Wow. Deep breath. Last week was a big one for the environmental movement and democracy here in Eugene.
First, Tuesday was the Wayne Morse public address by this year’s chair, Dale Jamieson, at the Knight Law Center. The professor of environmental studies and philosophy at NYU was astute in addressing a packed lecture hall about the “Moral and Political Challenges of Climate Change.”
Jamieson highlighted the true history of the science of climate change and noted how if you’d only been watching mainstream television news you might still be wondering if the science is legit. But in fact, knowledge of the correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature was already being studied just after the turn of the 20th century.
Additionally, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has conveyed more or less the same message, stating its certainty that CO2 emissions from human activities were causing the greenhouse effect, which would result in the warming of Earth’s surface, since its very first report in 1990.
So why haven’t we been working on this all along? I wondered, bewildered, as he spoke.
After delivering the harsh news that a certain amount of irreversible damage has already been done, Jamieson left the audience with a call to think about the ways in which our political system has failed us and has failed to address this issue of climate change, and to acknowledge the important role activism will continue to play in achieving climate justice.
Then he plugged my next topic, the PowerShift West conference, and said it had the potential to be one of the most important events in the country this past weekend. And, at least in the eyes of this menial columnist, he was right.
The importance Jamieson attributed the conference didn’t stem from the fact that it attracted more than 500 western youth, nor its menagerie of workshops and panels offered to students eager to become more involved with grassroots campaigns in their own locales (though they were quite helpful and informative).
Rather, the importance of PowerShift was its representation of a set of shared values — something the country on the whole is currently suffering from a lack of cohesion on.
Riki Ott, PowerShift speaker, author and activist, articulated how the environmental movement has become intertwined with the movement for true democracy and against corporate protectionism.
As she spoke about effective grassroots campaigns being guided by a set of prioritized values (e.g. clean air and water, safe neighborhoods, livable wages, affordable healthy food), I was interested to hear her ask ourselves to look honestly at the democracy we live in, just as Jamieson had. “If our values count,” she asked, “then why don’t ‘we the people’ have them?”
Ott’s analysis on how social, economic and environmental justice issues have become inextricably linked with one another illuminated the answer to that question. Through the “blurring of democracy and capitalism,” as she put it, or, the ever-expanding rights of corporations as individuals under the law, the real American citizens have had their values steadily less and less represented by their government.
This is what Ott calls the “crisis of democracy” and this is what I believe is the crux of the current discussion about what to do about climate change and energy use.
Essentially, energy equally fuels our social, economic and environmental actions, making it of paramount importance to society on the whole. Because the very burning of that energy is causing harm, threatening our future and forcing us to re-evaluate its use, it is a complicated issue that transcends almost every categorizing barrier we’ve assigned our actions, be they social, economic, environmental or anything else.
What can be known though, is what will happen if lobbyists who speak for private interests that count as “individuals” under the law, but which have much more money and thus power than the average citizen, continue to dominate that discussion.
Corporations, who have only one shared value, will get everything they want, and the American people and whatever values they still hold dear will be left without a voice, without representation and thus, without a democracy.
That PowerShift sought to shed light on this self-evident truth was its triumph and what made it so important. The young activists from states all across the West came together to act on their shared value of a representative democracy that is socially, economically and environmentally just, and demand that we receive it, chanting “This is what democracy looks like!”
The people are shouting that particular phrase, but are the policy-makers listening?
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Shifting to grassroots power
Daily Emerald
November 8, 2009
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