Stephen Harper government turns environmentalists into public enemies

By Linda McQuaig
TheStar.com
June 4, 2012

Nicole Eaton

Nicole Eaton may be Canada’s Mitt Romney.

The Republican presidential candidate comes across as a wealthy patrician with little sense of how tough the world can be for people who don’t have tens of millions of dollars at their disposal.

That tendency also seems to afflict Eaton, a wealthy Conservative fundraiser appointed to the Senate by Stephen Harper. She’s a leading figure in the Harper government’s campaign to aggressively go after environmental activist groups by threatening their charitable status.

“I don’t understand their fear of a chill,” Eaton told the Globe and Mail last week. Eaton, who was born wealthy and married into the Canadian department store fortune, has probably never experienced the kind of fear that the Harper government seems bent on instilling in environmental activists who dare to challenge its agenda.

Mission Tree: Six Years Boosting Eco-Socialism in Venezuela

Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
June 4, 2012

Today, Mission Tree, Venezuela’s national reforestation program, celebrates its sixth anniversary promoting environmentalism and giving people the possibility to build a model of development that helps recover and preserve wooded areas in Venezuela.

On June 4, 2006, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez launched this mission to rescue and preserve the country’s wooded areas through reforestation efforts to protect agro-forest and commercial-industrial areas.

Through the program, communities throughout the country present proposals for protecting the environment and preserving drinking water and biodiversity. These efforts are possible thanks to the conservationist committees that work in each state with support of the government.

Budget Blackout

Harmony and Ecological Civilization: Beyond the Capitalist Alienation of Nature

By Fred Magdoff

Monthly Review
June 2012

This article was prepared for presentation to the conference on “Harmony and Ecological Civilization” organized for a group of visiting Chinese academics interested in ecological Marxism by the Institute for Postmodern Development of China (IPDC), Claremont, California, on April 27 and 28, 2012. Sponsors of the conference from China included: the Central Bureau of Compilation and Translation of the CCP and the China Society for the Dialectics of Nature.

Let me begin by making clear that I am not a philosopher nor am I well versed in Chinese cultural history. My background is in agriculture, specifically soil fertility and health, from which I have branched out into areas of ecology and ecological approaches to agriculture and society.

With that background in mind, when I consider the concept of harmony in the context of humans, their societies, and the environment I have a particular understanding of the concept. It refers to all people living together peacefully without exploitation of one person by another, each able to reach his or her full human potential, in a society in which everyone has their basic material and nonmaterial needs satisfied, feels secure, safe, happy, and fulfilled as human beings. In addition, the concept also implies harmony between people, the environment, and the other species we share the planet with. People need fully to understand, and act in such ways that indicate, that they are embedded in nature and dependent upon it—not just to obtain natural resources needed for human life, but also that their lives are made richer and protected by biodiversity and the smooth and efficient functioning of the many cycles of nature such as the water and nutrient cycles.

Venezuelan Declaration Toward RIO + 20: Against the Green Economy

Climate Connections
June 1, 2012

We, wrestlers and fighters for the defense of life, gathered in the third Venezuelan Congress of Biological Diversity, we discussed about the multiple dimensions related to the preservation of life by contributing to the deepening of the struggle of the social movements and the new institutions, thus promoting organizational link scenarios in the collective construction of environmental policies of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

The rich debate that was generated during the third CVDB, among more than 3500 people, is a valuable input to strengthen the position of our country in the face of Rio +20, by contributing to the construction of another economy, based on respect for the nature and men and women, to eradicate all forms of poverty, domination and colonialism, which starts from this dialogue of knowledge and the collective construction of speeches, agendas for struggle and deconstruction of a system and logical thinkingexhausted, responsible for current global environmental crisis.

From our different ways of thinking and spirituality, nature is our natural heritage, the basis of diversity of knowledge, cultures, lifestyles and sovereignty of peoples. Nature is for us a source of food, water, building materials, inspiration and therefore can not conceive of a world based on its commercialization.

Inclusive Green Growth or Extractive Greenwashed Decay?

By Patrick Bond
Pambazuka News
2012-05-31, Issue 587

The debate over the Green Economy rages on next month in Rio de Janeiro, at the International Society for Ecological Economics meetings, the Cupula dos Povos alternative people’s summit, and the UN’s Rio+20 Earth Summit. Proponents and critics of ‘green growth’ capitalism will butt heads using narratives about valuations of nature and the efficacy of markets.

Boiling down a complex argument from her book Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice, University of Sydney-based political ecologist Ariel Salleh observes how a triple externalization of costs ‘takes the form of an extraction of surpluses, both economic and thermodynamic: 1) a social debt to inadequately paid workers; 2) an embodied debt to women family caregivers; and 3) an ecological debt drawn on nature at large.’

At minimum, addressing these problems requires full-fledged re-accounting to toss out the fatally-flawed GDP indicator, and to internalize environment and society in the ways we assess costs and benefits. This exercise would logically both precede and catalyze a full-fledged transformation of financing, extraction, production, transport and distribution, consumption and disposal systems.

RIO+20: Canada, Last Holdout, Drops Opposition to Water as Human Right

By Thaliff Deen
IPS
June 1, 2012

Some 3.4 million people die each year from water, sanitation and hygiene-related causes. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

Canada, in a dramatic political turnaround, has signaled its willingness to recognise water and sanitation as a basic human right.

As negotiations continue over the Rio+20 plan of action on sustainable development to be adopted in Brazil next month, Canada became one of the last Western nations to drop its opposition to a reference to water as a human right in the document titled “The Future We Want.”

Maude Barlow, national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, one of Canada’s largest social justice advocacy organisations, said it took “unprecedented pressure” to get the government in Ottawa to change its position.

Canada's Committment to Developing the Tar Sands

By John W. Warnock
May 29, 2012

Over the past few weeks politicians and the mass media have been ranting about the development of the Alberta tar sands. Thomas Mulcair, the new leader of the federal New Democratic Party (NDP), and a number of left leaning economists have argued that the massive investment in the development of the oil industry in Canada has been giving Canada a dose of the Dutch Disease. The influx of foreign investment has boosted the value of the Canadian dollar and has resulted in the steady decline of the manufacturing industry all across Canada. This is what happened to The Netherlands in the 1960s when its government stressed the rapid development of their offshore petroleum industry. In 2008 the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had warned Canada about this development.

There should have been a serious debate on the issue, but the politicians and the mainstream media, including the CBC, shot that down by posing the issue as a conflict between central and western Canada.

 But far more important is the question of whether or not the tar sands should be developed at all. It seems that no one in any position of authority in Canada wishes this issue to be opened up to a general, democratic debate.

Petroleum and Propaganda

The Anatomy of the Global Warming Denial Industry

By John W. Farley
Monthly Review
May 2012

James Lawrence Powell, The Inquisition of Climate Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 232 pages, $27.95, hardcover.

James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because of a remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a near-unanimous consensus that global warming is occurring now, is largely human-made, and will cause very severe environmental problems if humanity continues business as usual. However, among the lay public the picture is much more mixed: only about half of the U.S. public agrees with the climate scientists. Why the enormous discrepancy?

Powell argues that “in the denial of global warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.” Although Powell himself is not a climate science researcher, he has an appropriate background to understand the field: he holds a doctorate in geochemistry from MIT and became a geology professor, teaching at Oberlin College for over twenty years. He has been a college president at three institutions, and served for a dozen years on the National Science Board. Powell’s book is a sharp attack on the global-warming denial “industry,” a network comprised of corporate funding, think tanks, popularizers, and propagandists, who all work with a compliant mass media.

Read more HERE.

Draining of world's aquifers feeds rising sea levels

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world, says report

• Damian Carrington
• guardian.co.uk
• Sunday 20 May 2012 

For three decades, Saudi Arabia has been drilling for water from underground aquifers. Engineers and farmers have tapped hidden reserves of water to grow grains, fruit and vegetables in the desert of Wadi As-Sirhan Basin. Photograph: Landsat/Nasa

Humanity's unquenchable thirst for fresh water is driving up sea levels even faster than melting glaciers, according to new research. The massive impact of the globalpopulation's growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that manmade reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

Marx’s Ecology and the Understanding of Land Cover Change

By Ricardo Dobrovolski

Monthly Review

May 2012

The spread of humans worldwide, especially in the last two hundred years, has been associated with the growing human domination of the earth. This domination has not only entailed an increasing world population, but also rising and unequal wealth—all of which has been accelerated by the regime of capital. 

Such domination of the environment is expressed by among other things: 

(1) the change in the flux of elements and substances on Earth, i.e., the global biogeochemical cycles (of which the most famous manifestation is the rising level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for climate change);  (2) the growing threat of species extinction; and  (3) the huge land cover change (LCC)—the substitution of natural habitats such as forests, swamps, and grasslands by cropland, pasture, roads, and urban areas.

Modern natural sciences have made enormous inroads in understanding both ecological problems and the social drivers of LCC. However, they have been unable to generate a systematic understanding of how the regime of capital has governed LCC. Karl Marx developed more than 150 years ago, in the context of a social-science critique, an unparalleled theoretical approach to environmental crisis based on two concepts: differential land rent and the metabolic rift.

Read more HERE.

Harper and the Environment are Like Oil and Water

By Maude Barlow
Council of Canadians
Friday, May 18th, 2012

The Harper government is waging war on Canada’s freshwater.

We didn’t start with a strong record. Our national water laws are out-dated, we don’t properly enforce the ones we have and we chronically underfund source water and watershed protection. And consecutive governments refuse to consider the effect on freshwater when creating economic, industrial, energy or trade policies.

Yet the Harper government appears intent on systematically dismantling the few protections that have been put in place at the federal level to protect our freshwater heritage.

In its 2011 budget, the Harper government announced a reduction of over $222 million from the budget of Environment Canada and the elimination of over 1,200 jobs in the department. Programs to protect water, such as the Action Plan on Clean Water, which funds water remediation in Lakes Winnipeg and Simcoe among others, were particularly hard hit. Others targeted for deep cuts include the Chemicals Management Plan and the Contaminated Sites Action Plan, both of which are crucial to source water protection.