PRESS STATEMENT
Indigenous Peoples Support the Bolivia Cochabamba Peoples’ Agreement of the recent People’s Global Summit on Climate Change
and the Rights of Mother Earth
Rejection of Carbon Market Regimes
My name is Tom B.K. Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network. Our Indigenous network represents indigenous communities throughout the world experiencing the affects of climate change. The Indigenous Environmental Network is based in Minnesota, USA.
I am here at United Nations headquarters as part of an international delegation of civil society and social movements invited by President Evo Morales Ayma of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to lift up the importance of the Peoples’ Agreement and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, that are outcomes of the People’s Global Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.
Indigenous peoples from throughout the Americas and throughout the world participated in the Global Summit. Indigenous peoples stood together with the social movement of the world acknowledging that Mother Earth is the source of all life. World leaders and parties to the UN climate negotiations must reevaluate what their relationship is the sacredness of Mother Earth. The draft Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth developed in Cochabamba is an international framework to ensure mechanisms for the recognition of human rights, the rights of those that cannot speak for themselves and of our Mother Earth.
As representatives of social movements and civil society of the world – we are asking for meaningful and effective participation of civil society and social movements in Cancun and all UN climate change negotiations. The Copenhagen UN climate meeting did not allow this to happen. We are a movement of millions of people throughout the world demanding transparency, inclusion and to have a voice in UN climate negotiations that will create climate policy that directly affects the future of our communities and the world.
One of the key points of the Cochabamba Peoples’ Agreement was the rejection of carbon market mechanisms within climate agreements and negotiations such as the controversial REDD initiative (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) and REDD+ that want to use forests as a
commodity to be traded in a carbon offset regime, as well as Clean Development Mechanism projects.
Indigenous people the world over are suffering from human rights abuses from carbon trading and carbon offsets. Indigenous peoples’ cosmovision and our worldview are concerned of a world that privatizes the air, water and commodifies the sacredness of Mother Earth. We must de-colonize the atmosphere.
The Copenhagen Accord was a high-stakes deal-maker and was really a Copenhagen Steal that did not recognize, nor had any language ensuring the rights of Indigenous Peoples. This will lead to further human rights violations, climate destruction, lost of land and disruption of the livelihood and well-being
of indigenous communities from the arctic to the global south.
As Indigenous Peoples, we are the guardians of Mother Earth, and must make principled stands for the global well-being of all people and all life. The adoption of the Cochabamba Peoples’ Agreement and the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth is extremely necessary, if we are to survive this climate crisis that will be getting worst in decades to come.
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
May 12, 2010 at 11:10 am
Keith Lampe
I totally agree with all you say here. As for cosmovision, I’m pleased to relay the good news that we no longer need to be obedient to King Cong (coal/oil/nuclear/gas) because now we can tap all our energy from seemingly the air but actually the ether, which looks the same as air–to the human eye, anyway. Elegant, eh?
Meanwhile, here’s what I’m posting to my various Internet news lists later today. I begin by praising a bunch of academics whose just-released climate report calls for “the raising up of human dignity”–and then I say:
For decades now the underlying climate problem has been human mood: industrialized people don’t feel good enough often enough to care enough about their futures to be willing to go through the lifestyle changes necessary to have those futures at all.
Ah, but if provided with a sense of their inherent dignity they will start caring enough about their futures. It’s this simple beneath all the bitter factional climate rhetoric. A complex dynamic of vicious cycling–e.g., the more air pollution the lower the mood and the lower the mood the more air pollution–has been jiu-jitsued to a virtuous cycling.
The greater the sense of dignity the greater the desire to stop using oil/coal/nuclear/gas as energy sources and start using the best stuff–e.g., zero point, cold fusion, advanced hydrogen/water.
Also it’s refreshing that this group moves beyond the weird stuporous fixation with CO2–though this is more commonsensical than radical.
Besides the warming influences of atmospheric CO2 and methane, we have the cooling influences from the current phase (evidently to last another decade) of solar fluctuations, from chemtrails and from other particulate pollution.
Awwwright, enough for now. I’ll close by saying that I’ve suggested to the brilliant new World People’s Movement for Mother Earth that starting in June we hold monthly planet-wide Internet teleconferences so we can sharpen our focus–and our determination–for Cancun in November. Also I think we should do an action within the next couple weeks in response to the river of oil in the Gulf of Mexico
For all our relations,
Ro-Non-So-Te aka Keith Lampe and Pondo
Co-founder, US environmental movement in 1969, Living Creatures
Associates in 1972, All-Species Projects in 1978 and founder, US
Pro-Democracy Movement in 1991
Vilcabamba, Ecuador
PS: I should explain here that genetically I’m like the European invaders of the Americas–but back in ’70 Mohawk poet and carver Peter Blue Cloud saw me dancing and concluded I was one of those in Wowoka’s Prophecy who’d reincarnate “in blue-eyed or green-eyed form” to infiltrate the invaders’ society. So he gave me the name of a former Mohawk chief.