Indigenous Environmental Network tar sands campaign continues

An Interview with Ben Powless (9:25) 

By Mark
EarthGauge

Ben Powless

I recently had the opportunity to interview Ben Powless, a young Mohawk from Six Nations in Ontario. Ben is a  member of the Indigenous Environmental Network and a Founder of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition. Among other causes, he has been very active in the IEN’s tar sands campaign.  

He also sits on the board of the National Council for the Canadian Environmental Network, is on the Youth Advisory Group to the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and is very involved in his local Aboriginal community.

In our interview he discusses the impacts of the tar sands on indigenous communities in northern Alberta, their campaign for a moratorium on future tar sands developments and how the IEN is trying to raise awareness internationally about what is going on in Alberta. He characterizes the tar sands as a violation of the constitutionally-guaranteed rights of First Nations people in Canada.

To download the interview, right click here and select ‘Save as’ or ‘Save target as’.

Sun Come Up

Sun Come Up Film
First Screening in Canada

The Oscar-nominated film Sun Come Up follows the relocation of the Carteret Islanders, a peaceful community living on a chain of tranquil islands in the South Pacific, and now, some of the world's first environmental refugees. Small island communities contribute the least to climate change, yet they are among the hardest hit. The Carteret Islanders have secured new land, but now they need homes.

When rising seas threaten their survival, the islanders face a painful decision: they must leave their beloved land in search of a new place to call home.

The film follows a group of young Carteret Islanders led by Nick Hakata as they search for land in Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea 50 miles across the open ocean.

The move will not be easy as Bougainville is recovering from a 10-year civil war. Many Bougainvilleans remain traumatized by the “Crisis” as the civil war is known locally. Yet, Sun Come Up isn’t a familiar third world narrative. Out of this tragedy comes a story of hope, strength, and profound generosity.


Sun Come Up Trailer from Sun Come Up on Vimeo.

Harper's record on climate change

The Government of Canada's record on climate change (2006-present)

Climate Action Network Canada
News Release
March 25,2011

The current government has taken a reckless approach to one of the greatest challenges of our time. Despite the fact that the impacts of climate change have become increasingly obvious, the government has failed to take this crisis seriously. What follows lays out the government's record on climate change over the past five years.
 
Ongoing handouts to big oil
The current government provides over $1.3 billion in handouts to the oil industry every year, despite calls to end these subsidies from within the Department of Finance, former Environment Minister Jim Prentice, hundreds of organizations across Canada and major international organizations like the IMF and the OECD. The government’s 2011 federal budget proposed the elimination of less than 10% of these special tax breaks to the oil industry.
More information.

In the Wake of the Flood

Sphinx Productions

On the eve of her 70th birthday, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood set out on an international tour criss-crossing the British Isles and North America to celebrate the publication of her new dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood. Rather than mount a traditional tour to promote a book’s publication, Atwood conceived and executed something far more ambitious and revelatory—a theatrical version of her novel. Along the way she reinvented what a book tour could (and maybe should) be. But Atwood wasn't selling books as much as advocating an idea: how humanity must respond to the consequences of an environmentally compromised planet before her work of speculative fiction transforms into prophesy.

Atwood's odyssey is now captured in Ron Mann's new film, In The Wake of the Flood. Rendered as a fly-on-the-wall cinéma vérité, In The Wake of the Flood mixes new footage, archival materials and evocative animation in featuring Atwood on the road and at home as an aging but buoyant literary rock star spreading a message of warning and hope as she staged and participated in the novel production.

Science, Justice, Science Fiction: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Gerry Canavan
March 2011

Kim Stanley Robinson

The following interview with Kim Stanley Robinson appears in Polygraph 22: Ecology and Ideology, available now from Amazon.com. The interview is also available as a PDF, as is the introduction written by the issue editors. Brief summaries of the other articles can be found here. Other contributors to the issue include Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt, John Bellamy Foster, Timothy Morton, Joachim Radkau, Imre Szeman, Kathy Rudy, and Ariel Salleh. The full table of contents can be found here; video from Kim Stanley Robinson’s January visit to Duke University can be found here and here.

Science, Justice, Science Fiction: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson

- Gerry Canavan, Lisa Klarr, and Ryan Vu

Kim Stanley Robinson’s stature in the field of science fiction goes well beyond the usual sorts of accolades and distinctions. In a genre so often dominated by repetitive visions of dystopian surveillance states and inevitable robot apocalypses, Kim Stanley Robinson is among the proud few who still assert that most Utopian and most science fictional of dreams: that another world is possible.

The itsy-bitsy problem that doomed BP's well

By Steve Levine
Foriegn Policy
March 24, 2011

In a war zone, you have your vanguard. Then you have your tanks, your main body of troops, and your artillery. If all that fails, and you are being overrun, there is your rear guard. If they fail, and you cannot retreat, all is lost.

For the last 11 months, that has essentially been BP's explanation of what went wrong at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, where a mighty explosion killed 11 men and spilled five millions of barrels of oil into the water over a three-month period before the company managed to seal it in with concrete. But all along there has been the question -- what about that rear guard, in this case a much-trumpeted piece of technology known as the blowout preventer?

Eco-socialism or capitalist catastrophe

By Emmett Durso, SA Auckland
Socialist Aotearoa
March 27, 2011

“So many problems, so little time” has become the catch-phrase of environmental scientists in many academic circles. What’s more frustrating is the fact that the intellectual and monetary resources are available to solve the world’s major sustainability issues, but governments and institutions are prioritizing propping up failing banks and funding military campaigns.

Environmentalist David Bellamy sums it up nicely when saying; “Environmental scientists know how to solve all the major environmental problems of the world, but too many people are still making too much money from doing things the wrong way”.

Ecology and Ideology: An Introduction

Introduction to Polygraph 22
Ecology and Ideology
2010

What is really amazing and frustrating is mankind’s habit of refusing to see the obvious and inevitable, until it is there, and then muttering about unforeseen catastrophes.
—Isaac Asimov

How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.
—H.G. Wells

Ecology as Critique    

From Hurricane Katrina to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to the metastasizing specter of climate change, an initial foray into the rhetoric of “natural” disasters over the past decade finds surprise and shock as a primary theme. Whatever happens, “no one could have predicted” the results; ostensibly secular pundits have learned to comfortably and without contradiction invoke “acts of God” as the first line of defense against anyone ever being held responsible for anything.

Ignorance has become the ground for our relationship with Nature, precisely mirroring those official descriptions of terrorist violence in which “hatred” and “anti-modernity” provide instant and totalizing explanations for the actions of otherwise unrelated agents. Once Nature takes over, throwing off the economic function assigned to it, “we”—humanity—are all forced together onto the same side. Who, after all, could possibly be to blame for hurricanes, floods, volcanoes, and earthquakes? Who could possibly have the power to predict when and where disasters will erupt? Even in the case of BP’s irreparable destruction of the Gulf Coast—where the “culprits” seem clear and the potential consequences of deep-sea drilling eminently foreseeable—mainstream commentary finds itself gored on the horns of a false dilemma: because the spill was not purposeful, because no one wanted this to happen, it must therefore be a terrible “accident.”

Speaking simultaneously about the Deepwater Horizon spill and the recent Massey coal mine collapse in West Virginia, and by implication a host of other disasters past and future, an indignant Rand Paul, the current Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, lamented “It’s always got to be someone’s fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen.” Here we see the paucity of options for critique in the neoliberal age: the profit-seeking hand of the market can never be faulted, not even in the face of incalculable catastrophe.

Read more HERE (PDF).

Roads to renewal

By Judy Deutsch
Canadian Dimension
March 14th 2011

Approaches to the climate emergency can roughly be broken down into four categories.

Plan A, “business as usual,” is more-or-less a euphemism for accelerated greenhouse gas emissions, for promoting market mechanisms in order to profit from climate change, and for practices that treat the majority of humans, to say nothing of non-humans, as expendable. For the global plutocracy, climate change is one more rationale for expanding the military in the name of “security.” Gated military and civilian communities and settlements are enclosures of survival for the elite, with exclusive entitlements to energy and water, transportation, police and fire services, etc.

Plan B is based on extensive information about human/environmental interactions and is the antithesis of Plan A. It aims to save civilization and to provide basic security through a sustainable economy. Plan B emphasizes a shift to renewable energy through improved technology, a shift to a no-growth global economy with more equitable distribution of wealth and energy.

The criminal tale of Monsanto

By Phil Shannon
Green Left
Sunday, March 27, 2011

The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Politics & Power

Marie-Monique Robin

Spinifex Press, 2010

373 pages, $44.95 (pb)

Buy book HERE

“What counts for us is making money,” said a Monsanto vice-president to a new employee at an induction session in 1998, reminding the idealistic novice that there is a simple, and crude, capitalist philosophy at the heart of the US chemical and biotechnology giant.

All Monsanto's talk about the ecological and humanitarian miracles of its chemicals and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is so much hot air, says Marie-Monique Robin in The World According To Monsanto.

Radiation fears grow for low-paid heroes battling disaster

Safeguards at nuclear plant have failed emergency crews, and trust in the Japanese authorities is fading

Suzanne Goldenberg
The Observer
27 March 2011

Fukushima plant worker Tomotake Watanabe says he no longer trusts the nuclear authorities. Fukushima plant worker Tomotake Watanabe, who was inside reactor No 1 when the earthquake hit, says he no longer trusts the nuclear authorities. Photograph: Eric Rechsteiner/Panos Pictures

THE last time Tomotake Watanabe turned up for his shift at the No 1 reactor of the Fukushima nuclear plant, he was thrown to the ground by Japan's powerful earthquake and showered with broken glass and ceiling plaster.

Dr. Helen Caldicott on the nuclear disaster in Japan

By Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock 
March 25th, 2011.

Alex Smith: As Japan suffers multiple reactor accidents, with radiation of the land and sea, sadly, one woman is vindicated again. Dr. Helen Caldicott is a physician, author, and speaker known throughout the world for her clear warnings about the dangers of nuclear weapons, and nuclear power.

Helen Caldicott woke us up with the film and book "If You Love This Planet" - now the title of her own weekly radio show.

I'm Alex Smith, host of Radio Ecoshock. Dr. Caldicott I'm honored to welcome you to this program.

HC: Thank you Alex...

Hear the audio HERE.
Transcript HERE.