False Solutions and Real Solutions to Climate Change

Thurs. Jun 24 2010 – 1-5 pm               Cobo Hall: D3-22

Cosponsored with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities

Collaborating Organizations: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Biofuelwatch, Rising Tide, Institute for Policy Studies (with ETC Group, Global Justice Ecology Project and others)

The challenge of global climate disruption has created new opportunities for corporate profiteering, marketing of “technofixes” and further commodification of the earth. Many of these “false solutions” will in fact worsen global warming and stand in the way of changes that must be made. Policies to market carbon and offset emissions, unproven and costly technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration (“clean coal”), “advanced” bioenergy, GMO “climate ready” crops, nuclear expansion, and natural gas as a “bridge fuel” are all examples of false solutions. Real solutions do exist! This workshop will begin with discussion of false solutions and their direct impacts on our communities, and then turn toward a collaborative and wide ranging discussion of genuinely renewable, community-centered solutions, rooted in the principles of climate justice. This is part of an ongoing effort to build a “People’s Vision” for U.S. climate action that is just, effective, realistic and potentially transformative.

1 – 2:10 pm: False solutions: Energy technology

Diane D’Arrigo (Nuclear Information and Resource Service), Rachel Smolker (Biofuelwatch), Kerwin Olson (Citizens Action Coalition/IN), Pat Mooney (ETC Group)

2:15 – 3:30 pm: False solutions: Carbon markets, offsets and policies:

Michael Dorsey (Dartmouth College), Daphne Wysham (Inst. for Policy Studies), Brihannala Morgan (Rising Tide NA), Maggie Zhou (Mass. Coalition for Healthy Communities).

3:40 – 4:15 pm: Speak-out on real solutions.

Bring a summary of what’s happening in your community!

4:15 – 5:30 pm:  Wrapup panel:  Real solutions and ways forward

Howard Ehrman (Little Village Environmental Justice Organization), Emily Kirsch (Ella Baker Center), Edgardo García (Vía Campesina Nicaragua), Aaron Lehmer (Bay Localize).

From Climate Crisis to Collective Commons: Renewable Energy from Below

Fri. Jun 25 2010 – 1-3 pm               WSU Old Main: O134

Control over energy technologies and resources has long been a major factor in defining human power relations. In the current transition to renewable energy, social justice is far from inevitable and will only come about as the result of decisive collective action. If strategic steps are taken, the transition to renewable energy can offer an historic opportunity for communities to assume democratic control over their territories, resources and lives; to build more egalitarian relations of production and exchange; and to catalyze a global reawakening to the social and ecological importance of the “collective commons.” Join us in discussion with activists, theorists and community leaders as we look at new models for a just transition to renewable energy. Speakers will address the global threat of community displacement and exploitation by multinational energy corporations; the difference between “green jobs” and community / worker control over green industries; current models for community controlled energy projects, with a particular focus on Indigenous territories; legislative requirements for a decentralized and democratic energy system; and ideas for building a movement for collective commons around green technologies.

Panelists:

Moderator — Brooke Lehman: Institute For Social Ecology and the Yansa Foundation
Kandi Mosset: Tribal Campus Climate Challenge Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network
Nikke Alex: Executive Director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition
Yvonne Liu: Senior Research Associate at the Applied Research Center
Deborah Groban Olson: Executive Director the Center for Community Based Enterprises

ISE Director Brian Tokar is also scheduled to speak on:

The Capitalist Roots of the Ecological Crisis
Weds. Jun 23 2010 – 1:00pm               WSU Manoogian: 112

with Joel Kovel, Terisa Turner, and Chris Williams.
Ecotopia or capitalist ecocide?
Fri. June 25 2010 – 3:30 pm             UAW-Chrysler Building: 1

with Richard Greeman, Victor Wallis, and others

False Solutions and Real Solutions to Climate Change
Thurs. Jun 24 2010 – 1-5 pm Cobo Hall: D3-22
Co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities

From Climate Crisis to Collective Commons: Renewable Energy from Below
Fri. Jun 25 2010 – 1-3 pm WSU Old Main: O134

Capitalist Roots of the Ecological Crisis
Weds. Jun 23 2010 – 1:00pm               WSU Manoogian: 112
Panel with Brian Tokar, Joel Kovel, Terisa Turner, Chris Williams

Ecotopia or capitalist ecocide?
Fri. June 25 2010 – 3:30 pm             UAW-Chrysler Building: 1
With Richard Greeman, Victor Wallis, Brian Tokar, and others

Full details…

The Institute for Social Ecology presented an 8-day intensive introduction to the philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. This 8-day intensive offered students an introduction to the dialectical philosophy and politics of Social Ecology. Using the lens of Social Ecology, students participated in four topical seminars focused the climate justice; alternatives capitalism; race; and the history of Social Ecology and radical movements. Students also participated in a practicum applying the principles of Social Ecology to their own actual (or imagined) activist campaigns. We are reviewing options for a similar program next winter.

*The philosophy class will be held in the evening to allow for NYC students with day jobs to attend.

The summer and fall of 2009 will surely be noted in the annals of environmental history. This period could be remembered as the time when the world’s elites slowly began to crawl toward a meaningful solution to the threat of accelerating global climate disruptions. But if events continue along the path of recent months, it could mark the beginning of an inexorable slide toward an increasingly unstable planetary climate regime, an unstable and chaotic world that our ancestors would barely recognize.

Relying on the mainstream media for news, you’d think the outlook was fairly rosy. For example, a somewhat cautious note of triumph accompanied the G8’s pronouncement in early July that the world was committing to holding the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The obstacle? “Developing Nations Rebuff G-8 on Curbing Pollutants,” proclaimed the New York Times headline.

You had to read through most of the article to discover that the main objection of those pesky “developing nations” representatives was to establishing a long-range goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (50 percent by 2050), without proportionate commitments from the major industrialized countries to nearer-term commitments—at least 20 percent reductions by 2020, as accepted by most European governments—that would facilitate meaningful progress toward the more distant goal. One astute European activist pointed out that the G8 outcome was “nothing but hot air,” akin to pronouncing that there would be luxury resorts on Mars by 2050. With no intermediate goals nor tangible steps toward implementation, politicians can pledge to do anything at all 40+ years into the future.

What, then, does 2 degrees of global warming mean? Last April, following a series of articles in the prestigious journal Nature that offered some important new revelations about the state of our climate projections, the climatologists who edit the indispensable scientific blog, RealClimate.org, wrote, “We feel compelled to note that even a ‘moderate’ warming of 2°C stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society, leading potentially to the conflict and suffering that go with failed states and mass migrations. Global warming of 2°C would leave the Earth warmer than it has been in millions of years, a disruption of climate conditions that have been stable for longer than the history of human agriculture. Given the drought that already afflicts Australia, the crumbling of the sea ice in the Arctic, and the increasing storm damage after only 0.8°C of warming so far, calling 2°C a danger limit seems to us pretty cavalier.”

Two degrees also turns out to be a rather daunting goal, in terms of the current world economy. At pre-recession rates of economic growth, with CO2 emissions increasing 2 percent per year, we are almost certain to exceed 2 degrees of warming by 2100, according to the European researchers whose results were reported in Nature last spring. To keep the odds below 50 percent, developed countries would need to reduce their emissions by at least 80 percent over the next 40 years, but there is a large uncertainty in that prediction, depending on the vagaries of the global carbon cycle and other hard-to-predict factors. The only reliable way to meet such targets for minimizing the global temperature rise is for cumulative world emissions to be kept below a rather austere target, equivalent to a total of 400 billion tons of carbon between 2000 and 2050. Emissions since 2000 “have used up almost a third of that allowance already,” according to a commentary by one of Nature’s US editors. And for all the trading and offsetting of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions since the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, only the past year’s economic recession has led to substantial reductions in those emissions. The Kyoto agreement, which required wealthy countries to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels, “has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions, or even in anticipated emissions growth,” according to a widely quoted report published in Nature in 2007.

In the diplomatic sphere, the world’s hopes for an agreement to curtail emissions and forestall more catastrophic climate changes currently rest on the outcome of the next UN climate summit, scheduled for December 7-18th in Copenhagen. While some are hoping for a breakthrough in back-channel discussions between the US and China, together responsible for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the US continues to play a largely obstructive role in the negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen summit. So does Japan, which announced in June that it would only aim to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions another 2 percent beyond its Kyoto Protocol obligation over the next decade.

Following the latest in a series of UN meetings in advance of Copenhagen, Martin Khor of the Malaysia-based Third World Network, a decades-long participant in the UN process, wrote “not only is the climate in crisis, the climate talks are also in crisis.” Corporate representatives have been hovering like vultures over UN climate meetings, seeking to define the terms of what they hope will be a rapidly expanding market in tradable carbon allowances, and the World Bank is jockeying to control the funds to curtail deforestation, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of current global warming. Given the pivotal role of the US in these upcoming proceedings, it is important to understand what is wrong with the current domestic debate on global warming, now playing out in the US Senate.

Climate Politics in Washington

Even more than the G8 discussions on climate, the US House of Representatives’ passage of a significant global warming bill in late June was received by the mainstream press, and many environmentalists, with a palpable sense of triumph. Rep. Henry Waxman of California, one of the bill’s two main sponsors, called it a “decisive and historic action,” and President Obama described the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, among the most corporate-friendly of the major environmental groups, called it no less than “the most important environmental and energy legislation in the history of our country.”

Environmental Defense, along with NRDC and the Nature Conservancy, played an important role in the development of the bill. As members of the US Climate Action Partnership, a collaboration with corporations such as Alcoa, BP, Dow, DuPont, GE, and the former big three US automakers, among others, they helped articulate what would become the bill’s broad outlines: an emphasis on long-range goals, trading of emissions allowances, initially free distribution of those allowances, and a generous offset provision that permits companies to defer significant pollution reductions well into the future.

While many environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief, and suggested that any step in the direction of regulating carbon dioxide and other climate damaging greenhouse gases is better than nothing, others remained skeptical. As the bill meandered its way through various House committees, groups like Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, and Greenpeace issued sharp critiques. Even more scathing were analyses from smaller independent groups such as Chesapeake Climate Action and the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The bill that passed the House falls far short of international standards in mandating a meaningful level of reductions in global warming pollution, and seeks to implement decades of emissions cuts through the market-based device known as “cap-and-trade.” It also contains a number of Trojan Horse provisions that could ultimately forestall, rather than encourage, genuine climate progress.

By the time the bill had passed through the relevant committees, as well as last-minute horse-trading on the House floor, the loopholes were staggering to behold. Recall that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions on the order of 20-40 percent are needed in the next decade or so to prevent a slide toward uncontrollable global climate chaos, with reductions on the order of 80-95 percent by the leading industrial economies required by mid-century. The House bill—cosponsored by Reps. Waxman of California and Markey of Massachusetts, and now up for debate in the Senate—first attempts to shift the terms of the discussion by measuring emissions relative to 2005 levels rather than the accepted Kyoto Protocol benchmark of 1990. It promises a 17 percent reduction by 2020, relative to 2005, which only translates into 4 or 5 percent less global warming pollution than the US produced in 1990. The much-touted cap-and-trade provision of the bill accounts for about a 1 percent reduction by 2020, according to the Center for Biological Diversity’s analysis, with the remainder coming from regular, old-fashioned performance standards for smaller pollution sources, including automobiles, and from a controversial USAID effort to reduce deforestation in poorer countries. For comparison, recall that most wealthy countries agreed over a decade ago in Kyoto to reduce their emissions by 2012 to 6-8 percent below 1990 levels.

It’s important to note that the deforestation provisions of the bill mirror a highly controversial international climate mitigation strategy, promoted by the UN and the World Bank under the name of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries (REDD). REDD mainly targets intact forested lands, largely occupied by indigenous peoples, which are threatened with privatization for use as carbon offsets. Soon after the current US bill passed the House, an Anglo-African brokerage firm announced that it would sell “avoided deforestation” credits to buyers of voluntary carbon offsets in the US, threatening a wave of corporate takeovers of African forest lands.

Cap-and-trade, of course, is the latest catch phrase for attempting to control pollution by establishing an artificial market in permits to emit carbon dioxide. Since George Bush Senior’s Acid Rain Program of the early 1990s, advocates have aggressively promoted the idea that the most efficient pollution reductions come from the government setting a cap, and then allowing companies to freely trade pollution permits in order to nominally encourage development of the most cost-effective technologies. The Acid Rain Program succeeded modestly, but mainly because still-regulated electric utilities (this was the pre-Enron era) were mandated by state officials to hold true to their obligations and actually reduce their output of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Trading contributed only marginally to the 50 percent pollution reductions from that program. An effort to reduce air pollution in southern California by a similar scheme appears to have mainly delayed the installation of emission controls, and the region still has the dirtiest air in the country. In Europe just three years ago, the value of tradable carbon dioxide allowances plummeted and the carbon trading system almost collapsed under the weight of excess permits that were freely granted to favored industries.

Under the House bill, some 7400 facilities across this country would be given annual allowances to continue emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As many as 85 percent of the allowances would initially be given to polluting companies for free, reversing Obama’s campaign pledge that they should mainly be auctioned off. (In Europe, utilities routinely bill their customers for these newly acquired credits.) Meanwhile, the quantity of available pollution allowances would actually increase through 2016, only falling gradually thereafter, and companies would be allowed to indefinitely “bank” them for future use, borrow from their future allowances, and finally trade them with other regulated companies as well as with Wall Street firms and an emerging cadre of brokers in carbon futures. If all this reads a little too much like the financial machinations that nearly brought down the world’s financial markets in 2008, consider that carbon market boosters are projecting a worldwide trading system ultimately valued at $10 trillion a year—perhaps launching the next major financial bubble. All this potential for increased financial fraud and manipulation is for a mere 1 percent in CO2 reductions over the next decade, and a questionable promise of 70 percent by mid-century.

Many argue that, for all their uncertainty, these highly manipulable financial dealings are worth the risk because they facilitate the phase-in of an enforceable cap on global warming pollution. But the legislation replicates another of the most egregious features of the largely failed Kyoto Protocol: a virtual “hole in the cap,” in the form of an offset feature that allows companies to meet their obligations by investing in pollution control projects anywhere in the country, and even overseas. Companies could satisfy their full obligation to reduce CO2 by buying offsets until 2027; those familiar with the bill’s fine print suggest that companies could stretch this out for 30-40 years.

An entirely new global mythology has arisen around the idea of carbon offsets. Nearly every time you buy tickets for an airplane flight, or for some major cultural events, someone is out to sell you offsets to alleviate your contribution to global warming. Carbon offsets have become the postmodern version of the indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Middle Ages to buy your way out of sin. But on a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, they have become a scam of gigantic proportions. Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets are subsidizing the already routine destruction of byproducts from China’s rising production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and methane capture from a notoriously toxic landfill in South Africa.

One of the most notorious cases is that of the French chemical company, Rhodia, which is anticipating a billion dollars in carbon offset credits in exchange for a $15 million investment in 1970s-vintage technology to destroy the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide in its facility in South Korea. Carbon offsets have become the company’s most profitable line of business. Major hydroelectric projects, mainly in China, India and Brazil, represent a quarter of applications for offset credits, and nearly all of these projects are already under development before applying for the credits. As the International Rivers Network and others have pointed out, large-scale hydro, far from being green, is responsible for huge quantities of methane and other greenhouse gases. A German study of UN-approved carbon offset projects in 2007 reported that as many as 86 percent of offset-funded projects would likely have been carried out anyway. This runs counter to the Kyoto Protocol guidelines requiring that projects granted emissions offsets must be “additional,” that is they cannot already have been planned.

Allowing companies to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets is one Trojan Horse provision in the climate bill that could forestall future progress against the continued disruption of the climate. Another such measure largely prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to impose future regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Recall that it was a 2007 Supreme Court decision allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant that forced the Bush administration to finally start talking about global warming. Removing this authority represents a massive concession to polluting industries, one that would essentially remove the teeth of enforcement from future measures to forestall climate chaos.

Along with these systemic measures to weaken the climate bill, politically powerful industries wrote in further concessions of their own. (The Center for Public Integrity reported in February that some 2340 lobbyists are working in Washington on this issue.) The coal industry gets until 2025 to have to comply with the bill’s mandated pollution reductions, with ample means for gaining further extensions. Agribusiness, which is responsible for as much as a quarter of US greenhouse gas emissions, is exempt from most of the bill’s provisions, but large scale farmers who may, for example, reduce tillage by growing crops genetically engineered to withstand megadoses of herbicides, may be eligible for offset credits. Assessments of ethanol’s eligibility as a “renewable fuel” are to exclude its effects on land use, a factor that researchers from Princeton and the University of Minnesota proved decisive in a pair of landmark studies last year, which showed that industrial biofuels are often net contributors to global warming. Finally, the nuclear industry promises to be a leading beneficiary of the bill’s free allocation of emission allowances; a memo leaked to the Huffington Post reports that Exelon, currently the largest US nuclear power company, expects a $1-1.5 billion annual windfall from the bill in its current form. This despite the fact that nuclear power is yet another false solution to climate change that results in huge greenhouse gas emissions throughout the nuclear fuel cycle.

With horse-trading continuing on the House floor right up to the time of the vote, the bill ultimately included “billions of dollars in special interest favors,” according to the New York Times. These included $1 billion for green job creation job training in low income communities, viewed as a relatively minor concession by many inner city activists; the biggest giveaways were clearly to oil, coal and gas producers. Requirements for utilities to invest in truly renewable energy were severely curtailed to satisfy some southern Democrats. Still, despite all these concessions, Senators beholden to major polluting industries are already jockeying for much more, threatening to hold up the bill indefinitely if they cannot win even bigger concessions. A bill that passed the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, just a week prior to the final vote on the House bill, would open large new tracts of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, fund a new gas pipeline in Alaska, and increase funds for scientifically dubious efforts to permanently capture and store CO2 emissions from coal-burning power plants.

Toward a Movement for Climate Justice

At various venues around the world, activists have been meeting for over a year to plan a concerted grassroots response to the upcoming UN climate summit. Anticipating that the forthcoming Copenhagen agreement is likely to fall far short of what the world needs to prevent unprecedented climate disruptions, their focus from the outset was to highlight the limits of business-as-usual and the need for direct action against the root causes of climate change, while demonstrating just and sustainable alternatives. At a meeting this summer of the emerging Climate Justice Action network, participants from more than 20 countries, including several from the global South, agreed on an ambitious alternative agenda to the business-dominated deal-making at the UN level.

“We cannot trust the market with our future, nor put our faith in unsafe, unproven and unsustainable technologies,” the meeting’s declaration reads. “Contrary to those who put their faith in ‘green capitalism,’ we know that it is impossible to have infinite growth on a finite planet.” The statement calls for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, popular and community control over production, reducing the North’s overconsumption, respecting indigenous and forest peoples’ rights and, notably, reparations for the ecological and climate debts owed by the richest countries to those who are most affected by resource extraction and climate-related disasters. The emerging issue of climate debt will be the focus of an entire day of action during the Copenhagen summit, as part of a full week of actions around the summit site. Climate Justice Action has already stirred controversy among European activists for suggesting that they may choose to occupy the summit locations to challenge false solutions and rising corporate influence over the UN proceedings.

The emerging discourse of climate justice reflects a growing understanding that those most affected by accelerating climate-related disasters around the world are usually the least responsible for causing disruptions in the climate (see Z January 2008, February 2008 and February 2009 for more background). Thus any movement seeking an adequate response to global climate changes needs to clearly face this discrepancy and prioritize the voices of the most affected communities. Many people around the world are simultaneously impacted by climate disruptions and by the emerging false solutions to climate change, including carbon trading and offsets, the destruction of forests to create biofuel (agrofuel) plantations, large-scale hydroelectric developments, and nuclear power. Corporate “solutions” to global warming often expand commodification and privatization, whether of land, waterways, or the atmosphere itself, largely at the expense of the same affected communities.

This outlook was first widely articulated following a meeting in Durban, South Africa in the fall of 2004. Representatives from groups (including social movements and indigenous peoples organizations) based in Brazil, India, Samoa, the US, and UK, as well as South Africa, drafted the Durban Declaration on Carbon Trading, which has since gained over 300 signatories from around the world. The Durban Group has helped bring people to the sites of various UN meetings to represent those affected by increased resource extraction over the past several decades, as well as the accelerating conversion of forests to monoculture plantations that is partly justified by the North’s desire for carbon offsets. In discussions following the December 2007 UN climate summit in Bali, where representatives of affected peoples made a strong showing both inside and outside the official proceedings, a more formal worldwide network emerged under the slogan, “Climate Justice Now!”

In the US, this effort is increasingly led by environmental justice activists, mainly from communities of color that have been resisting daily exposure to chemical toxins and other environmental hazards for more than 20 years. An important two day conference in New York City last January, organized by West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT) brought together inner city activists, community and youth organizers, indigenous representatives, and farmworker advocates with students, environmental lawyers, scientists, public health advocates and government officials to discuss the relevance of the climate justice framework for communities of color and their allies across the US.

Throughout this event, speakers of widely differing backgrounds and perspectives articulated a sharp critique of carbon trading and offsets. This despite the efforts of a handful of mainstream environmental representatives to paint ‘cap-and-trade’ as a moving train that activists either had to board, or else be excluded from important debates around its implementation. A physician from Los Angeles described carbon trading as yet another means of “redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy,” and José Bravo of the Just Transition Alliance suggested that “when we put a price on every square inch of air, there are some of us who won’t be able to afford to breathe.” Many speakers described the emerging climate justice movement as a continuation of the civil rights legacy, and of the continuing “quest for fairness, equity and justice,” to quote the pioneering environmental justice researcher and author, Robert Bullard. Others explained how, in recent years, the environmental justice movement has broadened its scope to areas of food justice, housing justice, and transportation justice. Hence their embrace of the emerging global climate justice agenda is a logical continuation of a vital living legacy.

In the US and around the world, an impressive array of interests is coming together to contribute to shaping the climate justice agenda. First among these are the opponents of mountaintop removal coal mining, who have put their bodies on the line repeatedly to expose the profound hazard posed by this exceedingly destructive practice. Growing numbers of people in coal-dependent communities in Appalachia are expressing the need for an alternative development model that relieves the stranglehold of the coal companies over their communities, protects people’s health, and facilitates the phase-out of the single most climate-destructive form of energy production. Indigenous communities, many organized under the umbrella of the Indigenous Environmental Network, are resisting increased mining of coal and uranium and advancing educational initiatives on the false solutions to global warming. An emerging youth climate movement is carrying out creative direct actions, not only at coal mining sites, but also at corporate headquarters, industry conferences, and even the headquarters of corporate-friendly environmental groups such as Environmental Defense (see risingtidenorthamerica.org).

Internationally, people from Pacific Island nations, in some cases already losing land and groundwater to rising seas, have been in the forefront of calls for immediate action. The worldwide confederation of peasant movements, Vía Campesina, with affiliated groups in more than 80 countries, has joined the call for actions in Copenhagen, challenging the status of carbon as a newly privatized commodity and arguing that the UN climate convention “has failed to radically question the current models of consumption and production based on the illusion of continuous growth.” Critical civil society organizations, many working within the framework of Climate Justice Now! continue to challenge the status quo inside the UN negotiations. Further, hundreds of cities and towns in the US have defied the federal government’s 20-year trend toward inaction and committed to substantial, publicly-aided CO2 reductions of their own.

In the fall of 2008, U.S. organizations actively working for climate justice both nationally and internationally, including Indigenous Environmental Network, Global Justice Ecology Project and Rising Tide North America, launched the Mobilization for Climate Justice (MCJ, see actforclimatejustice.org). The Mobilization was founded to link the climate struggle in the US to the growing international climate justice movement, with an eye toward building for actions around the Copenhagen climate summit and beyond.  Its objective was to provide a justice-based framework for organizing around climate change that opened space for leadership by representatives of communities in the US that are most impacted by climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

The MCJ issued a broadly focused open letter to potential allies, calling for “a radical change in direction to put climate justice, ecological integrity and people’s rights at the center of international climate negotiations,” and is working toward a nationwide day of action on November 30, a week before the Copenhagen talks begin—and coincidentally the tenth anniversary of the mass demonstrations that successfully confronted the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Activists confronting the toxic legacy of Chevron’s refinery complex in San Francisco Bay city of Richmond, California are already developing action plans for that day, and gatherings in Chicago and Pittsburgh this fall will focus on developing plans for other regions of the country. In Pittsburgh, a climate action camp, modeled on similar camps in the UK and across Europe, will begin during the Pittsburgh Coal Conference (September 21-23), and continue through the September 24-25th meeting of the G-20 heads of state, also in Pittsburgh. The climate camp and subsequent protests against the coal conference and the G-20 will bring together climate justice advocates from throughout the eastern US to build pressure on the Obama administration and others to commit to real and just action on climate change in Copenhagen. Other groups are focusing their efforts on dates throughout the fall, including the annual commemorations of Indigenous People’s Day on October 12th (see ienearth.org), and an international day of climate actions on United Nations Day, October 24th, initiated by prominent environmentalists including Bill McKibben and David Suzuki (see 350.org).

The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has clearly hit a nerve among people of many walks of life, all around the world. While the outcome of this fall’s events remains highly uncertain, it is clear that such a flowering of creative and determined popular responses is precisely what is needed to reverse decades of willful inaction by the world’s elites and reach beyond the limits of politics-as-usual.

Brian Tokar is the Director of the Vermont-based Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org). His books include Earth for Sale , Redesigning Life? and the forthcoming collection (co-edited with Fred Magdoff), Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). Thanks to Anne Petermann and Orin Langelle for helpful suggestions.

• Brian Tokar’s articles: http://www.social-ecology.org/author/brian-tokar/

We’d also like to take this opportunity to invite alumni of the ISE’s programming to send us an update as to where you are and what you are up to. We’ve received and posted few updates already, though, unfortunately several updates were lost due to a computer crashing earlier this summer. If you had already sent us an update and don’t see it posted on the website, please let us know.

• Alumni Page: http://www.social-ecology.org/alumni/

Additionally, we’ve added links to several audio clips featuring social ecologists participating in various discussions and interviews on a range of subjects. These include clips with Brian Tokar, Chaia Heller, Dan Chodorkoff, and Peter Staudenmaier.

• Audio and Video clips: http://www.social-ecology.org/audio-video/

Finally, if you’re on Facebook, please join our group “Institute for Social Ecology”

• http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=37755667671

The previous panelists have offered thoughtful perspectives on how US agricultural policies profoundly alter the lives of people around the world and how people in tropical Central America are beginning to reclaim sovereignty over their food supply. I’d like to bring the discussion home by addressing the problem of increasing corporate control over our own food, and exploring some ways we can begin to bring our food economy back home. This discussion is in many ways an outgrowth of my research on the science and politics of genetic engineering in agriculture. For a variety of international perspectives on the relationship between genetic engineering and global trade policies, please see my 2004 book, Gene Traders, published by Toward Freedom in Burlington, Vermont.1

Once upon a time, my home region-the hills and valleys of north-central Vermont-was considered to be the breadbasket of New England. The Champlain Valley was an important wheat-growing region, and modest hill farms scattered among the foothills of the Green Mountains grew much of New England’s oats, barley and rye.

Today, Vermont, and northern New England as a whole, is overwhelmingly a net importer of food. Bill McKibben reported a year ago in the Vermont Commons newspaper that Vermont’s food imports are worth half again as much as what we export, and two-thirds of these exports are dairy products.2 Even foods we can grow in Vermont are largely imported. A Rodale Institute study of food self-sufficiency across the US, published in 1982, showed that Vermont even imports 70-80 percent of its carrots and apples.3 A recent University of Vermont study projected that only 10-15 percent of our food budgets are spent on locally grown products, but offered a hopeful assessment of the potential to significantly increase this percentage.4  David Timmons, a recent Masters degree recipient from the University’s Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, calculated that Vermont presently has the capacity to grow 38 percent of its food, based on current levels of agricultural production in nine major categories, including foods we mainly grow for export. New Hampshire, unfortunately, comes in at a disappointing 6 percent.

How did it come to this? And, even more importantly, in an era of rising fuel prices and wars for oil, how do we begin to change the situation?

Many factors contributed to the loss of Vermont’s traditional agricultural base. From the westward migrations of the mid-19th century, to the coming of the railroads and the creation of a national grain market, the huge surpluses generated by Western farms drove prices down and rendered New England growers economically marginal. Expanding commodity-based agriculture increasingly trumped the ethic of self-reliance that our region was said to be built upon.

In the 1950s, when Americans spent more than 30 percent of their household income on food, policymakers decided that food had become too expensive for the emerging consumer lifestyle, and that too many people were trying to make their living in agriculture. Subsidies were structured so as to create new export markets for agricultural commodities, and to encourage people to sell their farms and migrate to the cities to find work.

This policy has reverberated many times over the past half century, with repeated “farm crises” through much of the country, and prices declining to the point where we now spend only 15 percent of our income on food. A vanishing share of our food dollars actually goes to farmers, and we are often reminded that food items travel an average of at least 1500 miles from farm to table, a figure dating back to the late 1960s. Vermont lost nearly 90 percent of its farms in the past half century, and many agricultural areas of the central United States faced significant depopulation. Transnational chemical companies, food processors and grain traders, rather than farmers, came to decide how our food would be grown, shipped and processed. Today, the United States has more people in prison than are earning their livelihood growing food.

Today, a shrinking number of transnational corporations control the world’s supply of seeds and other agricultural inputs, as well as food processing, distribution and marketing. This process of corporate consolidation began with the rapidly increasing use of agricultural pesticides in the decades immediately following World War II. US pesticide sales increased ten-fold between the 1940s and 1970s, and another ten-fold since then.5 Pesticide manufacturers such as Monsanto, Dow, and their European counterparts gained unprecedented control over how our food is grown during this period. In the 1990s, they attempted to heighten and consolidate that control through the development of genetically engineered seed varieties, 80 percent of which are engineered to withstand large doses of those companies’ proprietary weed killers.6 To assure market acceptance of genetically engineered crop varieties, Monsanto and other agrochemical giants spent tens of billions of dollars acquiring the world’s leading seed companies.

In 2005, Monsanto became the world’s largest seed company with its takeover of Seminis Seeds, a Mexican company that had grown to become the largest supplier of vegetable seeds in the Western Hemisphere. A generation ago, seed production was as dispersed as milk production, if not more so; the idea of companies having global market share in seeds was virtually unfathomable. Today, ten companies control half of a global seed market estimated at $20 billion annually (see Figure 1).7 Four of those companies, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont, are also among the world’s largest pesticide producers, and are responsible (along with Dow Chemical) for essentially all of the genetically engineered (GE) seed varieties being aggressively marketed around the world today (Figure 2).

Genetic engineering is a technology that has significantly helped drive corporate consolidation in agriculture. Monsanto alone controls the germplasm, or genetic makeup, of 88 percent of the world’s GE crop acreage.8 Bayer, best known for aspirin and other common pharmaceuticals, is the world’s largest insecticide producer. After the Starlink corn scandal of 2000-’01 cost the food industry $1 billion-and forced the recall of hundreds of name brand corn products due to contamination with a GE variety never approved for human consumption-Bayer bought the former “CropScience” division of the pharmaceutical giant Aventis. Syngenta is essentially a synthetic company, formed from successive waves of mergers, divestments and re-mergers of chemical companies from Switzerland, Britain and Sweden; they are number two in pesticides overall and the largest producer of herbicides. Monsanto is number two in herbicides; thus it is no coincidence that herbicide tolerance is by far the leading genetically engineered trait in commercial agricultural production today.

Corporate giants like Wal-Mart-now the world’s single largest corporation, having overtaken all of the big automotive and oil companies-have come to control a third of the world’s retail sales of food (Figure 3).9 Other companies in the global retail top 10 that are active in New England include the Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold (owner of Stop & Shop), Albertson’s (owner of Shaw’s), and Costco. The unprecedented market power of Wal-Mart and other huge corporations has also driven consolidation among food processors, with increasing numbers of medium-sized companies-including many of the best known natural food processors-being purchased by the likes of Heinz, General Mills and Mars Candy.10 Added to these is the massive market power of the grain processing giants, especially Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, which together control two thirds of all the world’s shipping, distribution and export of bulk grains, and thoroughly dominate the crushing, milling and processing of soybeans and corn, the two most widespread genetically engineered crops.11

These facts and figures may appear insurmountable, but all around the world, people are saying no to corporate food, reclaiming the ability-and the right-to make basic choices about how our food is grown and how we obtain it. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have become a leading symbol of this resistance, with farmers’ organizations around the world often leading the opposition. In much of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, GMOs are at the center of highly visible and persistent public controversies, and more than 30 countries have adopted labeling rules and import restrictions, resisting pressure from the US and the World Trade Organization (WTO) to step back and simply accept this disruptive and dangerous technology.12

It is no accident that Vermont has been a leader in resisting genetic engineering in the US. Vermonters are very concerned about the quality of our food, and share a concern and identification with those who grow our food that has been all but obliterated in much of the US. Indeed Europe’s distinct food cultures have largely driven the resistance there to GMOs and agribusiness control. In this respect, by moving toward a more conscious cultural identification with the sources and character of our food, Vermont may have more in common with Europe than almost any other place in the US. Eighty five Vermont towns are on record supporting GMO labeling and in most cases, a moratorium on growing these crops, a distinction we share with more than 25 towns elsewhere in New England, as well as three northern California counties, where comprehensive bans on raising GE crops and livestock have been voted into law.

In the countries of the global South-the so-called “developing world”-agriculture remains far more central to people’s everyday experience, livelihood, and traditions. From India and Korea to Brazil and parts of Africa, militant farmers’ organizations have emerged in recent years, and joined with farmer activists from Europe and North America to create a global “peasant movement” known as La Via Campesina. Via Campesina has intervened in numerous international fora over the past decade, and has pioneered the concept of food sovereignty as a centerpiece of their demands toward various international agencies.

Food sovereignty is defined by Via Campesina as people’s fundamental right to define their own agricultural and food policies.13 This includes prioritizing agricultural production to feed people, rather than for export; protecting farmers’ right to land, water, seeds and credit; and granting countries the power to protect local agricultures from the common practice of food dumping. Since the 1950s, agribusiness companies, mostly from the US, have been unloading, or dumping, surplus commodities on international markets, thereby undercutting the value of local food in the recipient countries. Food sovereignty advocates support fair trade and have been in the forefront of resisting the myths of “free trade” advanced by the US government and the WTO.

Just as the sum of many small, local efforts have helped restrain the unchecked spread of genetic engineering and other excesses of corporate globalism, a similar convergence of local efforts can help us grow toward a healthier, more sustainable future at home. A year after Mendocino County in California became the first county in the US to completely ban the raising of GMOs, people in the town of Willits and neighboring communities launched a regional “Economic Localization Project,” inspired by awareness of the looming peak in world oil production.14 For many people across the US, “peak oil” represents the end of the unchecked expansion of the petroleum-based economy and an urgent imperative to create a way of life that can withstand what arms industry analyst Michael Klare has termed the “permanent energy crisis.”15

The WELL (Willits Economic Localization) meets biweekly, and has encouraged the creation of over a dozen projects to further the aim of energy and food self reliance in central Mendocino County. They are developing community gardens, a barter market, a school gardens project, and an effort to green their new community hospital. Other towns in the region have formed a biodiesel co-op, organized bulk purchase of fruit (and olive!) trees, and even started a yak cooperative. They’ve brought renewable energy technologies to area schools and organized local food tastings, along with a wide array of other educational and celebratory events. In 2005, Jason Bradford, one of the founders of WELL, produced a detailed study of his town’s food needs and how they can be met locally.16

Of course, food self-reliance is a more easily achievable goal in northern California than in Vermont or New Hampshire, but we are also beginning to see some heartening steps in that direction. A year ago, one group of 20 Upper Connecticut Valley residents pledged to only eat foods grown within a 100 mile radius for the entire month of January. They relied on a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, Luna Bleu, that provides stored produce all winter, on Butterworks Farm’s dried beans, wheat, corn and sunflower oil, and on diverse local sources of dairy products, bread, maple syrup, honey, and meats. It helped, of course, that they had planned ahead and put by an ample supply of produce from the past year’s gardens. They also relied on the active support of the Upper Valley Food Co-op in White River Junction, whose manager, Kye Cochran, is renowned as a dedicated local food and GE-free advocate. This “Localvore” movement has spread like wildfire throughout Vermont over the past year.

Another effort, the Addison County Relocalization Network (known as ACORN), has undertaken a detailed mapping of their county’s energy and food needs. They are working toward online partnering of growers and buyers, innovative ways for food producers to share needs, and an effort to strengthen agricultural zoning.17 One aim is to make it more difficult for prime agricultural land to be converted to other uses, a problem that has become epidemic in recent decades through much of the Champlain Valley.

Vermont has a vital network of farmers markets and CSA farms. Many growers plant a little extra every year to supply local food shelves. Burlington’s Intervale features some of the most vital and collaborative urban farms in the entire country. NOFA (Northeast Organic Farming Association) and the Vermont Grass Growers are helping struggling dairy farms transition to more sustainable methods. Thanks to FoodWorks in Montpelier, many Vermont schools have active food gardens and horticulture programs. But much more is needed. Even a couple of decades ago, there were many more local canneries for local produce, and freezer lockers and slaughterhouses to serve those who raise animals for meat. Today we have more artisanal cheesemakers than ever before, but Vermont’s single largest cheesemaker, Cabot, has been steadily moving its production out of state since it was purchased by the regional giant AgriMark in 1993.

Two policy initiatives debated in Montpelier during the 2006 legislative session aimed to help further the goal of increasing food self-reliance. One bill was passed (H. 456), providing small grants to schools to develop working relationships with local farmers and food processors; the original bill also included training and processing assistance for school food service personnel to bring more local products into their kitchens. Another bill (H. 654) addressed the link between food self reliance and emergency management, and would have brought together emergency planners, municipal officials and regional planning commissions in a coordinated effort to strengthen and expand local food and energy supplies in preparation for potential future shortages.18

Another crucial policy area is helping farmers through the costly transition to organic and sustainable production methods. Vermont’s recently retired Secretary of Agriculture, Steven Kerr, paid significant lip service to the idea of state aid to farmers who wish to transition to organic production. This idea languished over his four years in office, but needs to be a central element in any meaningful plan to help sustain our farms and farmers. In Europe, public support for organic transitions has been widely available, and has hugely benefited the land, farmers and consumers. In Austria, 10 percent of the farms are organic (50 percent in the alpine Salzburg province), with a ten-fold increase during the 1990s after state support became available for organic conversions.19 Vermont and New England should be able to do this as well.

Can these efforts toward increased food self reliance in our region meet the dual challenge of responding to future crises and sustaining a high quality of life for everyone? Can local alternatives challenge the influence of agribusiness giants like Monsanto over all of our lives, and also meaningfully serve those who are unable to pay more for high quality local food? One of the strengths of the GE-Free Vermont movement over the years has been its insistence that we will not encourage the creation of a niche market for safe, healthy food while those who are less fortunate among us are limited to increasingly hazardous corporate-processed food. A sustainable future-a future of genuine food sovereignty-is only possible if healthy, local food is available to everyone, regardless of their economic status, family history, or access to land. In the best New England tradition, we can work collaboratively with our neighbors to create a greener future for us all.

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Brian Tokar is the author of four books on environmental politics and issues, including Earth for Sale (South End Press) and Gene Traders (Toward Freedom). He directs the Biotechnology Project at the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, and extends his gratitude to Steve Chase and Christine Arminger for the opportunity to participate in this symposium.

Notes:

1 Brian Tokar, ed., Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger, Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004.

2 Bill McKibben, “Can Vermont Feed Itself?” Vermont Commons, October 2005.

3 Cornucopia Project, “The State of Your Food: A Manual for State Food System Analysis,” Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 1982

4 David S. Timmons, personal communication, February 2006; David Timmons and Qingbin Wang, “Measuring Local Food,” draft manuscript, University of Vermont, March 2006. See also David S. Timmons, Measuring and Understanding Local Foods: The Case of Vermont, MS Thesis, University of Vermont Program in Community Development and Applied Economics, May 2006.

5 Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens and Public Policy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981; John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts and the Insecticide Crisis, New York: Plenum Press, 1982; Paolo Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture: The Making of Scientific Careers in North America, 1885-1985, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996.

6 See, for example, Brian Tokar, “Monsanto: A Profile of Corporate Arrogance,” in Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander, eds., The Case Against the Global Economy, London: Earthscan Publications, 2001. An earlier version of the article appeared in The Ecologist, Vol. 28 No. 5 (September/October 1998).

7 ETC Group Communiqué No. 91, Oligopoly, Inc. 2005: Concentration in Corporate Power, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, November 2005; ETC Group Communiqué No. 90, Global Seed Industry Concentration-2005, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada: ETC Group, September 2005.

8 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

9 ETC Group, November 2005, ibid.

10 Phillip H. Howard, “Organic Industry Structure: Top 25 Food Processors in North America,” Michigan State University, November 2006, at http://www.msu.edu/~howardp/.

11 Corporate Watch, Cargill:  Arrogance Incorporated, Oxford, UK: Corporate Watch, 1999; Brewster Kneen, Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies, London: Pluto Press, 2002.

12 Center for Food Safety, Genetically Modified Crops and Foods: Worldwide Regulation, Prohibition and Production, Washington, DC: Center for Food Safety, 2005; see also Brian Tokar, “WTO vs. Europe:  Less-and Also More-Than it Seems,” at www.counterpunch.org/tokar02182006.html.

13 La Via Campesina, “What is Food Sovereignty?” January 2003, at www.viacampesina.org.

14 Willits Economic Localization Project Overview, at www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/MoreAbout.htm.

15 Michael T. Klare, “The Permanent Energy Crisis,” TomDispatch.com, February 2006, at www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=58126.

16 Jason Bradford, “Food Security Report for Willits, November 2003,” available from www.willitseconomiclocalization.org.

17 The efforts of ACORN and kindred groups across Vermont are profiled online at vtpeakoil.net.

18 Full texts of bills debated by the Vermont legislature are available at www.leg.state.vt.us.

19 Christian R. Vogl and Ika Darnhofer, “Organic agriculture in Austria,” The Organic Standard (Höje, Sweden), No. 34, February 2004.

The Institute for Social Ecology is is proud to announce the release of Beverly Naidus’ latest title, “Arts for Change.” Additionally, the ISE would like to call attention to several lectures, readings, and workshops featuring Beverly that are set for May and June of 2009. (Please see below)

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE for Arts for Change
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New Village Press announces its new title, Arts for Change, by Beverly Naidus, a provocative, personal look at the motivations and challenges of teaching socially engaged arts. The author offers candid examination of her own university teaching career, weaves in broader social and historical perspectives, and opens readers’ minds to other points of view, including those collected from contemporaries in her field.

Arts for Change intersperses scholarly concerns with intimate, image-rich metaphor in a free-spirited, non-academic prose. The author answers vital questions that students and educators have long been asking: How can polarized groups work together to solve social and environmental problems? How can art be used to raise consciousness?

Using her personal experiences in the classroom as a template, Naidus guides the reader through a progression of steps to help students observe the world around them and craft artistic responses to what they see. Arts for Change also features interviews with 33 artist/educators with diverse opinions and strategies for successfully engaging students in what, to them, is most meaningful.

Illustrated with 48 visuals and photographs of student, faculty and community works, Arts for Change is both inspirational and instructional. It is sure to stimulate new thinking among arts faculty, arts students, and activists of all kinds, as well as anyone who has an inkling of the role the arts can play in responding to critical issues of the day.

BRIEF BIO FOR BEVERLY
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Inspired by lived experience, topics in Beverly’s artwork include environmental illness, global warming, unemployment, the alienation of consumer culture, nuclear nightmares, body hate, celebrating cultural identity, confronting racism and anti-Semitism, and envisioning utopia and global justice.

Beverly has produced several artist’s books including What Kinda Name is That? and One Size Does Not Fit All. Her art has been discussed in books by Paul Von Blum, Lucy R. Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Lisa Bloom and others, and reviewed in many contemporary journals. Her writing about art for social change has been published in two books (New Practices — New Pedagogies edited by Malcolm Miles and The Arts, Education and Social Change: Little Signs of Hope edited by Mary Clare Powell and Vivien Marcow Speiser), and in articles in Radical Teacher, the New Art Examiner, and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal.

Beverly is teaching art for social change in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where she has also co-created a program in Arts in Community. Unfortunately the program is on hold due to budgetary constraints.

UPCOMING EVENTS FEATURING BEVERLY NAIDUS
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Reading and Book Signing @ Boswell’s Books, Shelburne Falls, MA
On June 21st at 2 pm, Beverly Naidus will read her book, show slides of her students’ work and sign books at Boswell’s Books, 10 Bridge Street Shelburne Falls, MA 01370 413-625-9362
http://www.boswellsbooks.com/

Reading and Book Signing @ Food for Thought Books Collective, Amherst, MA
On June 24th at 7 pm, Beverly Naidus will read her book, show slides of her students’ work and sign books at Food for Thought Books Collective, 106 N.Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01002
Tel: 413-253-5432
http://www.foodforthoughtbooks.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp

SEEDS Festival: Workshop on Eco-art for Everyday Life
Beverly will facilitate a week long workshop on Eco-art for Everyday Life for the SEEDS festival run by Earthdance in Plainfield, MA from June 21-28th. Contact Earthdance for more details:
http://www.earthdance.net/programs/seedsschedule09.htm

***Note:
This SEEDS Festival (Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance, & Science) is not to be confused with the SEEDS (Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School) project that Beverly is involved with on Vashon Island near Seattle, Washington. For more information about that project please visit their website: http://socialecologyvashon.org

(This interview was originally posted at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/101/interview.html)

ECOCLUB.com: What is Social Ecology and in what key ways does it differ from the mainstream environmentalism of the big US & International NGOS?

Brian Tokar: Social ecology offers a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and environmental problems, as well as a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society. We view environmental problems as fundamentally social and political, and seek systemic, long-term solutions, in contrast to the incremental policy adjustments generally advocated by the large NGOs. We advocate fundamental changes in political, economic and social systems, envisioning an outlook that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom within human communities.

ECOCLUB.com: What criteria should Tourism meet, assumed that it can, so that it could be genuinely ecological and compatible with social ecology?  In other words, could there ever be a Social Ecological Tourism?

Brian Tokar: Several of our students over the years have sought to address the problems of tourism and eco-tourism from a social ecology perspective. The fundamental problem with tourism today is that it transforms communities and important natural areas toward serving the desires and perceived needs of more affluent people who come to visit from other parts of the world.
A more genuinely ecological tourism would necessarily begin with the genuine needs and lived realities of the host community. Visitors would participate in ongoing community activities and voluntary forms of service to their hosts. Facilities would necessarily be owned and managed by local people and genuinely reflect the community’s lifeways, rather than some idealized or repackaged version of those. The problem, of course, is that in a competitive, capitalist context, and in a world burdened by vast discrepancies in wealth and privilege, communities that offer visitors their lived reality as it is may have a difficult time competing with locales that offer visitors a more idealized fantasy of their existence.

ECOCLUB.com: What is your view of tools such as carbon offsetting of travel emissions, voluntourism and traveller’s philanthropy, do they advance the social ecological agenda, or are they just ‘humane’ forms of green capitalism in travel?

Brian Tokar: We are especially skeptical of carbon offsetting for travel. Offsets may help absolve individuals’ personal guilt for their excess carbon emissions, but the actual benefits to the climate are often difficult to measure. For countries that aim to meaningfully cap their emissions, offsetting emissions through investments in projects elsewhere in the world represents a “hole in the cap” with results that are difficult to monitor and verify. Authors such as Larry Lohmann from the UK have demonstrated that many carbon offset projects ultimately do more harm than good. I am new to the concept of ‘voluntourism;’ as I’ve outlined above, it all depends on how it is carried out, and how genuinely it meets the needs of the host community.

ECOCLUB.com: How optimistic are you about the Obama administration delivering on its promises for peace and the environment?

Brian Tokar: After 30 years of virtually uninterrupted right wing hegemony in the US, most progressive-minded people are hopeful about the ‘change’ that Obama represents. However his policies have a long way to go in living up to his promises for change. The escalation of US military activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the very slow withdrawal from Iraq reflect more continuity with past policies than meaningful change. In environmental policy, Obama’s top appointees are consistent in acknowledging the need for effective science-based responses to problems such as the potentially catastrophic global climate disruptions that we are facing. On the other hand, they appear quite wedded to status-quo false “solutions” to global warming, including the potential expansion of nuclear power, trading of carbon dioxide emissions permits, and the myths of “clean coal” and “advanced” biofuels. We may be seeing as much change as is possible within the constraints of the current structures of political power in the US, but this is clearly not enough in the face of mounting ecological and economic disruptions.

ECOCLUB.com: Should the Green movement search for short-term solutions to the current economic crisis (of capitalism) or should they just let the system collapse and develop a really alternative one, not based on money & profit, that it can replace it?

Brian Tokar: Short term solutions are inherently limited, but necessary. Crises, both economic and ecological, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people, while the most affluent are best able to shield themselves from the most serious consequences. It is the responsibility of any society that believes in justice to compensate for these short-term effects and allow everyone to participate in the recreation of a social order that fully meets the needs of the people and the planet. Short term solutions should not become ends in themselves, nor allow us to become complacent, but rather help set the stage for the much bigger changes that are necessary.

Staudenmaier’s pieces include his critical historical essays on anthroposophy, his participation in Left debates over Kosovo, and his involvement in a “Social Ecology vs. Participatory Economics” debate with Michael Albert, the founder of PARECON.

The two articles authored by Grosscup posit a radical critique of the response to Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 election cycle, respectively.

Hardy offers a book review of the posthumously-released “Social Ecology and Communalism,” a collection of essays by Murray Bookchin, and an analysis of progressive candidacies during the 2008 US presidential race.

As an aware consumer imploring American farmers to “put away that DDT now,” singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell sang back in the 1970’s, “give me spots on the apples, but leave me the birds and the bees…please.”

Once upon a time, when I was an activist and small organic farmer, organic standards were a self-imposed system of rules developed primarily by organic farmers, those who had to work with them on the ground. Consumer expectations were always figured into organic standards, but we understood that consumer perceptions of what is “pure and natural” do not always fit the reality of organic farming, let alone food processing. While consumers might be ignorant about farming and food production, we believed they could learn—it was more important to support farmers who did the right thing than to pander to consumer fears. Just as the immortal Ms. Mitchell learned to ignore those spots on the apples.

Today, no one seems bothered by the assertion that consumer expectations, even those grounded in ignorance, are all that matters. Add to that the marketing myth that consumers cannot understand and could care less about the nuances of organic methods, and only want to be assured that organic products meet the toughest possible standards. What it often adds up to is unparalleled hypocrisy, and betrayal of the early vision of organic in the name of an ideological anti-corporate agenda that actually works against the interests of both small farmers and “ordinary” consumers.

The gist of the problem is this: Most of the grassroots farm and consumer activists have had it wrong all along. They believe that the only way to fend off the takeover of organic by global corporate evildoers is to make the standards as tight, strict, rigorous and undiluted as possible, and use consumer perceptions as their rationale. This is in part due to the mistaken assumption that regulation of the organic label is comparable to regulations that prohibit misdeeds by corporate polluters. Not true.

The difference is one that very few outside of government and some rarified academic fields understand, but which immediately makes sense to most people when it is explained. Unlike a traditional environmental or consumer protection regulation that keeps giant corporations from threatening the health of consumers and the environment, the NOP (like any other government organic labeling program) is a marketing program that establishes minimum requirements for those wishing to enter the organic market.

Marketing programs are generally there for the benefit of the regulated industry, not as watchdogs to stop them from harming the public. Established players want to tighten their standards to limit competition by potential new entrants. It has nothing to do with protecting consumer interests, and works against consumers by maintaining high prices and limited supply for products that may not be demonstrably superior. For example, spotless apples that meet cosmetic standards as “fancy” may still be drenched in pesticides, and milk from a cow that was treated with antibiotics when she was a calf cannot be distinguished from milk from a cow has never been treated with antibiotics (as required under the NOP), if other factors such as feed quality are the same. Marketers point to consumer preferences for qualities that the marketers themselves have told them they should prefer. Tighter organic standards also do nothing to protect the environment or improve product safety. Tighter rules mostly serve to create more paper work, a bigger obstacle for small operations than for large players, who are accustomed to meeting bureaucratic requirements and have paid compliance staffs.

Unfortunately, the activists often have more power than they realize. Everyone connected with the organic industry–from the NOP administration to the companies, large and small, who are trying to make a buck and save the world at the same time (never mind if the two may be mutually contradictory—that’s another discussion)—live in fear of being publicly accused of trying to “weaken” the standards. The charge (endlessly repeated even by people like Jim Hightower, with the aura of accepted truth) that USDA has been trying to dilute organic standards at the behest of corporate agribusiness, while plausible to any activist who has battled corporate owned environmental regulators, is completely wrong.

This has had unfortunate consequences for the original vision of organic, most clearly seen in the public reaction to the NOP’s first proposed rule in 1998, when the only staff people who truly cared about small organic farmers and the organic vision were immediately sidelined from the program. The new management then instituted a politically driven policy supporting the strictest possible interpretation of the law. The most recent examples of this can be found in discussions about the NOP’s proposed rule on access to pasture and in some public comments about the NOSB’s proposed standards for organic aquaculture.

The proposed rule for access to pasture is generally acknowledged to be excessively prescriptive in its requirement for year-round outdoor living for organic livestock in any climate. Many of the comments agree that, if implemented as written, the rules would likely eliminate a large number of small organic dairy farmers, as well as most organic beef producers. To this extent the NOP’s strategy has succeeded: Activists are now being forced to ask that USDA make its rules just a wee bit looser. But they continue to cling to the delusion that tougher rules benefit small operators, and threaten those who disagree with public relations nightmares.

Another case in point is the recommendation on standards for organic aquaculture that was just passed by the NOSB. It was opposed mainly by consumer groups, who consider fish farming as it is practiced by conventional agribusiness concerns to be an ecological and health disaster—as well they should. But does it make any sense to oppose the possibility of environmentally sound fish culture because consumers have been convinced that organic means “pure and natural?”

With the myriad crises we face, not least of them climate change, why on earth would anyone want to limit the possibility of the broadest possible transition to organic methods, without delay? There’s much more I could say, especially about what organic does mean, if not “pure and natural.” Lets continue the discussion.

Grace Gershuny

GAIA Services

Barnet, Vermont