Earth

WHAT: 1 day conference about mining issues within Canada and abroad

WHEN: Sunday, April 26, 2009, 10:00am - 7:30pm

WHERE: Earth Sciences, Room 1050 (ES 1050), University of Toronto, 5 Bancroft Avenue

Moderated by Judy Rebick

$10 (sliding scale) to cover cost of meals; free for students. No registration required. Donations gladly accepted (available seating for 400 in auditorium).

Hosts: UTERN, Science for Peace, Students Against Climate Change / Toronto Mining Support Group, Aboriginal Students Association of York University

With the intention of building a movement for change within Canada we are hosting a conference on mining issues at the University of Toronto. This conference will provide the space for people within Canada to interact with affected communities and each other, and the conference format prioritizes facilitating conversations focused on solutions to ending corporate impunity.

“The Question of Sustainability” is a conference dedicated to examining the Canadian mining industry through the lens of sustainability within ecosystems, human rights, culture, and economics.

Featuring speakers from Papua New Guinea, Chile, the Congo, Guatemala, Tanzania and Peru, as well as many First Nations speakers and academics from Canada. This conference brings together indigenous people from the global south and the global north, and serves to address some of the complex social, political and environmental issues that relate to the imposition of extractive industries on traditional cultures.

Major issues include water use and contamination, human rights violations by Canadian companies operating abroad, the question of corporate social responsibility, and the autonomy and preservation of traditional cultures.

The meltdown of the economy is becoming so common and widespread it has been hard to keep track of everything that is going on. Briefly:

• In Canada, media empires including
  CTV, Torstar, Quebecor and Canwest continue to flounder along with a whole host of other media outlets across the continent.
• At the same time, Canadian pension funds, most of the big banks, Nortel, Walmart Canada, GM and a number of agricultural and mining industries are being hit with massive losses.

South of the border, thing are looking a little rough for the folks in the halls of power.

• Barack Obama is strutting out the biggest budget in US history which looks to (supposedly) raise taxes on the upper classes, cut Medicare to give more people health care and rip into Pentagon spending, military contractors and agri-business. The US economy meanwhile contracted 6.2% in the last 3 months of 2008.
• The "Sage of Omaha", Warren Buffet is sage-no-more having admitted to $11.5 billion in losses.

James Howard Kunstler: "The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization."

Kunstler makes some pretty significant predictions for 2009. Much of his analysis and suppositions seem off, but I wonder by how much.

John Gray argues that the US financial crisis marks the end of the US/IMF model of "deregulation" economics, the end of US primacy, and the rise of economies that managed to avoid US/IMF strictures.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, successive American administrations have lectured other countries on the necessity of sound finance. Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina and several African states endured severe cuts in spending and deep recessions as the price of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which enforced the American orthodoxy. China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China's success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.

(Article via Murray Dobbin's mailing list)

Greetings from the 15th Indigenous Environmental Network gathering to Protect Mother Earth in Newe Segobia (Western Shoshone territory)!

LISTEN ONLINE LIVE HERE: http://www.earthcycles.net/
Info & program here: http://www.ienearth.org/

The first panel of the day - about mining & the extractive industries - is about to get started, with amazing speakers from all over, INCLUDING KI!!! There are 2 smaller workshops on mining today & a field trip tomorrow to Barrick Gold's Cortez gold mine, which is threatening to expand into Horse Canyon, one of the most important Western Shoshone sacred sited.

On that note, the photo is of the Havasupai (Grand Canyon area) delegation at the Longest Walk 2's arrival in DC, The Manifesto for Change, the Resolutions, and the 1978 Longest Walk Manifesto are all now posted as PDF files on the main Longest Walk site: www.longestwalk.org

I'll get more writing up on all these events & issues at some later date...

saludos,
Sandra

Greetings from a teepee in Delaplane, Virginia...

The Longest Walk 2 (www.longestwalk.org) for Mother Earth, health, sacred sites & indigenous rights is rapidly approaching Washington, DC, after thousands of miles of walking and running from Alcatraz on the west coast. Thirty years ago, in 1978, the American Indian Movement's original Longest Walk walked into DC to present their manifesto: Affirmation of Sovereignty of the Indigenous People of the Western Hemisphere.

Four days from now, the 2008 Longest Walk 2's Manifesto for Change "All Life is Sacred" will be presented to the United States government when both the southern and northern routes of the Walk converge in DC, after the July 8-10 Cultural Survival Summit in Greenbelt, MD.

The day before yesterday, a small group of us from the southern route traveled to Baltimore to meet up with the northern route for a press conference in the middle of a plaza in the city's Inner Harbour district. A photo-essay about the event will be online on my other blog - thistidehasnoheartbeat.wordpress.com - very soon, likely before you read this one. The photograph above was taken at the press conference of the young girl who carries the lead staff of the northern route: the children's staff, for the future generations.

I was invited to go along to Baltimore to take a break from the 18-hour workdays. I haven't been able to walk for over a week now because of a foot injury (the doc says achilles tendonitis, but then again he also tried to inject me with something I had just told him I was allergic to), so I've been working with the Manifesto writing & editing team. Luckily there's usually a steady stream of coffee.

Hello fellow Dominion readers!

I thought I'd get this blog started while standing in an office store with free wireless somewhere in North Carolina while the American Indian Movement driver of the trash pick-up crew van sleeps a while in the parking lot...

Thanks to the Dominion for editing & posting 'Gravel and Gold', a narrative article about a prison visit with Tyendinaga Mohawk spokesperson Shawn Brant, Barrick Gold's Pascua Lama project in Diaguita territory ('Chile'), and related issues.

The longer (as in 16-page long) version (PRISON NOTES: They Came First For the Mohawk, and I Didn't Speak Up Because I Wasn't Mohawk...) is available on my other blog.

My most recent article, THE ROAD BEGINS AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR FEET: The Longest Walk 2 Speaks Out for Mother Earth) is about the Longest Walk 2, the Dooda Desert Rock resistance and uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, the Y-12 National Security Complex & nuclear plant, and the bombing and mining of Western Shoshone territory.

Sandra Cuffe has an epic, but very worthwhile article that starts with an Indigenous rights activist from Chile visiting Shawn Brant in jail and follows the concentric circles of mining and indigenous resistance outwards.

Photo Credit: Aaron Lakoff

The opening day of the largest NATO gathering in history a brutal mass arrest of activists took place in Bucharest, Romania.

This afternoon hundreds of police made a sudden attack on the legally rented convergence center that local activists had set up to house demonstrators from abroad, as well as serve as a space to organize actions. Wearing ski masks and carrying sub machine guns a team of 80 special forces moved into the space where people were in the process of cooking and talking. Albert, one of the 60 activists who were arrested spoke to me from the police station:

“Yeah the place, over the space was taken by the police. There is nobody inside. Everybody who was inside was taken by the police. They beat everybody inside, and everbody got arrested. "

A police spokesperson stated that nothing illegal had been found within the center, but that the police intervention was provided for in the national constitution. One protester was rushed to the hospital due to the severity of the violence strikes by the police. The Romanian government has taken a zero tolerance towards any actions against NATO.

It is being billed as the largest NATO summit in history and officially opened this morning in Bucharest, Romania. In addition to the thousands of official delegates, military figures and journalists covering the event, Bucharest has seen a huge influx of
security personnel, numbering approximately 26,000.
All 26 members of the alliance as well as th2 23-member states of the 23 members of the Partnership for Peace are attending.

City residents have been encouraged to leave town, with schools and workplaces closed for the duration of the summit. Bucharest's Police Chief publicly warned that protests against the summit would not be tolerated. All protest permits have been denied, making anti-NATO. Demonstrations illegal. Activists attempting to enter Romania from other European Union countries say they have been denied entry with no cause given. Many local activists have been followed by the secret services, had visits to their homes, with family members receiving threats and intimidation. On Monday the 1st, at least 8 activists were detained for 8 hours with no charges laid against them.
Meanwhile, local media 'Realitatea' is reporting that activists are
coming to destroy Bucharest and encouraging residents to meet them with force or alert police to anyone who may appear to fit the
description. NATO maintains a military force in Afghanistan, a police force in Kosovo, and a training mission for security forces in Iraq.

RadicalCartography.net has a lot of cool maps, including this complete map of US territories around the world.

You may have heard that the United Nations recently passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

You may have also heard that only four countries voted against it. Any guesses?

Here's the list:

• Canada
• USA
• New Zealand
• Australia