A Truly Green Economy Requires Alliances Between Labour and Indigenous People

(Photo: Light Brigading/flickr/cc)

by Harsha Walia, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/04/truly-green-economy-requires-alliances-between-labour-and-indigenous-people

Dozens of social movement organizers recently gathered in Toronto at a meeting convened by the This Changes Everything team to envision a new economy centered on climate justice.

With relentless extractions of labor and land harming all life on earth, cross-sectoral alliances are necessary.

But a number of predictable tensions bubbled up at the gathering, some related to land defence and workers’ rights. How do we shift from a petro-economy to prevent catastrophic climate change while safeguarding workers whose livelihoods depend on the resource economy?

Over the past few decades a green economy, which would ensure jobs and equity within a low-carbon economy, has been posited as a solution.

Extending from this and in the context of reconciliation, I want to envision emancipatory possibilities of solidarity between workers’ movements for self-management and Indigenous struggles for self-determination.

Land defence as labor, blockades as pickets

Capitalism not only creates the conditions for the expropriation of labour, but also limits what can even be characterized as labor.

Our society primarily defines workers as those producing within the industrial, financial, service or technological economies. Labor outside of these economies is not only devalued, but also unrecognized as productive labor. This includes reproductive and affective labor, land stewardship, and care work.

Single mothers, elders, peasants, women of color, and Indigenous communities, all of whom are deliberately impoverished and stigmatized as “uncontributing,” overwhelmingly undertake this hard work that maintains life itself.

Blockades from Clayoquot to Caledonia have long been sites of conflict between workers in the resource sector and land defenders working to protect the land. Within the house of labor we can create a formidable precedent by respecting blockades as legitimate picket lines.

Furthermore, since land grabs are, to borrow from David Harvey, accumulation by dispossession, Indigenous land defence is an impediment to capital accumulation. Dene scholar Glen Coulthard notes that blockades “seek to negatively impact the economic infrastructure that is core to the colonial accumulation of capital in settler political economies like Canada’s.”

Strident working-class movements picket to hamper capital’s exploitation of labour and strike for workers’ collective control over the means of production. Similarly, Indigenous nations blockade to prevent state and capital’s expropriation of natural resources by asserting Indigenous jurisdiction.

Green economy or Indigenous land-based economies?

Indigenous land defenders rarely describe their efforts as work, but rather say they are protecting a way of a life under attack by development projects.

As Lianna Spence from Lax Kw’alaams, who recently voted to reject Pacific NorthWest LNG’s project, states, “They’re offering us benefits if we vote Yes. But we already have a lot of benefits around us - we have coho, spring and sockeye salmon. We have halibut, crab and eulachon.”

We have normalized the idea of labor as a job that extracts time and energy from us for someone else’s profit. But If we understand “work” and “way of life” as synonymous - as generative rather than extractive processes - it becomes evident that Indigenous nations are working to protect laws and relations stemming from their land-based economies.

Such economies are not only local and sustainable, but also offer a profound challenge to the logics of commodification and isolation inherent to capitalist markets.

Author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates, “If I look at how my ancestors even 200 years ago, they didn’t spend a lot of time banking capital, they didn’t rely on material wealth for their well-being and economic stability. They put energy into meaningful and authentic relationships. So their food security and economic security was based on how good and how resilient their relationships were.”

With growing attacks against them since the 1980s, many North American unions retreated from anti-capitalist stances and took on more constrained slogans of “more jobs” or “fair working conditions.”

Fighting for dignified conditions of work is most potent when done alongside a systemic challenge to capitalist and state relations that subjugate the social and class positioning of workers (particularly racialized non-citizen women increasingly stratified into precarious work).

The bold leadership of unions that revive principles of social unionism ensures that unions are not simply advocating mobility within capitalism and state structures, but are primary allies in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism.

As Herman Rosenfeld, a former GM worker, writes, “Job security is key, but what kind of jobs? Is the job security strategy one that works against the interests of the rest of the working-class and First Nations peoples, or in partnership with them?

Moving away from the narrow focus on the short-term sectoral interests of a relatively small group of workers, whose jobs are currently defined by their employers, is a critical way of building unions as fighters for the class as a whole, and for a different, sustainable, and hopefully anti-capitalist future.”

Simply put, workers shouldn’t have to extract toxic sludge. Workers want and need clean air, clean water, and a more equitable future.

Labour within settler-colonialism

While a reconceptualization of work strengthens alliances between workers and Indigenous movements, it is inadequate in contending with settler-colonialism and the context of labouring on Indigenous lands.

Since the inception of Canada, settler-colonialism has sought to forcibly displace Indigenous peoples from their territories, destroy self-determination within Indigenous governance, and assimilate Indigenous cultures and traditions. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has painstakingly recounted how Canada clearly participated in “cultural genocide.”

A pervasive myth is that the Canadian economy subsidizes Indigenous communities. The reality is the opposite. As one tangible act of reconciliation, unions can educate members on how industry’s profits are not only generated by the labor of the working class.

The wealth of Canadian society as a whole could not be built, as Dru Oja Jay argues, “without massive subsidies: of [Indigenous] land, resource wealth, and the incalculable cost of generations of suffering.”

Or imagine if every union in Canada adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and made free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous nations a necessary part of any collective bargaining it undertakes with government and industry.

The possibilities are endless and the power within such genuine acts of solidarity and reconciliation are transformative.

Given the scale of catastrophic climate change, state violence and capitalist crisis, we need to reimagine work as that which makes up the ecology and economy of everyday life through the generations. When it comes to the job of decolonization and protection of life, many aren’t getting a paycheck at all.

© 2014 Ricochet Media 

Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. She has been involved in community-based grassroots migrant justice, feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous solidarity, anti-capitalist, Palestinian liberation, and anti-imperialist movements for over a decade. The column, "Exception to the Rule," is about challenging norms, carving space and centring the dispossessed.

Happy Earth Day! Reframing the Environmental Movement

by Fred Kent, Project for Public Spaces: http://www.pps.org/blog/happy-earth-day-reframing-the-environmental-movement/

On this day in 1970, thousands of people gathered in New York City’s Union Square Park for the world’s first Earth Day celebration.

Those of us organizing events in cities all across the country were excited about the promise of environmentalism - not only as an effort to curb pollution and save the planet’s natural habitats and wildlife, but also as a powerful citizen’s movement. 
 

Front Page of The New York Times, April 23, 1970

In preparation, we convinced Mayor John Lindsay to shut down Fifth Avenue from Midtown to 14^th Street, and to close off 14^th Street and Union Square. Closed to vehicle traffic, these urban thoroughfares transformed into lively pedestrian avenues as well as stages for street theater and peaceful protest.

The mood that day was energetic and triumphant. Here we were - students, workers, activists of all stripes - together and full of hope, fighting for change in some of the city’s most historic public spaces and streets. 

Still, there was a heaviness looming over the event: the war was still raging in Vietnam, and rumors of its expansion into Cambodia were becoming more and more real (in only a few days, this anger would reach a tragic peak with the fatal protests at Kent State). 

Despite the sun and celebration, this was also a sweeping protest, and environmental activism often went hand in hand with the anti-war, civil rights, and student movements of the time.

We’ve made great strides since that first Earth Day - our air is less polluted, we’ve cleaned up toxic dumpsites, and we’ve overseen the passing of all kinds of environmental legislation - but today’s cities face some even greater challenges. 

While addressing environmental degradation, we also need to confront the increased inequity within our cities; we need think creatively and together about alleviating traffic congestion and unplanned sprawl; and we need to find ways to address growing health disparities and uneven access to public spaces and social resources.

We need a broader movement that can speak to all of these issues - one that can speak to and for every community. In some very exciting ways, the environmentalist movement of the 20th century has given way to a more localized focus on sustainable urban Placemaking in the 21st century.

Placemaking is both a philosophy and a process that works to strengthen the connection between people and the places they share. I was wary at first, when people began to refer to Placemaking as the “new environmentalism” (I’m more concerned with the process and results, rather than any kind of label or re-established “ism”). 

But the term does make some sense if we expand our usual definition of “environment” to include those places we call home - our streets, neighborhoods, communities - the places where our lives unfold every day.

The practice of Placemaking is of course not new, though until recently it’s been a relatively quiet movement. For decades, it has taken shape around citizen-led activism and thousands of grassroots efforts. More recently, in places like Detroit, public and private stakeholders have joined together to effect full-on re-animations of neighborhoods, downtowns, and sometimes even entire cities.

As the movement enters the mainstream, it is essential that every sector of society participates in it. And we need leaders at all levels - from community organizers to CEOs. The funding support we are now seeing for Placemaking shows that foundations and even large corporations are joining the cause, and recognizing the vital role public spaces play in our cities and communities.

Today, nearly half a century after that spring day in Union Square, the desire for transformative change is as strong as ever - though it has taken a new shape.

Let’s continue to do everything we can to address climate change and to protect our vast and troubled wildernesses - but let’s remember that this is just one aspect of saving the Earth. 

Let’s also work to make streets safer, encouraging people to walk and bike more and to drive less. Let’s continue lobbying for accessible and enjoyable public spaces, and for public markets that provide communities with healthy affordable food. Let’s stop building wide streets and sprawling parking lots that exacerbate pollution and global warming. Let’s turn impersonal and outdated strip malls into neighborhood centers that include mixed-income housing, public squares, sidewalk cafes, and convenient transit stops.

The Placemaking movement has emerged as a way to bring environmentalism back home. We all care deeply about the places where we live, and there’s nothing more inspiring than being able to see, and indeed be a part of, immediate change.

VIDEO: A Beautiful Weekend - Climate Mobilisation

Bill McKibben

by Blair Palese, 350.org Australia


Friends,

Last weekend, the world stood tall. What I saw on the streets of Australian cities, in pictures from New York and from around the world, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in its scale, unity and beauty. 

This is a short video, but it’s a taste of what I mean:

This past week, over 125 world leaders met at the UN for the big climate summit. The headline was that more leaders than ever had gathered to talk about this particular issue - but here is what I think is just as important:

When those heads of state walked into the UN, they had the sounds of the largest climate mobilisation in world history still ringing in their ears.

A huge number of our allies were still in the streets in New York, laying out a strong vision for a transition away from fossil fuels, bringing the fight to polluters, and identifying solutions that are already in progress. The politicians themselves spoke to our power in the opening statements of the summit.

World leaders gathered in New York City didn’t plan to sign a new agreement this week. The next important UN gatherings will be in Lima in December 2014 and in Paris in December 2015.

Our hope is to use people-power to ratchet up the pressure on these talks, to channel the voices of millions around the world to increase the accountability and ambition of world leaders in these negotiations.

If they are serious at all about doing their democratic and moral duty, they will need to be ambitious - committing to transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy which benefits everyone, and quickly.

The struggle is not around these summits alone. We’ll have to keep pressure on climate polluters and those who invest in them; we’ll have to turn our communities into models for solutions; and we’ll have to convince politicians that their careers are on the line if they don’t act.

Our purpose in marching around the world last weekend was to show that, without a doubt, there is a mandate to act at the level science and justice demand. Our purpose was also to build the global network of people needed to work together to do what we can do - at home, with our investments, in our coummunity and internationally.

After this weekend, we can look world leaders in the eye and insist that they join us on the march towards action in the months and years ahead.

Thank you, so many times over. It’s an honour to fight alongside you.

Blair

P.S. Just this week, we got news that 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben won the "right livelihood award," which is known as the 'alternative Nobel Prize' - click here to watch a video from him thanking you all.