Day 5 — COP17, Durban: Friday, December 2, 2011
Today Climate Justice Hearings were conducted at the People’s Space. We heard from Florence, a young South African activist, about the One Million Jobs Now! campaign – http://www.climate-change-jobs.org – which has been adopted by South African civil society.
A South African fisherman from Coastal Links said: “Our ocean is not a factory where you can come in and take what you want. Our ocean is our lives… We cannot eat promises. ‘No Fish. No Eat. No Sea. No Life.’ In the restaurants here, observed a German woman, you find salmon and tuna shipped in from Norway by plane. Enough said.
Kamila, from India said: “No more development [by dams]. We will not give an inch of our land to any multinational company.”
I also had interviews with Paul Okong’o, Kenyan farmer and activist, mentioned above, from the Caravan of Hope (young South Africans also organized a “Train of Hope” tour around their country), and with Pablo Solon.
In the evening, Pable Solon delivered the Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture on “The Rights of Nature and Climate Politics.” He was heavily involved both in the 2010 Cochabamba people’s conference that drafted the “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.” He also worked toward the UN’s declaration this year on the Universal Human Right to Water.
Some highlights of his remarks, which I captured in full on tape:
“Snow has memory…” – that a glacier today contains within it its history of having been much larger one hundred years ago, and that when we speak of the rights of Mother Earth, we mean all of the earth’s inhabitants – including people, animals, plants, oceans, and mountains.
“Why is it that human laws have to be respected, while the laws of nature can be ignored, or violated?” JF: Of course, humans violate these laws at their own peril as well, and if we acted only in our own selfish interests, we would act decisively now to deal with climate change, which is changing nature so much already, and whereby nature will change human societies more drastically than we can imagine, and in the lifetimes of people now living on the planet.
He judged that this COP would be worse than COP 16 at Cancun, that it’s “Cancun times four.”
Finally, “To build a different society is going to take some generations,” with the implication that yes, this can be done in a positive direction, creating a future that is not only not worse than today’s world, but has the potential to be far better. And with this knowledge, this hope, goes incredible responsibility.
John