With their 1994 battle cry, “Ya basta!” (“Enough already!”) Mexico’s Zapatista uprising became the spearhead of two convergent movements: Mexico’s movement for indigenous rights and the international movement against corporate globalization.
After years of grassroots pressure, the UN General Assembly will debate a resolution July 28th on the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation.
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern traveled with Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela to Chile, Peru, and Ecuador last week, to discuss climate change with his government counterparts and civil society. Deepening bilateral and multilateral cooperation to increase economic growth, cutting greenhouse gasses, and helping climate-vulnerable populations were on the official program.
President Morales called the alternative climate summit following the failed United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, COP15, in 2009. Morales, in his opening address in Bolivia, urged individual lifestyle changes, with flagrant consumerism relying on disposable products and plastics to be replaced with new standards of living in harmony with the earth. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was among the dignitaries and participants from 150 countries. Although originally 5,000 to 10,000 people were expected, ultimately there were 30,000 at the gathering held April 20–22 in Cochabama, Bolivia.
Without much fanfare, U.S. legislators last December unveiled a new climate bill that just might succeed in breaking the political gridlock that has blocked action on global climate change. The bill, co-sponsored by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), is a sharp departure from the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives last June but subsequently died in the Senate.
Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.
Once upon a time, “There’s Only So Much Oil in the Ground” was a popular song that could be heard on the radio. The year was 1974, and Tower of Power, an Oakland-based soul and funk band, was enjoying some commercial success. They made the year’s top 100 with “What is Hip?” In addition to the important topics of being young, hip, and falling in and out of love, they sang about the energy crisis. Following a brief OPEC oil embargo, the price of crude oil (in today’s dollars) jumped from $23 per barrel in 1973 to $41 in 1974. Everyone was thinking about the world’s finite and diminishing supplies of oil. As the song continued, “Sooner or later there won’t be much around.”
Is there another way to create jobs in Owego? I submit that there is.
The water is crystalline, the sand is whiter than white, and elegantly bent palm trees sway in the breeze. This is how the Seychelles markets itself: as “another world.” Tourism is the mainstay of this heavenly island, averaging 20 percent of GDP and 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings.
Almost a month after the debacle at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen (Conference of Parties or COP 15), the question of who scuttled the talks elicits fury and derision.