The Dominion - Cochabamba

The Roads We Travelled

Moira Peters — Wed, 18 May 2011 05:39:02 +0000

Building the Toronto People's Assembly

TORONTO—Copenhagen, December 15, 2010. The day before what CNN referred to as “the most hotly anticipated action of the summit,“ nearly 1,000 activists huddled together in a Danish squat that became the focal point of grassroots mobilization against the United Nations annual Coalition of the Parties (COP) Climate Change Conference.

Lisa, an American activist and veteran of 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, delivered a final pitch for the plan of action while maps were distributed, blocs were formed and participants felt the growing anticipation of being part of a plan to change the course of history.

“We will use the combined mass of our bodies to push through the police lines and then break through the fence,” she announced. “Once we are inside the UN grounds we will secure a safe space where delegates coming out from the conference can join us and together we will form a People’s Assembly.”

As much as has been said about the day of December 16—the “Reclaim Power” People’s Assembly in Copenhagen—the prior two weeks of frantic meetings, alliance building and constant striving to create an inclusive and horizontal process were critical in creating a new model for organizing that could be exported around the world. This action in Copenhagen was to inspire the Toronto People’s Assembly, a global gathering held in parallel to the 2010 G8/G20 summits.

Cochabamba, April 2010. Bolivia hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Toronto activists in Cochabamba observed a conference that, while engaging the grassroots participation of 30,000 activists from across the globe, was largely organized from the top down. The Toronto People’s Assembly drew much inspiration from Cochabamba, which also acted as a guide for the Assembly to be critical of its own process.

The main development to come out of Cochabamba was a collective understanding that the best way to answer the international call for justice is to build your struggle locally. One of the lessons drawn from Bolivia was the need to put in place impactful structures to build and maintain a movement that is substantial, consistent and long-term. The call from Cochabamba was to build a worldwide climate justice movement.

Toronto, May/June 2010. The weeks in May immediately following Cochabamba and in June prior to the G20 were a crucial and transformative period for the social and climate justice communities. Ongoing talks and discussions evaluated which elements could be drawn from Cochabamba.

“The People’s Assembly is an extension of the dialogue, organization, and mobilization that took place in Cochabamba. It’s an instrument through which local activists can create new spaces, and generate new possibilities,” said organizer Raul Burbano, who is also active with Toronto’s Latin America Solidarity Network.

As June 2010 and the G20 grew closer, a call was put out through the Toronto Community Mobilization Network for a day of resistance for climate and environmental justice during the G8/G20. Responding to this call, a circle of unaligned climate justice and environmental organizers started meeting weekly in a park on Church Street. Two plans for action emerged. One was a rally that would become known as the Toxic Tour. The other was the People’s Assembly on Climate Justice (PACJ).

The G20 hit Toronto like a storm, and the collective response was quick and widespread, with a resounding call to establish new relationships that was not only heard, but also understood.

In the aftermath of the G20, the organizing community would suddenly find itself in a new, highly charged environment. After the Toronto People’s Assembly on June 23, 2010, and through July and August, the intensity of organizing would remain high, with action camps across the country and groups in Toronto together emphasizing the immediate need for movement building. There would be no doubt that a second PACJ would take place.

Maxim Winther, a participant in the June 2010 Assembly, said, “I don’t really know what the G20’s like because it’s behind two layers of fence and it’s costing billions of dollars and I’m not seeing any of that. All I see is police roaming the streets.“

Police from across the country turned the downtown Toronto hub into what the Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin would later call “a time period where martial law set in the city of Toronto, leading to the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.”

Despite this atmosphere, the Toronto PACJ was vibrant and successful, and another People’s Assembly was organized on December 4, 2010—the Worldwide Day of Climate Action. While the first PACJ focused on defining the meaning of climate justice, the second focused on the collective work of building a stronger movement for climate justice in Toronto. For both Assemblies, the starting point for participants to generate ideas was a “framing question”—a direct import from the Reclaim Power Assembly in Copenhagen.

The main innovation introduced in Toronto was a round of break-out groups, allowing more space for the Assembly’s horizontal process both to generate ideas and also to orient itself for action by harnessing the intimacy and energy of small group work. Beginning with the December 2010 Assembly, Toronto activists took the working-group model that emerged from Cochabamba and re-framed it as a series of permanent action-oriented bodies known as People’s Councils. People’s Councils included Movement Building, Outreach & Education, Group Coordination, Building Alternatives Spaces, Mass Action & Political Pressure, and Personal Development.

Both assemblies generated more than 200 participants and more than 40 endorsements from community groups in Toronto.

“It was very participatory and very open,” said Alaynah Smith. The new activist who travelled to Toronto from Michigan said the People’s Assembly was “unlike the G8/G20 where we can’t see stuff...and its really kind of almost a mystery. But this was open to the public; anybody could come and we all had a voice equally.”

The Assembly is an open collective dialogue which organizers have termed “radical horizontality.” Within the Assembly, radical horizontality is a two-pronged process which allows participants, through two rounds of break-outs and intermittent plenaries, to first generate ideas, and then to develop and synthesize them with the goal of establishing mandates for the People’s Councils. Radical horizontality extends to everyday life, seeking to establish shared responsibility and accountability in the entire community, making local resistance and organizing sustainable.

From its beginning, the Assembly focused on being a point of convergence inclusive to a wide range of organizations: women’s groups, anti-poverty, food security and environmental and migrant justice organizations, cyclists, co-operatives, collectives, and so on. To transform communities, the Assembly posited closing the gap between activism and everyday life.

Raul Zibechi, a Uruguayan socio-political theorist, explained how “in the new pattern of action...mobilization starts in the spaces of everyday life and survival, putting in [motion] an increasing number of social networks or, that is to say, societies in movement, self-articulated from within.” The People’s Councils were modeled on the hope of establishing this sort of organizing on a permanent basis, to make the leap from activism to organized communities.

The post-G20 realities of community organizing in Canada presented a challenge, and a new dynamic that calls for activists to develop, out of necessity, new methods of organizing. This requires ingenuity, responsibility, and a long-term willingness to sculpt a new grassroots paradigm.

Small beginnings and creative examples were observed in Canada during the months following the G20.

Action camps took place throughout the country during the summer of 2010, themed around climate justice, Indigenous solidarity, non-violent direct action and tar sands/pipeline resistance. Organizers built links between cities and strengthened regional networks. Simultaneous People’s Assemblies were organized in December 2010 across Canada; organizers in Montreal began to develop a climate justice co-op, and the climate justice community in Toronto established a permanent People’s Assembly. Climate justice organizers have used momentum from the G20 to create their own grassroots infrastructure, without waiting for existing infrastructure to get on board, or being dependent on external funding.

The People’s Assembly in Toronto rose on the tide of a paradigm shift towards popular assemblies as an alternative to the failure of international institutions and nation-states to address the urgent global threat presented by the climate crisis.

At the same time, a global climate justice movement has grown organically, shaped by horizontal structures, and differentiating itself from mainstream environmental voices through a deep anti-capitalist analysis.

The year 2010 presented the organizing community in Canada with two major opportunities to mobilize—one in Vancouver to oppose the Olympics and one in Toronto to resist the G20. Toronto organizers took this confluence of factors as an opportunity, and the People’s Assembly was one outcome.

By eschewing traditional hierarchies, the open and inclusive process of the Assembly is an invitation for communities and organizers to come together and build solidarity, share skills and coordinate efforts.

“The aim of the People’s Assembly in Toronto,” an organizer told The Dominion, “is for the climate justice community and its allies to utilize it as a vehicle or a space through which it can operate as a movement, a self-articulated space that will allow it to remain a movement.”

Kimia Ghomeshi, an organizer of the June Toronto People’s Assembly, told a Toronto Media Co-op reporter that the entire process was “highly participatory which we so rarely see in Canada...What will change things is the solutions being home-grown because then they’re relevant to the local context and people feel more ownership in creating that change rather than it being imposed on them.”

This article was produced by the Toronto Media Co-op for A People's Forecast: The Climate Justice Issue, our 2011 special issue. To read more articles as they are published, click here.For more news driven by readers and not advertisers, check out www.toronto.mediacoop.ca

People's Assembly Image

Canadian Reflections on the Cochabamba Climate Summit

Cameron Fenton — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:06:25 +0000

TORONTO—Last month, representatives from around the globe gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia for the first World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Called by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of last winter’s Copenhagen United Nations Summit, he called “the peoples of the world, social movements and Mother Earth's defenders,” to gather for a People’s Summit. The conference captured popular sentiment, ballooning from an expected 5,000 participants to well over 30,000 from over 140 countries. This compares with around 40,000 participants to the Copenhagen summit, although "civil society" only made up half that number—making it the largest gathering of non-governmental voices on climate change.

High-level delegations also came from Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Cuba, with representatives of 40 other governments present. Crucially, however, talks were led by those in attendance, not by governments. This was a sharp distinction from any UN processes, where civil society and Indigenous Peoples must often fight to be heard, let alone have their input respected. This meant that those voices had not only the opportunity to talk climate justice; they had the ability to challenge the terms of the traditional climate debate and put forth radically different solutions.

These are reflections from Canadians who attended the summit in various capacities.

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I was invited to sit as Secretary of the Indigenous Peoples Working Group, one of 17 distinct working groups. In all of the working groups, we built upon an online discussion process that had started weeks before, and involved people who couldn’t make it to the conference. In all the working groups, Indigenous peoples from South America were prominent, which gave a particular flavour to the documents and discussions.

This was evident in the discussions that pushed for a return to principles of "living well," granting rights to nature, and building upon long-ranging debates about interculturalism—beyond laissez-faire liberal multiculturalism—while ensuring that these ideas found a receptive audience in the global climate justice community.

After prolonged debate on the various issues, our job as secretaries was to come up with a final text from each working group. Eventually, the results of each working group were consolidated into one final text, which was presented to a crowd of tens of thousands on the final day of the conference.

Indigenous peoples called for transnational corporations to be banned from Indigenous lands, while calling for the universal application of the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, not only as a protective measure for the climate, but also against the negative impacts of any climate "mitigation" projects, such as biofuels or mega-dams, which have already devastated many Indigenous communities. Indigenous groups also made a call for people to "live well" instead of seeking unimpeded economic growth.

 In the end, the participants made a call to developed countries to reduce emissions by 50 per cent within the next decade, while paying off the ecological debt owed to the countries and peoples most impacted by climate change.

Also noteworthy was the development of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, which attempts to articulate a new class of rights towards the non-human world. This compliments the proposal to form an International Climate Justice Tribunal that would be empowered to prosecute countries and companies who violate environmental agreements.

Key ideas articulated in this Universal Declaration, already forwarded to the UN by the Bolivian government, include granting Mother Earth and her dependent beings the rights to life, to water, to be free of contamination and genetic modification, while laying out complimentary obligations for humanity.

Participants also issued a rejection of carbon markets as a neo-liberal means of avoiding real emissions cuts, while privatizing the planet. Understanding these projects as a way to impose devastating mega-projects on many local communities, they soundly condemned the UN proposals on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) as another mechanism that threatens to privatize and rob Indigenous peoples of their land, while letting developed countries off the hook.  

Despite all the powerful words, the conference still faced a number of challenges, starting with an unruly volcano in Europe that kept many participants from attending. Timelines were short, resources were sparse, and sufficiently large meeting rooms far too uncommon. Three presidents even had to stay home because of domestic issues, leaving only Morales, Hugo Chavez and Esteban Lazo Hernandez, vice-president of Cuba, to attend.

The challenges internationally stemmed from the lack of attention paid to the conference by the international press, except to an out-of-context statement by Morales on the potential effects of growth hormones in poultry on male sexuality, for which he was ridiculed to no end. Otherwise, the conference was a media black hole outside of South America, with Canadian press not even showing up to a joint press conference organized in Ottawa during the conference.

In the long term, the challenge will be to use the momentum and strategies fostered at this conference to build and strengthen local movements worldwide, and force real change in government and non-governmental institutions. The other challenge is to translate and communicate the conclusions of this historic conference into local contexts and strategies. Here in Canada, reports have taken place and are planned for different communities. But it will not be enough—movements and organizations in Canada and abroad must make the space for the voices from the South to inform and lead.

The mobilization towards the G8/G20 in Toronto and the US Social Forum in Detroit cannot miss this important opportunity to advance the case for climate justice and build the connections between peoples and movements to challenge Canadian governments and corporations. With only six months remaining until the Cancun Climate Conference, we have a chance to see if we’ve learned anything since Copenhagen.

—Ben Powless

When I think back to Cochabamba, there’s one afternoon I remember. Surrounded by Indigenous families, it was very different from any conference I’d been to before, where the only "civil society" present are representatives from NGOs, civil servants and union leaders. The vast majority of people in Cochabamba were community members—individuals and families whose livelihoods are deeply threatened by the climate crisis. They weren’t speaking about someone else’s struggle, but their own—a vast contrast from the typical climate conference, and this influenced the type of discussions that were had. What I learned in those few hours was far more valuable than anything a scientific report could tell me.

In Cochabamba, I heard story after story of people’s direct knowledge and experience with climate change—droughts have ruined harvests for poor farmers; floods have displaced families; melting glaciers have led to extreme water shortages in major cities—it was all right in their backyards. People were telling their own stories as evidence of how climate change has exacerbated poverty, illness and displacement for their communities. As I listened to people’s interventions, I realized how different the discourse in Canada is. Our arguments for climate action are mostly based on science and scary predictions about a looming future, because many of us are not personally impacted by the climate crisis yet. We use numbers and statistics as evidence that we have an unprecedented crisis on our hands, but we just end up confusing Canadians along the way.

There was also a common thread in people’s stories that afternoon—of the extreme air, land and water pollution, health impacts, and military presence of mining industries forcefully setting up shop in their communities. The connection between the extractive industries and the creation of the climate crisis was seamless, as were the links to the global capitalist system, which has allowed unregulated resource extraction to ravage the people's land, their health, their way of life and their self-determination as Indigenous peoples—all this in the name of unfettered profit for the global North.

That afternoon I realized, maybe we—the Canadian climate movement—have been asking ourselves the wrong questions. We have been so focused on how to "fix" climate change that we haven’t spent enough time asking ourselves, what caused such an unprecedented catastrophe to begin with? Is the way that we frame the issues and solutions in Canada only validating the existing capitalist system that has caused the climate crisis? Are we even educated enough to know the difference between false solutions that perpetuate human inequality and ecological destruction, and the real, just solutions expressed in the People’s Declaration from Cochabamba? How often do we talk about the depth of systematic change that is needed to overcome this crisis?

It is time that the climate movement in Canada better aligns itself with the demands of the growing resistance in the global South.

The Climate Change Accountability Act has passed its third reading—an amazing victory—but the hard work comes as we determine how Canada will achieve these targets. Moving forward, we have to question how each of our actions and strategies fit into a larger struggle—restructuring our relationships, our jobs, our economy and our production and consumption of goods. Each small victory should be one step closer to transforming the overarching systems we wish to change. Each victory should bring us one step closer to the paradigm shift that we envision as a movement. If we are committed to climate justice, then we are committing ourselves to challenging current global systems that continue to exploit, oppress and kill. We are committed to standing in solidarity with communities on the front lines of this struggle. We are committed to spreading the real solutions articulated in the People’s Declaration with our families, our peers, our communities and our politicians. The world has spoken in Cochabamba and it’s time to heed the call.

As we mobilize toward the Toronto G20 this month, followed by the UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, in November, we will see if the voices of the global civil society, so beautifully articulated in the People’s Declaration, will be heard by the world’s biggest powers and polluters.

—Kimia Ghomeshi

Kimia Ghomeshi is an Iranian-Canadian based in Toronto. She works as the G20 Campaign Co-ordinator for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition.

Ben Powless is a student at Carleton University in Ottawa, and works as a climate justice campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network in Ottawa.

Cochabamba, Evo and Hugo

Cochabamba, Closing

Cochabamba Unrest

dylan — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 03:24:38 +0000

The Andean Information Network, once its website is up and running again, has a few more articles about the current developments in Cochabamba, Bolivia. As well, this blog offers a good conglomeration of news stories, including translations from local press, on a variety of topics related to the country's politics.