Hurricane Sandy and now Mayor Bloomberg have finally managed to inject climate change into next week's election, but before Nature intervened, Mark Hertsgaard made the foreign policy-climate connection for PRI's The World,
Two years in Pakistan, there was a climate change disaster, terrible monsoon rains and resulting floods that put 14 million Pakistanis out of their homes, made them homeless. If you want to know why there’s that kind of unrest in Pakistan, and unhappiness, these kinds of natural disasters are a perfect breeding ground for terrorists. Or Mali, the African nation of Mali was mentioned by Governor Romney. I reported from Mali for The World, and in the north of Mali, why is it that there’s this resurgence of terrorists and radicalism. It’s partly because nobody there can farm any more because the climate has become too inhospitable. And more and more of the planet is threatening to come under those conditions unless we really get serious about reducing not just the emissions but putting in place real adaptation programs to build the resilience in those places.
We learned reading Hertsgaard's Earth Odyssey some years ago that environmental disasters have human rights consequences, so it is useful to have this reminder of the relationship between climate and unrest..
A few weeks back, Herstsgaard connected the dots between the farm bill and climate change in an NYT editorial decrying the proposed bill's failure to encourage farmers to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and aid them in taking measures to protect crops from weather extremes. In his latest post-Sandy article for The Nation, Hertsgaard continues to find fault with the presidential candidates failure to discuss their plans (if they exist!) to address climate change. He is optimistic about the technical fixes (for more on that see his book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth) but not so much about the political way forward, "No president can cross Big Oil in the way that is required to defuse the climate crisis without the help of a powerful and sustained popular movement" and to that end he points us to 350.org'sDo the Math Tour launching immediately after the election to build the community for change. Check to see if there's an event near you and meanwhile you can support their call for Big Oil to contribute to Sandy recovery.
Before I survey the commentary on the Occupy movement from authors we have read, and in view of the police actions we've seen in the last 24 hours I'd just like to point out to my Esteemed Readers this October 27 press release, Amnesty International Urges Restraint as Police Clamp Down on Occupy Wall Street Protests and with a further nod to PEN, their press release from yesterday, PEN Calls for Press Freedom at Occupy Sites.
Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is probably the least surprising name on that list. Her book about living among low-wage earners is ten years old and available in a newly revised edition. She was interviewed at WNYC about it last August. As the Occupy movement took off, she explored the intersection between the protestors and the homeless community,
In Portland, Austin and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed—the 99 percent, or at least the 70 percent, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher and impoverished senior—unless this revolution succeeds.
Sonali Kolhatkar's Uprising radio also features this interview on the topic with Ehrenreich.
Other authors have weighed in around the country and abroad:
The Occupy Portland folk are protesting corporate greed, the concept of corporate citizenship (foisted upon us courtesy of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision) and the lack of accountability of the government to the people. At the same time, they are promoting local, sustainable, diverse economies; the right to privacy and Internet freedoms; free education; clean air and water; meaningful work and fair taxes.
There’s been a lot of talk in the media about how “incoherent” the Occupy events are, but that seems to me like a pretty coherent program for a people-focused democracy, in place of a congress beholden to corporate interests.
An occupation is a job. But it's also a seizing of control...
Amira Hass (Drinking the sea at Gaza), also reporting from Montreal, discovers another layer of meaning for members of Canada's first nations who,
find the choice of the term "occupy" very disturbing. For them it represents a very real history of the dictatorship of the material profit mentality, to the degree of genocides. Are we part of the 99 percent or outside it, they ask themselves.
Mark Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey), focuses on the success of the Keystone Pipepline protests at the White House,
Already, the political conversation has changed in the US. Although much of the media coverage of the Occupy movement has been simple-minded or even hostile, there has been a great deal of it, and the effect has been to amplify the movement's message and gain it followers. Now, budget cuts for workers and pensioners are no longer the sole focus of political debate; requiring corporations and the rich to pay their fair share of taxes is also on the agenda.
[The] vision has to be the dismantling of this particular model, in which a few people can be allowed to have an unlimited amount of wealth, of power, both political as well as corporate... And that has to be the aim of this movement. And that has to then move down into countries like mine, where people look at the U.S. as some great, aspirational model. And I can tell you that there is such a lot of beauty still in India. There’s such a lot of ferocity there that actually can provide a lot of political understanding, even to the protest on Wall Street. To me, the forests of central India and the protesters in Wall Street are connected by a big pipeline, and I am one of those people in that pipeline.
Last but not least, of course Pete Seeger (The Protest Singer) showed up:
More on the Occupy movement and human rights in another post.
Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) won a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her reaction and plans here.
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) writes about the connections between the Iranian recipients of this years Anna Politkovskaya Award and the award's namesake and previous winner Natalya Estemirova.
Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International (and Nicolas Kristof) talk about the current state of the human rights movement at NPR's On Point. A very interesting discussion, though we don't learn much about Khan's new book, (The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights).
Bill Moyers interviews Dr. Jim Yong Kim (see Tracy Kidder'sMountains Beyond Mountains) about the connections between our current national healthcare debate and global health issues.
Ted Conover (Newjack)is interviewed by On the Media about the ethics of his undercover reporting at Sing Sing prison.
Mark Hertsgaard (Earth Odyssey) reports from Burkina Faso on climate change and appears on a FORA.tv panel on food security and climate change. Hertsgaard is preparing a book on the subject, certainly a good candidate for a Rights Read. Kevin Bales (Disposable People) is interviewed about his latest book, The Slave Next Door.
Another in our periodic updates on Rights Readers authors, this time with an environmental twist: Orville Schell (Mandate Of Heaven) previews the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen highlighting the U.S.-China divide on climate change solutions. Nation subscribers might want to check out Mark Hertsgaard's (Earth Odyssey) article on the same subject, 'Shades of Green'. I also highly recommend exploring the Asia Society's excellent multimedia web resources on China and climate change which feature interviews with Schell. Check out the air quality in Beijing and watch time lapse view of the melting of the Tibetan plateau and learn how drought is affecting nomadic herding cultures of the area.
Edward Humes (No Matter How Loud I Shout), now on the environmental beat, profiles the Center for Biological Diversity and their fight against development at Tejon Ranch,
The organization’s goal is to augment its usual battle over specific endangered species issues—in Tejon’s case, the California condor—with a broader campaign to show that projects such as Tejon are precisely the sort of development, built far from existing cities and requiring residents to “leapfrog” through the outlying area to get to work, that must stop if we are to get serious about slowing climate change. It argues that state and federal laws should force developers at Tejon—and elsewhere—to quantify their contribution to global warming and then do everything feasible to eliminate that impact, from installing solar roofs to mandating zero-emission vehicles for residents.
More than one of our Esteemed Readers have praised the film, The Linguists (view online here). I'm going to recommend this fascinating article about the nexus between climate change and language diversity from Seed, 'In Defense of Difference,'
Epicenters of global biodiversity, it turns out, tend to be situated in exactly the same places as the epicenters of high cultural, linguistic, and food-crop diversity.
...
Homogeneous landscapes — whether linguistic, cultural, biological, or genetic — are brittle and prone to failure. The evidence peppers human history, as Jared Diamond so meticulously catalogued in his aptly named book, Collapse. Whether it was due to a shifting climate that devastated a too-narrow agricultural base, a lack of cultural imagination in how to deal with the problem, or a devastating combination of the two, societies insufficiently resilient enough to cope with the demands of a changing environment invariably crumbled.
Hey! Poets and scientists unite! You should also Check out this UN Tribute to Poetry in Endangered Languages with handy world poetry map!
On a more serious note, here are a couple of articles on the intersection of human rights and global warming. First from an article in Amnesty Magazine by Ross Gelbspan,
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the rights to secure shelter, food, health, and the tools for basic sustenance — all of which are endangered by the extreme weather, disease outbreaks, crop failures, and famine caused by global warming. The impact of an increasingly unstable climate falls disproportionately on people in poor countries. They are hit hardest — not because nature discriminates against the poor, but because developing countries cannot afford the kinds of infrastructures, such as back-up food reserves, redundant generating systems, and accessible healthcare facilities, needed to buffer the effects of global warming.
...there must be a conscious reframing of the climate-change debate in terms of human rights. One group of the world's peoples (namely the poor and vulnerable) have found that their right to live and prosper has been harmed by the actions of another group of people (namely the rich).
Something to keep in mind as we plan our usual run of "Earth Day" events this spring. Hmmm... this has really turned into Science Week here at Rights Readers!
Two years in Pakistan, there was a climate change disaster, terrible monsoon rains and resulting floods that put 14 million Pakistanis out of their homes, made them homeless. If you want to know why there’s that kind of unrest in Pakistan, and unhappiness, these kinds of natural disasters are a perfect breeding ground for terrorists. Or Mali, the African nation of Mali was mentioned by Governor Romney. I reported from Mali for The World, and in the north of Mali, why is it that there’s this resurgence of terrorists and radicalism. It’s partly because nobody there can farm any more because the climate has become too inhospitable. And more and more of the planet is threatening to come under those conditions unless we really get serious about reducing not just the emissions but putting in place real adaptation programs to build the resilience in those places.
A few weeks back, Herstsgaard connected the dots between the farm bill and climate change in an NYT editorial decrying the proposed bill's failure to encourage farmers to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and aid them in taking measures to protect crops from weather extremes. In his latest post-Sandy article for The Nation, Hertsgaard continues to find fault with the presidential candidates failure to discuss their plans (if they exist!) to address climate change. He is optimistic about the technical fixes (for more on that see his book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth) but not so much about the political way forward, "No president can cross Big Oil in the way that is required to defuse the climate crisis without the help of a powerful and sustained popular movement" and to that end he points us to 350.org's Do the Math Tour launching immediately after the election to build the community for change. Check to see if there's an event near you and meanwhile you can support their call for Big Oil to contribute to Sandy recovery.
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