Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Environment
Jerome Bettis’s Hall of Fame-Worthy Fight to Save Kids From Asthma
01 day ago
Questions of greatness will consume this Super Bowl weekend as Brady and Manning legacies clash once again. But the real contest for the greatest takes place on the day before the Super Bowl in Canton, Ohio, where former Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jerome Bettis is a finalist for induction to the Hall of Fame, the highest NFL honor. And while Tim Tebow has garnered attention for political activism of a smellier kind, Bettis has been doing his own campaigning–for a cause most people can breath easier with.
Since his days on the field (Bettis retired in 2006), Bettis has been an advocate for children suffering from asthma. He has asthma himself, and NFL fans probably remember the catharsis after many of his memorable runs when, whether for a tough-earned five yards or a 50-plus yard break away, he’d end up on the bench with an inhaler pumping into his mouth, trying to catch his breath. Bettis developed the health condition as a young teenager, growing up in Detroit, where the air above is often misted with soot and toxic metals from factory clusters. It didn’t stop him from becoming an outstanding football player both in high school and in close-by Notre Dame for college.
Since a pro, first with the St. Louis Rams and then finally with the Steelers, where he played for 13 years, Bettis amassed a spectacular career on the field, ranking fifth in NFL history for yards rushed and making the Pro Bowl six times before retiring after his 2005 season-capping Super Bowl win, earned in his native Detroit.
Off the field, he raised money and created special programming and camps for children with asthma, a breathing condition that’s grown worse for children over the decades, particularly for children of color. Last year, Bettis took a step beyond, when he teamed with the Environmental Protection Agency to produce a public service announcement in support of their new Mercury and Air Toxics rules [MATS], which will regulate the amount of pollution that large factories can emit. And it’s for this reason alone that Bettis ought to be inducted into the Hall of Fame–if not in Canton, then the Hall of Fame in the minds of those who cherish professional heroism in general.
After a meeting with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Bettis said, “I don’t think I’m courageous or anything. … She said I was courageous.”
Here’s why he is courageous. When Jackson thanked Bettis for his courage, she also explained to him that he was “going to meet some resistance.”
The Resistance: The Republican Party, not to mention Big Industry in general, which has profited handsomely for decades by not having to control the amount of particulate matter, lead, mercury, dioxides and other pollutants that diminish the quality of the air. These pollutions have harmed the lives of people who live near factories, and mostly without the offending companies paying a dime for the neurological, respiratory and economic damage they’ve caused in thousands of communities from Detroit to Pittsburgh and beyond.
The Republican Party, well funded with lobbying dollars from energy companies that operate the polluting facilities, have been the energy industry’s staunchest defenders, calling not only for a revocation of the MATS rules–House Republicans preemptively passed a bill blocking EPA’s move–but often calling for the shuttering of EPA itself.
The rivalry between EPA and Big Industry is deeper and much more costlier than the most hostile rivalry between any two NFL teams. And Bettis has marched right into the middle of it, despite the fact that companies could pull advertising from the NFL games in which Bettis is a commentator (some have already waged their own anti-MATS commercial campaigns during football games), and despite the fact that he’s trying to raise money for his The Bus Stops Here Foundation, which helps children with asthma. That’s to say nothing of his many endorsement deals, which often scare athletes away from politics of any sort.
Bettis could have taken an easier road, or in NFL terms, picked a weaker schedule. He didn’t need to team with EPA–probably the most electric political football of all federal departments and agencies right now–to continue his advocacy around asthma. He had already been doing so for years without them. He also could have waited until after 2012, side-stepping an election year when every conceivable opponent will be blitzing EPA on every play until November. Keep in mind that Bettis’s work with EPA doesn’t amount to a mere YouTube video. He’s also traveled with EPA officials and the Clean Air Council to meet with Congress members, urging them to support the new stricter mercury rules.
But Bettis understands that the stakes are highest for the kids suffering, and dying, from asthma as well. As he told Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, “This needs to happen sooner than later. … It’s pretty simple. Everybody’s health is at stake.”
Asthma has been a growing problem for children in general, but for children of color it’s more severe, affecting kids who grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, as Bettis did, and children growing up in the White House–President Obama’s daughter Malia suffers from asthma, a condition she’s carried since living in the well-to-do Hyde Park neighborhood of Southside Chicago.
For African American children, the death rate from asthma was seven times higher than that of white children from 2003 to 2005, Bettis’s final three years in the league. African-American children have a 80 percent higher prevalence of asthma than white children. The death rate for Puerto Rican children was 400 percent higher than for whites in 2003. And while Asian-American children have lower asthma rates than white children, they died from it at a 30 percent higher rate than white children.
EPA’s new MATS rules address the kind of pollution that can lead to asthma and other health disorders by requiring coal-powered power plants, incinerators, boilers and other electricity generating facilities to upgrade themselves with equipment that’s called “Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology,” or UMACT. Along with targeting mercury, which has been linked not only to asthma but also nervous system damage and early development disorders, the rules also aim to control pollutants such as cyanide, lead, acid gas and arsenic, which are linked to similar problems and can cause cancer. EPA anticipates that its new safeguards will prevent 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and lead to 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year. They will also drop premature deaths by as many as 11,000 per year, and 4,700 less heart attacks a year.
The new standards have the additional economic benefits of creating thousands of new short- and long-term jobs for construction workers, who will be needed to help facilities comply. (They have three years to upgrade, with the extension of an additional year if the official deadline is too early to meet.) So you’d think these are rules we could all comfortably live with–you’d think. But Sen. Jim Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works committee, has vowed to overturn them, saying they are “a thinly veiled electricity tax that continues the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy and is the latest in an unprecedented barrage of regulations that make up EPA’s job-killing regulatory agenda.”
Bettis’s position on mercury and toxic air standards is pro-life, but you wouldn’t know it since he doesn’t get the kind of press that Tim Tebow does for his version of pro-life activism. Advocating on behalf of kids with health problems shouldn’t be branded as political, but given the current climate, there’s no way to escape the label. In that context, he’s joined a very tiny pool of NFL “greats” who’ve taken up political causes. Hall of Famers like Jim Brown and Reggie White also took up political causes in their post-NFL years, but both had their own problems–Brown with domestic violence, and White’s own political positions mirrored Tebow’s.
Looking at someone like Muhammad Ali, who’s not without his own personal problems, you find someone whose greatness was achieved not just because of his boxing titles, but because of the positions he took on racism and war. Both of those issues were widely controversial during the 1960s. Making the air cleaner for children to breath and live with shouldn’t be viewed with the same level of controversy. But the political reality has determined otherwise. Bettis hasn’t shied away, which is why he deserves to be ranked with the greatest.
Obama Rejects Keystone Oil Sands Pipeline Application
02 weeks ago
The Obama administration rejected a bid to expand the controversial Keystone oil sands pipeline Wednesday, saying the deadline imposed by congress did not leave sufficient time to conduct the necessary review.
“Our Lakota people oppose this pipeline because of the potential contamination of the surface water and of the Oglala aquifer,” Deb White Plume, a Lakota activist, told Colorlines.com last fall. “We have thousands of ancient and historical cultural resources that would be destroyed across our treaty lands.”
Statement by the President on the Keystone XL Pipeline:
Earlier today, I received the Secretary of State’s recommendation on the pending application for the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. As the State Department made clear last month, the rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment. As a result, the Secretary of State has recommended that the application be denied. And after reviewing the State Department’s report, I agree.
This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people. I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision, but it does not change my Administration’s commitment to American-made energy that creates jobs and reduces our dependence on oil. Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security -including the potential development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico – even as we set higher efficiency standards for cars and trucks and invest in alternatives like biofuels and natural gas. And we will do so in a way that benefits American workers and businesses without risking the health and safety of the American people and the environment.
Bay Area Residents Work to Turn Health Inequities Into a Solar Mosaic
03 months ago
Gwai Boonkeut suffers from severe heart disease. He doesn’t smoke, has no family history of diabetes or heart problems, and he’s in his mid 50s — about 10 years younger than the average age for men who suffer from their first heart attack. A doctor told Boonkeut that his heart operated at a third of the capacity of a normal heart. Boonkeut, who supports his family by working as a school janitor, had to cut back his hours because of his health.
Boonkeut moved his family to Richmond, California in 1980 from Laos to escape the violence of the Vietnam War, where he lost his mother, two brothers, and a niece. However, life in Richmond wasn’t any better. In 2004, his 15-year-old daughter Chan was mistakenly targeted by gang members and killed at the family’s front door. Boonkeut’s older son was caught up drug use.
The city is dominated by the Chevron corporation, which operates massive oil refineries, spewing hazardous toxins in the air. Boonkeut is a member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a community based group advocating for the health and livelihoods of members such as Boonkeut.
Richmond’s residents, mostly black, Latino, and South Asian, suffer from higher rates of death from heart disease and cancer than surrounding communities, according to the documentary ”Unnatural Causes“ by the California Newsreel. Children are hospitalized for asthma at twice the rate than surrounding counties.
Now, residents are teaming up with community groups like APEN to paint their own vision of a healthy, sustainable future.
The first step towards that vision occurred last week, with the launch of Oakland Solar Mosaic, a partnership between an eponymous community solar company and the Ella Baker Center. Their pilot project was a community owned solar installation atop a neighborhood center, the Asian Resource Center, in Oakland’s Chinatown, which houses APEN and other community based organizations. Community members each chipped in $100 to purchase a tile, a multitude of which created a mosaic.
“We know what dirty energy does to our communities,” said Mari Rose Taruc, state organizing director for APEN. “We have members in Richmond at the fenceline of the Chevron refineries and members living in Chinatown near the 880 freeway; the consequences are huge for our communities.”
She added, “It’s going to take a lot to transition out of fossil fuels and harmful industrial practices, to a cleaner world that we can actually be a part of, in terms of beneficiaries, to get our folks to be part of the work it takes to do that.”
The panels will generate 28.8 kilowatts, saving the center over $300 monthly on their utility bill. Any monies netted from the savings will first go towards repaying the community investors, then towards community ownership of the panels, and ultimately towards wealth the community can pocket.
That’s what distinguishes Solar Mosaic from other renewable energy projects by, say, Chevron or the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), who have jumped onto the green bandwagon. The community, not a corporation, holds ownership and wealth.
This is energy democracy in action, according to Billy Parish, cofounder and president of Solar Mosaic. Parish’s past credentials include co-founding the Energy Action Coalition and supporting the Navajo green economy campaign of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, which his partner Wahleah Johns co-directed. (I profiled her work with the Navajo green economy in this case study.)
“Energy is the largest industry in the history of human civilization; there’s an incredible amount of power controlled by a small number of people in fossil fuels and finance companies,” explained Parish. “We represent a very tiny example of a major shift that’s happening, where wealth and prosperity that the energy sector represents can be more democratically enjoyed.”
Parish added, “We hope soon that people will be able to move their money from investments in the stock market and derivatives to tangible clean energy assets, an emerging class that is based on safe energy, good for the world, and which provides a good financial return.”
For Mari Rose Taruc, the solar panels on her roof represent hope. “To know that it’s on the rooftop of our building is an inspiration that it’s also doable for homes, businesses, and other buildings.”
A hope so necessary for APEN’s members, like Gwai Boonkeut and his family.
“Solar by itself is green only, especially if it’s only for rich people and we still have bad working conditions,” added Taruc. “Our question is where are the APIs or immigrants in this movement? We want to see models of ownership and business, where they honor the folks in the community, the 99 percent, a more decentralized and locally owned green economy.”
First Nations and Native Activists Come Out Against Keystone XL
05 months ago
In hopes that action would discourage President Barack Obama from permitting an extension to the Canadian Keystone pipeline — also known as the “Keystone XL” — a group of First Nations and American Indian activists protested in front of the White House on Friday.
Before being arrested, the protesters insisted that the extension — which will run from Alberta Canada to Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas — will harm ancestral homelands.
“Our Lakota people oppose this pipeline because of the potential contamination of the surface water and of the Oglala aquifer,” said Deb White Plume, a Lakota activist. “We have thousands of ancient and historical cultural resources that would be destroyed across our treaty lands.”
Even the New York Times’ editorial board came out against the pipeline, writing that it was concerned about oil spills along the route and carbon emissions. “[T]he extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does,” the board wrote last month.
The approval process for the Keystone XL was set in motion in September 2008, and while the National Energy Board of Canada approved it in 2010, 50 members of Congress have opposed it. Obama will have until the end of the year to decide whether to approve the extension.
In the meantime, those affected are speaking up. “Our First Nations in Alberta have been concerned of the lack of consultation of the pipelines and tar sands expansion,” Chief George Stanley, Cree Regional Chief of Alberta said at the protest. “President Obama can do what’s right. For the president to approve this pipeline is not in the national interest of U.S. or Canada.”
Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin Has Big Post-Katrina Regrets
05 months ago
Six-years after Hurricane Katrina, former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says his biggest regret is that he didn’t call for a mandatory evacuation of the city sooner.
“When I called the mandatory [evacuation], we got about 95 to 96 percent of the people out of harm’s way, but it still wasn’t good enough,” he said, reflecting back with disapproval in a conversation with BET.com.
Nagin was one of the leading figures to receive criticism for the lack of preparedness in New Orleans when Katrina hit. He’s currently focusing on promoting a book titled “Katrina’s Secrets: Storms After the Storm,” which he says will shed more light on the decisions he made in the days before and after the storm.
A 2007 Colorlines.com video from the archives.
“I want them to understand a lot better about how politics, race and class played a negative role in this disaster and, hopefully, we can learn from it and it won’t ever happen again in American cities and in any other city around the world,” he told BET.com.
Nagin also spoke about policies that are preventing a lot of New Orleans’ black population from coming back.
“There were open discussions about changing the social fabric of the city and very bold discussions about gentrification. I had to make a very tough decision to say that everybody had a right to return to the city of New Orleans and there was a heavy price I paid for that,” he says. I made the ‘chocolate city’ speech in response to messages out there that African-Americans weren’t welcome back to the city.”
You can read Nagin’s entire interview on BET.com and for more information on the housing struggles in New Orleans read Tram Nguyen’s “They Can’t Go Home Again” available in the Colorlines.com archives.
Twitter Rages as NY Announces No Evacuation Plan for Rikers
05 months ago
At 11:31am Eastern Standard Time on Friday, just hours before Hurricane Irene was expected to hit New York, amNewYork confirmed that the city had no plans to evacuate the estimated 12,000 inmates being held on Rikers Island. A few hours later the New York Times City Room blog offered some more context, and that seemed to be the end of it. Major publications in New York city avoided the story that there was no evacuation plan for 12,000 people stuck in an island.
It took small publications like the a prisoner rights group blog Solitary Watch to offer real historical context on the potential danger that lay ahead for prisoners. “For a warning of what can happen to prisoners in a hurricane we need
only look back at Katrina, and the horrific conditions endured by
inmates at Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans,” an entry posted early evening Friday read.
From there, the story unraveled on Twitter. Everyone from British politicians to political commentators and regular people alike got the story on publications like Gawker and Mother Jones.
Some even brought the UN human rights standards in to it. Chris Kromm, director of the Institute for Southern Studies even brought analysis from a UN human rights standards approach to Twitter.
What do the Guiding Principles say about treatment of inmates during a disaster? Below is a snippet from Kromm’s story.
In Principle Four, the U.N. clearly prohibits discrimination on the basis of “legal status” during disaster response. In other words, if it’s decided that evacuation is the best way to protect residents, that has to be applied to all people.
Further, Principle 11 prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of all people affected by a disaster.
These issues were brought into sharp focus in the wake of treatment of inmates at Orleans Parish Prison during and after Katrina.
We’ll bring you more in-depth coverage tomorrow. For now, take a look at some of the analysis that came from Twitter below.
Solitary Watch was one of the first publications to break the news of the lack of emergency plans at Rikers Island. They also have one of those most retweeted tweets on the subject.
British Conservative Party politician Louise Mensch brought news and analysis to her close to 39,000 followers across Europe.
Journalist and hip-hop historian Davey D points out most of the 12,000 mothers, fathers, sons and daughters held at the main city jail are not a bunch of killers.
Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson delivers Mayor Bloomberg’s talking point.
The Director of the YWCA Racial Justice program takes on NYC Mayor Bloomberg.
PrisonReformMovement calls attention to why Rikers is an exceptionally dangerous island.
Climate Change Report: American Indian Tribes Hit Hardest
05 months ago
American Indians and Alaska Natives are the most impacted by climate change in the United States, according to a recent study by the National Wildlife Federation.
The report notes that American Indian Tribes are hit hardest largely due to dependence of their natural resources to sustain their economic and cultural practices, the relatively poor state of their infrastructure, and the great need for financial and technical resources.
The study, “Facing the Storm: Indian Tribes, Climate-Induced Weather Extremes, and the Future for Indian Country,” points out the federal government provided some of the of the worst real estate for American Indian communities and they’re often facing natural disasters that are triggered by human neglect:
Multiple climate-related threats can further challenge Tribal resiliency. Climate and weather extremes can interact to cause more severe impacts for communities and nature. The combination of extreme heat and drought can increase plant and wildlife mortality, cause electricity shortages, and heighten the risk of wildfires. These climate and weather extremes often occur in the context of other problems facing Tribes, from other sources of environmental degradation to limited economic resources.
“As usual, we’re the most vulnerable groups of people,” Nikke Alex, youth organizer for Navajo Green Jobs and the Black Mesa Water Coalition tells the Navajo Times. “It’s not just America. I’ve traveled all over the world for climate change forums, and it’s the same story with indigenous people everywhere.”
The study asks Congress to increase funding for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs’ efforts to address climate adaptation, along with to
providing equitable tribal access to federal funds and a repeal of the Tribes’
exclusions from federal environmental programs. It also stresses the
need for the federal government to enforce tribal rights to natural and
cultural resources.
Who’s Grabbing Africa’s Land? U.S. Speculators, Including Universities
06 months ago
When a massive tire corporation rolled into Nigeria’s Iguobazuwa Forest Reserve a few years ago, just one thing stood in the path of the CEOs’ plans to set up a rubber plantation: the communities that lived there. With cruel precision, the communities that got in the way were uprooted and displaced, their farmland devastated. As documented by Friends of the Earth International, the bulldozers of the French conglomerate Michelin sowed the ground for “increased hunger, malnutrition, poverty and forced migration, as food became harder to find or produce.”
“It was as if there was no reason to live again,” recalled a local woman. “Now, no land, no farm, no food.”
Land, farm, food–some of the few things that all societies hold sacrosanct, yet also some of the hottest commodities in financial markets. Land is up for grabs across the Global South, and U.S. investors are getting in on the action.
New research by the Oakland Institute, which monitors global agricultural trends, suggests that transnational land grabs in Africa–including Ethiopia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Sudan–are setting up a repeat of the 2007-2008 food-price crisis, which was fueled by a blend of financial, political and environmental factors.
“We see really vertical integration and control of the markets [by investors] who will be able to both influence prices and also decide on what the production will be,” warns Oakland Institute Policy Director Frederic Mousseau. “We have the food chain, which is pervasively and quite rapidly in recent years being under the control of financial groups.
China and Arab countries have generally been scrutinized in the media for their land deals, but much of the cash flow comes through U.S. and European investors, according to Oakland Institute–through established pension funds, agribusiness behemoths and even educational institutions.
Oakland Institute’s report on land-grabbing in Africa calls out several universities for their ties to land-grabbing.
Investors include not only alternative investment firms like the London-based Emergent Asset Management that works to attract speculators–including universities such as Harvard, who have maintained secrecy on such potentially unpopular activities, Spelman and Vanderbilt–with a primary motivation of economic access to agricultural land that will have high returns for the endowment.
Several Texas-based interests are associated with a major 600,000 hectares south Sudan deal which involves Kinyeti Development, LLC., an Austin, Texas, based “global business development partnership and holding company,” managed by Howard Eugene Douglas, a former United States ambassador at large and coordinator for refugee affairs.
For these investors, it’s just another lucrative transaction. An Emergent spokesperson, for instance, told the Guardian in June, “This is not landgrabbing. We want to make the land more valuable. Being big makes an impact, economies of scale can be more productive.”"
Being big does make an impact, but generally not the one that’s promised. Land is the object of a violent, but often unnecessary, tug of war between development and sustainability.
At the same time, multinational investors bank on humanitarian rhetoric by wrapping their land deals in the banner of “trade not aid.” But the land bubble in many ways poses greater danger than did the U.S. real estate boom: at stake are the fates of indigenous communities and the sovereignty of whole nations.
It’s also hard not to draw parallels with European colonialism. But the International Land Coalition, an NGO alliance, says “the new scramble for Africa” is taking place today on a far more complex political and environmental terrain.
One modern aspect to the new scramble is the expanding market in biofuel crops, which have been blamed for undermining and displacing traditional food crops–not to mention their role in creating water scarcity, global climate change and population pressures.
And while symmetrical land deals do carry the racial baggage of imperial history, land reform has also been a continual struggle since independence within many African countries. It has too often yielded policies that deepen existing patterns of segregation and inequality and encourage the displacement of farming communities that lack formal landholder status. That’s in part because land is a critical bargaining chip for political leaders who are courting foreign capital after years of failed development and agrarian reform initiatives. As ILC explains, “these acquisitions sit well with the new thinking among African political leaders frustrated by patronizing aid dependency and keen to forge relationships of trade with the developed world.”
But if parceling out prime real estate helps governments capture new investment, the land itself and its traditional stewards are withering away. Ecologically, the ILC says, “There is limited or no capacity in these countries to control or deter pollution of the air, soils, and groundwater by the heavy chemicals likely to be used in these ventures. Such pollution will add to the burdens of poor environmental health that rural populations already bear in many of these countries.” The use of aggressive industrial farming methods and genetically modified crops may further destabilize rural communities, since “many of these countries lack the capacity to effectively police the type of large-scale technological production envisaged over the large areas of land involved.”
Mousseau adds that despite promises of building new infrastructure and encouraging trade, the commodification of land portends the destruction of more sustainable, small-scale agriculture. “What they are bringing is what is required for industrial farming in large-scale plantations,” he explains. “Small-scale farmers in Ethiopia aren’t going to suddenly learn to drive a tractor and ride a tractor. It’s really about buying land in Africa.”
It’s too late to grab back the thousands of hectares already lost to global markets, but hundreds of civil society groups recently tried at least to reclaim the debate on land grabbing. Ahead of a G20 conference of agricultural ministers, the coalition rejected the centrist reform proposals for controlling agricultural investment and called on the United Nations World Food Program’s Committee on Food Security to “develop effective mandatory guidelines for land tenure that respect and protect peoples’ rights especially the right to food.”
Still, declaring a right is one thing; securing food in a wild global marketplace is another.
A report by Friends of the Earth International highlights examples of actions communities have taken to protect food systems from corporate predation. In Argentina, for instance, small farmers have staved off the the destructive impacts of monocultures like tobacco by encouraging more ecologically sustainable, traditional farm practices, supplemented by an agritourism initiative that markets local products.
In other regions, though, grassroots solutions are losing ground in the race to buy up rich soil in poor nations. This month, violent clashes in Nuagaon village in Odisha, India exploded as locals demonstrated against plans to build a giant steel plant, which is projected to displace thousands of families. To protect the “development” plans of the Korea-based firm POSCO, police reportedly arrested and brutalized demonstrators, not even sparing children and the elderly. Civil rights activist Mahtab Alam reported, “They are ready to give their lives but not their land for the project.”
Sadly, corporate investors seem willing to sacrifice both more lives and more land for their projects–just another cost of doing business on the new global frontier.
The Globe’s Not Only Getting Hotter. It’s More Unjust and Unstable, Too
07 months ago
Over the next few decades, tens of millions of people will be driven from their homes. Braving violence and poverty, they’ll roam desperately across continents and borders in search of work and shelter. Unlike other refugees, though, their plight won’t be blamed simply on the familiar horrors of war or persecution; they’ll blame the weather.
If you haven’t heard about the rising tide of environmental migrants, that’s because throngs of displaced black and brown people don’t evoke the same public sympathy as photos of polar bear cubs. The governments of rich industrialized nations will scramble to shut the gates on the desperate hordes with the same self-serving efficiency with which they’ve long ignored the social, ecological and economic consequences of their prosperity. But both efforts at blissful ignorance will fail, because climate change is forcing society to confront the mounting natural and man-made disasters on the horizon.
In 2010, according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “more than 90 percent of all disasters and 65 percent of associated economic damages were weather and climate related (i.e. high winds, flooding, heavy snowfall, heat waves, droughts, wildfires). In all, 874 weather and climate-related disasters resulted in 68,000 deaths and $99 billion in damages worldwide.”
Those numbers look worse on the ground. In rural Bangladesh, where some of South Asia’s major riverways converge, rising waters are threatening to swallow vulnerable coastal communities and leave millions without homes. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the sea level need only rise by a few feet to turn a cultivated area of 1,000 kilometers squared into sopping marsh. The frequency and intensity of floods continues to escalate exponentially, pushing young workers into the cities to earn a living and eroding rural communities and their cultures.
While some places soak, others bake. An ongoing drought crisis in East Africa has created massive hunger and aggravated conflict between groups vying for dwindling resources in an increasingly barren terrain. The United Nations estimated that in 2009, conflicts over cattle grazing and water resources led to several hundred deaths.
It’s hard to pinpoint climate as a decisive factor in this sort of social upheaval, but the evidence grows more pronounced with each violent storm, ruined harvest and tribal clash: the cumulus of natural calamities makes it harder to live and thus harder to coexist with our neighbors.
On “Democracy Now!”, Christian Parenti, author of “Tropic of Chaos,” described how climate-driven warfare brings the environmental toll of imperialism full circle.
From 1945 to 1990 the U.N. said there were 150 or so armed conflicts that killed 20 million people, displaced 15 million, 16 million were wounded. That all happened in the “global south” in this belt of states. And so now that’s where climate change is kicking in and that was also the same terrain where the last 30 years of IMF and World Bank-backed structural adjustment of privatization, deregulation of economies, cutting state support for farmers and fishermen–that program affected those states most intensely.
And now the weather associated with climate change, extreme weather such as the drought, punctuated by flooding in East Africa, is adding to this. And there’s this catastrophic convergence.
Grassroots environmental groups have rallied around the concept of “climate debt” to demand justice for the ecological destruction of the Global South. Still, the immediate humanitarian threats posed by climate change reveal the difficulty of thinking long term in the face of intense scarcity.
Trickle-Down Effect
A warming planet is a thirsty one.
Water is one reason why Southern Sudan’s new independence could just be a temporary respite in a raging struggle for ecological wealth. The world’s youngest nation is at the heart of the Nile River Basin, which supports several economies and ecosystems and fuels toxic tensions among them. Last year, economics professor Paul Sullivan of National Defense University, predicted that without equitable management of precious water, Sudan’s partition would merely pave the way for more turmoil:
Water, land, food, energy and development are tightly and importantly interlinked. Water is also very much linked to the potential for peace in the country. The tensions and potentials for peace in Darfur, between the north and the south–and amongst many other in other regions, including between local tribes and clans–can be, in part, determined, by the availability, quality, sharing, management and maintenance of water sources in the country.
A recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report offered similar warnings about Afghanistan and Pakistan, where “water scarcity… triggers human insecurity, which can intensify potentially explosive tensions among neighboring countries or regions.” Alarmingly, the report recommended that the U.S. government integrate water management into its occupation of the region, which would expand Washington’s control over civilian resources in an arena of unending conflict.
And long before popular uprisings in Egypt, analysts were predicting that climate change would feed into geopolitical instability in the Middle East.
Al Jazeera reports that water shortages could tip Yemen’s political turmoil toward full-blown civil war.
Yemen’s capital Sanaa, from where president Ali Saleh left the country after he was injured during protests, could effectively run out of water by 2025, hydrology experts say.
Water shortages could cost the unstable country 750,000 jobs, slashing incomes in the poorest Arab country by as much as 25 per cent over the next decade….
Commentators frequently blame Yemen’s problems on tribal differences, but environmental scarcity may be underpinning secessionist struggles in the country’s south and some general communal violence.
One of the perverse intersections between the water and climate crises is a misguided attempt to solve both through the energy industry.
For instance, while hydroelectricity has been touted as a “clean” power source, activists point out that energy-intensive mega-dam projects may actually ruin ecosystems and belch even more carbon into the atmosphere–and strengthen oppressive regimes as well. The government of Burma has used dam construction as a pretext for driving out indigenous groups and crushing political dissent. The military has repeatedly cracked down on isolated minority villages to clear the way for lucrative dam-building projects, which are typically designed to funnel electricity to energy-hungry consumers in China at the expense of Burma’s poorest communities.
One 85 year-old who fled to Thailand from his homeland in 2008, whose story was recorded by the Shan Sapawa Environment Organization, couldn’t imagine life in exile:
My spirit is here; I am connected to this land…. When the military burned our village and forced us out from our homeland, we still hand the land. If the water floods over, we will have nothing left.”
Frustrated by political gridlock in international negotiations on carbon emissions, the climate justice movement sees the link between climate and conflict as a call for broad-based solutions that blend the environmental with the social. That can start with the political enfranchisement of indigenous groups and securing food and water sovereignty for the poor. From there, the people most impacted by climate change can work toward inclusive development to heal the damage and move toward more sustainable energy.
But environmental migrants have a long way to go before they reach justice. Meanwhile, whether displaced by nature’s wrath or civil war, the new refugees are running out of places to run.
5 Ways to Prepare For When Disaster Strikes
08 months ago
The death toll resulting from tornadoes that hit Joplin, Missouri, last weekend has reached 125. Meanwhile, relief and recovery efforts are ongoing in Alabama, after severe tornado outbreaks last month left over 200 people dead. The Black Belt Region, a historically poor area that stretches across several Southern states, was hit especially hard. While natural disasters can be devastating for anyone they impact, the long-term effects are especially severe for low income communities who may not have the personal resources to fully rebuild their lives.
Both these disasters are instructive for the threats facing many communities, and the challenges that can often make recovery excruciatingly slow. ”Alabama’s one of the poorest states in the country so we’re talking about folks who have very litte aid,” said Rachel Raimist, a professor at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa who’s been involved with local recovery efforts. Advocates who are on-the-ground maintain that while immediate relief is crucial for many families, more must be done to impact the local and federal policies that can often make that relief excruciatingly slow.
“People are very very concerned for this not be addressed the same way that the development of housing after Katrina, repeating a lot of distrust and concern about the state being in control of these resources,” said LaTosha Brown, director of the Gulf Coast Fund that emerged after Hurricane Katrina and has been coordinating with relief efforts in Alabama. “Historically, people of color and low income communities are always left out of the process.”
Here are five ways you can respond when natural disaster strikes.
Volunteer. Several organizations are recruiting volunteers, especially health care professionals or those who can provide psychiatric or social work services, to help out with tornado relief on a temporary basis. Racialicious has more information on volunteer opportunities, as does MSNBC.
Donate. While there are many charities collecting funds towards tornado relief, also consider donating directly to community organizations and local agencies long established on the ground. Temporary Emergency Services in Tuscaloosa is accepting needed items, gift cards, or monetary donations. The Ujima chapter of the National Association of Black Social Workers is also accepting applications for an Adopt a Family or Adopt a Person program,which is looking for qualified individuals willing to provide advice and emotional support to those severely impacted by the tornadoes as they navigate the rebuilding process, for at least the next four months.
Stay Informed. It’s important to know which agency is responsible for what in the case of an emergency. A good place to start is by looking at FEMA’s list of state emergency response agencies. There are also several local, regional, and non-profit disaster relief agencies.
Make policy a priority. Of course, part of the bigger picture in all of this is identifying which policies could make recovery easier for many low-income communities. Advocates say the Stafford Act, which gives FEMA responsibility for coordinating the federal response to emergencies and disasters, needs to be reformed to more effectively provide aid and relief, and work better with state and local government. The agency’s unclear policies, regulations, and bureaucratic inefficiencies have long been criticized.
Prepare your community. Contact your local Emergency Management Agency to organize community awareness workshops. At the very least, every home should be equipped with an emergency evacuation plan. Advocates in communities recently hit by storms also stress that it’s important to gather personal documents. Many affected people did not have any form of ID, social security cards, or insurance information immediately needed to fill out forms and apply for assistance, or even to prove their identity when trying to recover items from their destroyed homes. Benjamin recommends keeping copies of all these crucial documents in a fireproof and waterproof package in your home, and to also have someone you trust keep a copy for you at a different location.