social ecology

Chris Williams and Robert Pollin interviewed by Jessica Desvarieux - The Real News Network, July 30, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Biography

Chris Williams is a long-time environmental activist and author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis. He is chair of the science department at Packer Collegiate Institute and adjunct professor at Pace University, in the Department of Chemistry and Physical Science. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including TruthOut, Z Magazine, Green Left Weekly, Alternet, CommonDreams, ClimateAndCapitalism, ClimateStoryTellers, The Indypendent, Dissident Voice, International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, and ZNet. He reported from Fukushima in 2011 and was a Lannan writer-in-residence in Marfa, Texas over the summer of 2012, where he began work on his second book. He was awarded the Lannan 2013-4 Cultural Freedom Fellowship to continue this work. He has just returned from four months in Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia, examining the impact of economic development and climate change in relation to energy, food and water issues.

Robert Pollin is professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the US and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the US. His latest book is Back to Full Employment. Other books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.

By Ben Ptashnik and Victoria Collier - The Progressive, July 8, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Oh, make you wanna holler
The way they do my life
This ain’t livin’, this ain’t livin’
No, no baby, this ain’t livin’
No, no, no, no

–Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues”

On July 18 thousands of activists and dozens of organizations will converge on downtown Detroit to protest the privatization of the city’s assets and the disconnection of water to tens of thousands of low-income residents. The UN has called the shutoff a human rights violation.  Demonstrators from around the country will rally in Hart Plaza at 1 pm, linking arms with the citizens of Detroit to protest the hostile corporate takeover by Wall Street banks and their ALEC-led political allies in the Michigan Statehouse, including Governor Rick Snyder.

July 18 marks the one-year anniversary of the announcement by Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr that Detroit must file for bankruptcy—a decision that County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina immediately ruled violates the Michigan Constitution and state law and must be withdrawn. “I have some very serious concerns because there was this rush to bankruptcy court that didn’t have to occur and shouldn’t have occurred,” Aquilina stated.  Orr and Snyder managed to circumvent her ruling, and the bankruptcy proceeded. The next few months will determine how successful they will be.

On July 4 the activist community of Detroit put out this call to action:

“We call on activists everywhere to come to Detroit on Friday, July 18th, for a rally and march to fight the dictatorship of emergency manager Kevyn Orr, appointed by millionaire Republican Governor Rick Snyder, and backed by Wall Street bankers and the 1 percent.  Under a state-imposed bankruptcy, the City of Detroit workers face severe cuts to their pensions and tens of thousand people face water shut-offs.

“The banks, which have destroyed Detroit’s neighborhoods through racist predatory sub-prime mortgages and saddled the city of Detroit with fraudulent financing, continue to loot the people of Detroit.

Detroiters have lost their democratic rights – ‘elected’ officials serve at the pleasure of the unelected Emergency Manager – and may be fired at any time.”

– Detroit Moratorium Now and Freedom Fridays Coalition

By Carl Gibson - Occupy.Com, July 11, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

“Your human dignity shouldn’t be truncated because you’re priced out of the commodification of an essential resource.“ - Charity Hicks

By Juston Wedes - The Ecologist, July 4, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The waves of the Detroit River lap up onto the wall of the riverwalk downtown, and young children play in the fountains that shoot up through the concrete in the park below the towering Renaissance Center.

It is Saturday in Motown, and the sun is shining warm rays down on working-class folk enjoying a day of rest.

Just a few miles away, on the east side across the highway, Jean stands on her porch and worries about the pregnant mom whose water was shut off Thursday morning by Homrich contractors working for the City of Detroit under emergency financial management.

Water is a human right. Oh yeah?

They came that morning in a red pickup truck with a homemade decal on the side. In an arc around a circle it read "DETROIT WATER COLLECTION PROJECT" - quite official-looking - and inside the circle it read "WATER ****** HOMRICH".

The asterisks representing a scribbled out word "SHUTOFF" that was removed after community protests about shaming neighborhood residents.

Jean came yesterday to the weekly, growing Freedom Fridays rallies at the Detroit Water and Sewerage Dept (DWSD) to voice her outrage at seeing a pregnant mother and young children denied the basic human right to water in a city surrounded by the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth, containing 21% of the world's surface fresh water.

Her voice faltered as she worked to hold back tears on the megaphone. Her tone was one part desperation and one part pure rage, a rage that is simmering with the summer heat and the threat of over 100,000 family water shutoffs in the hot months ahead.

Joachim Spangenberg interviewed by Felicitas Sommer - EJOLT, July 1, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

For “Scharf-links”, a German online newspaper, Dr. Joachim Spangenberg , co-chair of EJOLT’s steering committee, spoke about the activities of EJOLT and the link between Environmental Justice and Degrowth, looking forward to the Degrowth meeting in Leipzig in the first week in September 2014 where EJOLT will be present. In the interview he explains that justice is a core element of any Degrowth process. Without justice, Degrowth won’t work.

[?] Dr. Spangenberg, for many people at EJOLT the Degrowth movement of the global North largely corresponds to the environmental justice movement of the global South…

[!] On our EJOLT map of environmental conflicts (www.ejatlas.org) it is not only possible to identify which regions are affected and which industries are causing conflicts, but also where perpetrators are coming from. These companies are primarily mining companies or other manufacturing industries, private ones as well as state owned ones. Apart from very few exceptions these companies are based in industrial countries, especially in Europe and the U.S. The victims of conflicts, in contrast, are mostly from countries of the global South. In these countries each month 2-3 leaders of environmental movements are being murdered. For them protection of the environment in is not a matter of goodwill but it is a matter of life and death.

[?] Who allows or fosters such developments, governments or corporations?

[!] State-owned energy companies in OECD-countries contribute 200 billion per year to state revenues. Many states are financially dependent on these companies and also on the taxes from private resource companies.

Many of the private companies are stock exchange-listed companies. The goal of high share prices collides with ambitious environmental targets. For example, to reach the 2 degree Celsius target two-thirds of remaining fossil fuels would have to stay in the ground. If this target were actually enforced, stock prices of the world’s largest corporations would collapse–their market value is based on the amount of resources they own, as these are considered the basis of future profits. Anything that reduces expected profits will lower the companies’ market value and this applies to laws protecting the environment, labour rights or indigenous people’s rights as well.

Australia‘s largest mining company, for example, would lose 50% of its market value if it had to re-classify 2/3 of its fossil fuel reserves as „unburnable fuels“. Mining and oil companies, but also the waste industry, do everything in their power to avert more stringent laws, more ambitious political targets and more effective sanctioning. Yet, with the Renewable Energies Law (EEG) in Germany it became apparent that big companies do not necessarily have the upper hand – RWE has lost 80% of its market value. However, the tough fight over renewable energies continues, also with the aid of the German Federal Government, to safeguard as much of the market value as possible.

By Sasha Reid Ross - Global Justice Ecology Project, July 3, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Climate change is a war waged against the people of the Global South by industrial powers. A historical epoch is descending, and the islands of the Pacific are drowning. Waters will rise three feet over the next 90 years in Micronesia, a devastating potential for those 607 islands. The small island of Kiribati is already evacuating; the UK purchased a swath of land in Fiji as a climate refugee camp for the fleeing, but Fiji, itself, is looking into the eye of climate change enhanced storms and droughts.

The pressure on Southeast Asian populations is also mounting. Among the strongest typhoons ever recorded, Typoon Haiyan left more than 6,000 dead in the Philippines alone. Aid plans are still the works, some eight months after the most deadly storm in that nation’s history. Two years after the Tōhoku earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit Fukushima Daiichi, a once-in-a-decade typhoon slammed into the country, killing 17 and causing more nuclear contamination. The condition of climate refugees is only going to put greater pressure on diplomatic relations in the region, as even the US Department of Defense has stated that its infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change in the region.

Far from promoting a way to escape climate change, the North Atlantic aims to extract fossil fuels from the contested energy-rich waters of the South China Sea by whatever means available. As the US turns its “pivot to Asia,” however, it is mirrored by Russia. Where the US uses the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to chip away at China’s hegemony in the region, Russia works closely with China. The two countries recently signed a gas infrastructure deal that develops a historic partnership. Rosneft just deployed the world’s largest offshore oil drilling platform off Sakhalin Island while mending ties to Japan after the Crimea polarizations, and China has pushed a second offshore oilrig into waters contested by Vietnam. A storm is brewing larger than a typhoon.

By Beverly Bell and Jessica Hsu - Toward Freedom, June 3, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

At the first World Social Forum at the end of the 1990’s, participants started looking for alternatives. There are a lot of authors who started to theorize about different forms of economies. They started to rescue the idea of solidarity economy, based on the experience of cooperatives, indigenous practices, practices from different parts of the world and different economies.

This came to be called the solidarity economy, basically a concept rescued by Chilean sociologist Luis Razeto Migliaro. It refers to different economic practices in which monies and profits are at the service of the common good. They are practices based in the articulation of collaborative and cooperative process among people, and where the center of the actions is the well-being of people.

Solidarity economy goes far beyond a simple practice. It’s a science that is taking shape and that is based, to a certain point, on the contributions of Marxism and contributions about the labor economy developed by Marxists. For me, I add five elements. First is self-management: a way to democratize the management of the economy. Second is gender: the participation of women through employment and recognition of domestic work as a contribution to the economy. Third is fair trade at an international level, a movement which shows the market is false. Fourth is food sovereignty, based on the rights of people to produce and to consume what they produce. Fifth is ecological economywhich can be changed to savethe biospherewhich is the entire systemof life, the social, political and natural processes that comprise life on our planet. Ecological economy is also an indigenous concept,an expression of how the relationship among humans and between nature and life can be harmonized,because solidarity economies look at the preservation of life. I'm not just talking about human life, but of all life, of Earth, the Cosmos. It is based on a state of interdependent coexistence with people. It recognizes that our happiness is based on that spirit; not in consumption, not in competing and showing that I am better or bigger than you, but simply: I give you, you give me, we share, and from that blooms a new form of culture. I hope that a new cycle will begin where human spirit and love shall be the dominant forces on the planet.