, says “Leave the oil in the soil, leave the coal in the hole, and leave the tar sand in the land.”

After a gruelingly long and bombastic speech by Hugo Chavez, that put most of the people asleep, Evo Morales gave his closing remarks. He said that the corporate mass media turns things around to make people working for true democracy into the enemy and that it was up to us to get the word out and raise awareness of these important issues. In the end the future of the planet is in the hands of the people!

All in all it was a very inspiring day. More tomorrow.

michael