What happened at the United States Social Forum?
- Over 15,000 people from across the United States and around the world attended the USSF (http://www.ussf2010.org) in Detroit, Michigan, from June 22 – 26, 2010
- Many also attended the Allied Media Conference (http://alliedmediaconference.org) from June 17 – 19, 2010
- Other national gatherings were held in the days between the AMC and the USSF, such as the
- Progressive Communicators Network (http://progressivecommunicators.net) annual meeting and training with the Center for Media Justice and the Praxis Project, and the
- National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.nnirr.org) national membership meeting
- Progressive Communicators Network (http://progressivecommunicators.net) annual meeting and training with the Center for Media Justice and the Praxis Project, and the
- Over 100 People’s Movement Assemblies (PMAs) were held before and during the US Social Forum, which came up with over 100 resolutions, statements, commitments and visions for the US and the world, which we will follow up in our work during the next period.
- For more about PMAs, see here: http://www.pma2010.org/process
Resolutions and outcomes I think are key for my/our work in the next period:
Photos from the Incinerator Action, June 25, 2010
48217 is also the most polluted zip code in the US. 98% of Detroit is Black. This is what we call environmental racism.
The city was gutted by the leaving of the automobile production industries in the 1970s, when the population was around 2 million. The city was built and designed for 3 million residents. Today, in 2010, less than 800,000 folks remain. There are no supermarkets within city limits and folks have to regularly drive a half hour or more to go to supermarkets.
Most folks don't own cars.
There are over 900 community gardens in Detroit.
And, in a region where nearly a quarter of the wrold's fresh water resides, on the edge of the Great Lakes, over 40,000 households have no access to fresh water. The impacts of this are huge: Child Welfare can come and take away your kids because you don't have water; and unlike some other states, they can shut off your water in the winter (I think this recently changed).
There are huge family networks and community ways that people protect each other from the state around water and water shut-offs in Detroit, and support each other's well-being in the face of abandonment by the government and by the corporations.
This is how communities are resilient and inventive in the face of adversity.
As Grace Lee Boggs, Chinese American and intellectual backbone of Detroit's slow / quiet revolution says, "It is clear that something has died here in Detroit." She is referring to the industrial age, the age of oil, cars, and what Sherman (Motor City DJ, producer, hood therapist and philosopher) called the addiction to oil. Boggs goes on to say, "What is less visible is that something new is being birthed here. We don't know what it will look like, yet."
Teamsters
and many others
Friends from Milwaukee, San Francisco, Detroit
Ayisha, from the East Michigan Environmental Action Coalition
Ian Viteri, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization's Climate Justice and Energy Organizer, strikes a pose. He went on to offer some powerful words of wisdom from another community fighting power plants and incinerators (smokestacks).
Nikke Alex and Chelsea, from the Black Mesa Water Coalition. BMWC just won a victory that revoked a permit for expansion / extension for Peabody Coal Mine on the Navajo (Diné) reservation in New Mexico, which is located on a sacred site. BMWC is leading the way for Navajo Green Jobs that expands the notion of "green jobs" to the roles that we need for our communities to be resilient and to thrive, as well modeling the type of youth-led intergenerational, coalition and alliance-building work that leads to power on multiple scales of state and extra-state solutions to injustice.
Asian Pacific Environmental Network's delegation - APEN is located in Oakland, California, and is also working with organizing the Laotian community in Richmond, CA. The Richmond, California campaign against Big Oil just won a major campaign victory as well, where community pressure and a progressive Mayor and City Council (along with West County Toxics Coalition, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, Communities for a Better Environment and the Mobilization for Climate Justice - West) led to a an agreement where the polluter would pay a tax to the City.
APEN organizer Mari Rose Taruc reminds us that climate offsets and pollution trading mean continued sickness and premature death for residents of communities ike Richmond California, who have been bearing the costs of the pollution that has caused climate change. Environmental justice reminds us that the impacts of pollution - like the community health and environmental burdens of climate change - are not evenly distributed. She says that reducing emissions must begin by reducing pollutants and toxics at the source. Consumer reductions are also necessary for this to happen, reminds Kandi Mossett, of the Indigenous Environmental Network. But not sufficient.
Sunyoung Yang, Bus Riders Union (Los Angeles, California). The Bus Riders Union is leading the way in terms of multilingual organizing combined with research and analysis that leads to real transportation justice. For instance, when justice and pollution reductions are combined together, real green-blue-brown solutions (emerald? turquoise?) mean low-to-no emission buses, maintaining public transport, and not really new light rail systems.
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization youth organizers. LVEJO is doing amazing work combining education justice, environmental justice, community planning and development, and youth led creative work.
Asian and Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership (AYPAL), from Oakland, Califas. AYPAL has a unique youth organizing model that allows youth to organize in ethnic/national specific groups as well as across ethnicities.Youth from low-income households throughout Oakland become leaders in mediating school and race-based violence, as well as promoting positive change in their own communities and in Oakland as a whole.
Having lived in Oakland for the last 10 years (and moving to LA in August), I am biased, of course. But I have to say that AYPAL (along with AIWA and CPA) do some of the most interesting, innovate, effective youth organizing in Asian communities that I have seen. Even when the rest of national movements often can't see us, we have been centrally present in most major struggles in the last century and a half in the Americas. 
GenderJUST:
From their website, "Gender JUST (Gender Justice United for Societal Transformation) is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational grassroots organization of Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer, and Allied (LGBTQA) young people, LGBTQA people of color, and LGBTQA grassroots folks developing leadership and building power through organizing." I was super-impressed by yet another instance where queer folk and youth are leading the way in terms of intersectional analysis for the better and just world that is coming. As I say above, the Queer and Trans PMA announced the consolidation of a new(-ish) national coalition that articulates a broad movement definition of justice rooted in gender, race, class and other liberation. My favorite frames: family in all the ways that we are family; a world where we can be all of who we are; and working towards safe self-determination.
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