Rumbo a Cancún:

November 25, 2010

On this day, most of my friends and family both give thanks for our families and communities and for the meaningful work we get to do in our lifetimes. Sometimes this coincides with our paid work and sometimes not. For me, it's both!

I am in the fancy airport in D.F., or Mexico City, waiting for my transfer flight to Cancún, where I will be meeting up with some of the advance team of folks from the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). I am excited and honored to have been asked to collaborate with IEN on their media work for this upcoming 16th Conference of the Parties, or COP 16, of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The meeting takes place from 29-november through 10-december.

This is the first of many blog posts that I will be posting from México introducing these unlikely negotiators and observers where, as Martin Khor said after Copenhagen last year, we are "not only negotiating the future of humanity and the earth but also the future distribution of the GDP of the world."

 

We are calling the delegation the "Grassroots Solutions to Climate Justice" Alliance for North America. We are Indigenous and Native peoples from North America, youth and young people from frontline and fenceline communities, economic and racial justice representatives from the same (where incinerators, pipelines, oil rigs, refineries, chemical plants, power plants, uranium mines, nuclear power plants, coal mines, in Indian Country and Appalachia, in urban America and the Gulf Coast, are located), and environmental justice organizations and leaders.

The blog posts will include updates from the inside of the negotiations, but also updates from members of our delegations who are on the road, meeting with indigenous and small farmer organizations and communities along the way, from caravans with La Via Campesina, that originated in Chiapas, Acapulco and other points.

It is fitting that we begin the coverage with a profile of the Indigenous Environmental Network, or IEN. At home in the United States, most people are preparing meals and gathering together families of all kinds for what is called Thankgiving, but is also called Thanks-taken, or Indigenous People's Genocide Day, or Day of Mourning. Where I grew up, in the Northeast, the myth of Pilgrims sharing a feast in peace with local Native peoples was taught to us in the public schools. In fact, local Native peoples took pity on the starving Europeans who didn't know how to farm or fish well enough to save their own lives, and were in return exterminated, had their lands stolen, and their hirstories erased from the dominant narrative. So for me, the passion to tell our stories from our communities, the underside of modernity, of colonization and colonialism, comes from knowing that once we know the full story, we must re-imagine who we are as a society and culture and deeply change structures - economic, political, social, cultural - in order to move towards justice.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is one of the leading organizations and formations within the Indigenous Peoples' Caucus in UN proceedings on climate change. Indigenous Peoples are among the leading constituencies that have developed, articulated, and held a climate justice perspective as observers in the UN process. IEN will have several media-worthy actions. They are also in many ways the (unsung) intellectual leaders and political strategists behind which much of the rest of the alignment follows.

 

Tom Goldtooth has been following these proceedings since Rio, over 20 years ago. He is an experienced negotiator in arenas including the UNFCCC, but also in the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples and the World Conference on Sustainable Development.

Goldtooth anticipates that the REDD agreements will be one of the major flashpoints of this negotiations. Mexico and many other governments would like to push through some sort of REDD agreement. Many other folks from small farmers to indigenous peoples, to youth and other constituencies from the communities where these polluting facilities are located, where their communities suffer the daily impacts of rare cancers, asthma, and premature death, say that REDD and associated programs lets corporations - and governments - off the hook by allowing them to continue polluting while likely kicking poor land based communities off their lands somewhere "else."

IEN will have a talented inside team of peoples impacted by fossil fuel extracting and producing industries such as the Tar Sands in northern Alberta and people from communities whose homelands are disappearing under a rising ocean on the north slope of Alaska.

 

And, below, a note form the compas in the Gulf Coast.

More later. Gotta go catch my plane. See you in the interwebs or on the streets!

* * * * *

A Special Thanksgiving For Mississippi's Gulf Coast

by Liana Lopez

 

Gulfport, MS - Residents along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, a region still struggling to recover from the worst hurricane disaster in American history and more recently, the worst American oil spill, have something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving holiday.

  

A little more than a week ago, H.U.D. Secretary Shaun Donovan joined Governor Haley Barbour and Mississippi Center for Justice attorney Reilly Morse in the coastal city of Gulfport to announce that $132 million would be made available for lower-income, disabled and elderly Katrina victims still suffering with unmet housing needs five years after the storm.

 

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, fair housing advocacy groups and the state department had already identified 4,400 families that would likely benefit from the extra funds when the declaration was made last week - families that had previously been denied state assistance.

  

In fact, $93 million was assigned specifically for folks that were “already in the system” while only $40 million was set-aside for new applicants.

 

Posted via email from Decolonizing Environmentalism