Confronting climate catastrophe: Direct action is the antidote for despair

I attended my first UN Climate Conference in 2004 in Buenos Aires, and my last in 2011 when I was permanently banned from the UN Climate Conferences following a direct action occupation at the Climate COP in Durban, South Africa.

But I actually got involved with the UN Climate Conferences through the work I spend most of my time on, which is stopping the dangerous genetic engineering of trees.

In 2003, the UN Climate Conference decided that GE trees could be used in carbon offset forestry plantations. Why? Because Norway tried to get them banned and Brazil and China blocked them, so GE trees got in the back door. This is one of the dysfunctions of the UN Climate Convention.

But it wasn’t until 2007 that the UN and the World Bank announced the launch of the “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation” initiative, or REDD, with a press conference featuring then-World Bank President Robert Zoellick. Zoellick is one of the key figures in the “Project for a New American Century”, which strategized to advance US global domination after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and orchestrated the Iraq War in 2003.

Yet there he was in Bali, Indonesia, at the UN Climate Conference, talking about the need to protect forests to help stop climate change. Why would he do that?

Because REDD is a scheme to enable business-as-usual under a green veneer. It lets corporations like Chevron buy forests in the Global South to “absorb” their pollution rather than cut their emissions at source.

In fact, REDD creates a framework that encourages the theft of the most ecologically diverse lands remaining on the planet from the people who have historically protected them – the indigenous and forest-based peoples who depend on them for their existence. It was protested almost daily during the two-week Conference.

By the end of Bali, organizations, social movements and Indigenous Peoples from around the world came together to form Climate Justice Now! (CJN!) to demand justice-based and ecologically appropriate approaches to the climate crisis.

Two years later, the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, was scheduled to start on November 30, 2009, the 10th anniversary of the historic shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, US. The Seattle WTO shutdown was a watershed moment for the global movement against corporate globalization.

We planned to use that auspicious anniversary and the framing of the UN as the World Carbon Trade Organization, to build momentum for a mass action in Copenhagen.

We announced these plans at a press conference during the UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, in 2008. The next day, the UN pushed back the start of the Copenhagen event by one week.

At the press conference, Climate Justice Now! released a powerful statement denouncing the UN titled, “Radical New Agenda Needed to Achieve Climate Justice.”

“We will not be able to stop climate change if we don't change the neo-liberal and corporate-based economy which stops us from achieving sustainable societies. Corporate globalisation must be stopped.”

“Solutions to the climate crisis will not come from industrialised countries and big business. Effective and enduring solutions will come from those who have protected the environment – Indigenous Peoples, women, peasant and family farmers, fisherfolk, forest dependent communities, youth and marginalised and affected communities in the global South and North.”

“We stand at the crossroads. We call for a radical change in direction to put climate justice and people's rights at the centre of these negotiations.”

The following year in Copenhagen, Climate Justice Now! and Climate Justice Action, a network created to coordinate direct actions around the Copenhagen Conference, organized the “Reclaim Power!” march out. Country delegations, organizers and others, led by Indigenous Peoples, marched out of the talks in protest of the lack of meaningful and just action, and the silencing of people’s voices, while thousands were trying to break the police lines outside of the Conference center.

Meanwhile, inside the negotiations, the US was bribing and threatening other countries to go along with Obama’s secretly negotiated and disastrous “Copenhagen accord.” But Venezuela and Bolivia refused to capitulate and it was not adopted.

CJN! released a statement at the end of the Copenhagen Catastrophe which was titled, Call for “system change not climate change” unites global movement:

“Government and corporate elites here in Copenhagen made no attempt to satisfy the expectations of the world. False solutions and corporations completely co-opted the United Nations process. Virtually every proposal discussed in Copenhagen was based on a desire to create opportunities for profit rather than to reduce emissions. The only discussions of real solutions in Copenhagen took place in social movements.

“Our demonstrations, organised together with Danish trade unions, movements and NGOs, mobilized more than 100,000 people in Denmark to press for climate justice, while social movements around the world mobilized hundreds of thousands more in local climate justice demonstrations.

“While Copenhagen has been a disaster for just and equitable climate solutions, it has been an inspiring watershed moment in the battle for climate justice. The governments of the elite have no solutions to offer, but the climate justice movement has provided strong vision and clear alternatives.”

At the next two Climate Conferences, in Cancun, Mexico, and Durban, South Africa, the UN cracked down on dissent. Any demonstrations or protests had to be permitted or participants would be ejected from the conference. Even wearing a t-shirt with an unsanctioned message was enough to lose your credentials.

All of this led to the youth occupation of the hallway in Durban. And the permanent banning of my colleague and myself.

And the next year the UN Climate Conference went to Doha, Qatar, just like the WTO.

Is there hope that the UN will accomplish real, effective and just action on climate change in Paris this year? No.

Will they promote dangerous profit-driven false solutions that endanger people’s lives and further destroy the planet’s life support systems? Yes.

Are people standing up to corporate power, shutting down the polluters and building and defending their own solutions to climate change? Yes. Is it time for the rest to stand up in solidarity and do the same? Yes.

Is it possible to change this entrenched system? It has to be. We don’t have any other choice.

We have seen the power people have when they refuse to obey, when they take on the power structure through creative and direct action, when they stand up for their rights.

People are putting their lives on the line to defend their communities and their lands against the ravages of climate change, the main drivers of the crisis and the false solutions like biofuels – for example, farmers in Honduras and Indigenous Peoples in Indonesia rising up against oil palm plantations in the face of violent repression and murder and loss of territories and livelihoods. Farmers in Mexico fighting industrial wind farms, Innu people in Quebec organizing to stop massive hydroelectric dams that would drown their ancestral lands. Tupinikim and Guarani peoples who cut down industrial eucalyptus plantations in Brazil to re-establish their ancestral villages, and when the government burned them down, they came back and rebuilt them again. In Kenya, rural women are sharing with each other how to grow traditional foods to become less dependent on food aid, often in the form of GMOs, and more resilient to climate change.

And La Via Campesina is organizing small farmers around the world who are practicing traditional agriculture, and feeding people while cooling the planet.

There are thousands of such inspirational examples.

As those of us know who’ve been involved in the movement, who’ve spent time in jail, there is great power in taking action for your beliefs and not backing down. In putting your body on the line. In saying No.

Because direct action is the antidote for despair.

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