The theme of the 2002 Public Interest Environmental Law Conference was “Global CPR: Conservation, Preservation, Restoration” — a theme summed up in Sunday’s keynote address by Jeri Sundvall.
“We need to think about how we, as human beings, can contribute to healing this Earth, and not the degradation of this Earth,” Sundvall, director of organizing for the Portland-based Environmental Justice Action Group, told the audience in the EMU Ballroom.
The four-day conference, now in its 20th year, brought together activists, attorneys, students and scientists from around the world for a series of workshops, discussions and keynote speeches.
Sundvall also focused on the need to include poor and minority community members in the environmental movement.
“No one has made an investment in the human component in those communities,” she said.
Sundvall was followed by Mexican ecologist Rudolfo Montiel Flores, a subsistence farmer who was imprisoned and tortured by Mexican authorities following his efforts to stop the Boise Cascade Corp. from logging in Guerrero, Mexico. After being held for two years on what many have claimed were false charges of growing marijuana, Flores was released by order of Mexican President Vicente Fox in November 2001.
Through sometimes halting translation, Flores told the audience about his treatment by Mexican police and urged them to continue fighting “environmental injustice” wherever they found it.
“Imagine we’re a bunch of people all in the same house,” he concluded. “We should take care of the land that God gave us. We should participate in making God’s kingdom.”
Between 3,000 and 5,000 people took part in the conference, according to conference co-director Jonathan Manton. Manton, a member of the student law society called Land Air and Water, which sponsored the event, said the conference went even better than expected.
“Things never go exactly as planned,” he said. “But it was everything we hoped and much, much more.”
The capacity crowd in the EMU Ballroom for 2000 Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader on Friday may have accounted for some of Manton’s optimism. Nader’s address was scheduled for noon, but a line of people waiting to get in had packed the EMU Foyer by 11 a.m.
Nader called for more “grassroots” activism and made a point of telling activists to “start with family pocket books” in their efforts to gain support for environmental causes among mainstream Americans.
Hearkening back to his 2000 presidential campaign, Nader criticized the lack of environmentalist leadership in “post-Kyoto Washington” and warned that voting for politicians based on their opponent’s platform did more harm than good.
“Once you get to the ‘least worst’ mode, both candidates will get worse every four years,” he said.