{"id":102476,"date":"2017-11-27T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-11-27T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=102476"},"modified":"2017-11-23T19:38:39","modified_gmt":"2017-11-23T19:38:39","slug":"respect-existence-or-expect-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/11\/respect-existence-or-expect-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Respect Existence or Expect Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

22 Nov 2017 – <\/em>Last week in Bonn, Germany, thousands gathered at the heavily secured United Nations climate conference, dubbed \u201cCOP 23,\u201d a Potemkin village of bureaucrats, politicians, environmentalists, journalists and local support staff. Sixty kilometers away, in the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest, scores of activists, living in treehouses, defended the old growth woodland in an ongoing struggle to save the rare ecosystem from destruction and stop the expansion of Europe\u2019s largest open-pit mine, a sprawling hole in the earth where energy company RWE extracts lignite, or brown coal, the dirtiest coal on earth. Hanging over both was the political pall cast by President Donald Trump, who announced June 1 that he was pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement, the global climate change accord negotiated by all the countries of the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhilst the United States might be saying that it\u2019s pulling out, it still continues to play a destructive role,\u201d Asad Rehman, executive director of London-based War on Want, told us on the Democracy Now! news hour, broadcasting from inside COP 23 (\u201cCOP\u201d stands for \u201cConference of Parties\u201d to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). \u201cDonald Trump has come here, backed by his fossil fuel pals. He\u2019s come here to wreck the climate negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big promises were made in Paris in 2015: Each signatory to the Paris Agreement made a voluntary pledge to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. If pledges are met, the theory goes, then the global temperature rise above pre-industrial levels will be capped at 1.5, or, at worst, 2 degrees Celsius (2.7-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), avoiding the worst consequences of climate disruption. Rich countries, largely responsible for the world\u2019s polluting carbon emissions to date, pledged hundreds of billions of dollars to poorer nations, to allow them to recover from climate damage already done, and to pursue a renewably powered development path.<\/p>\n

In response to Trump, U.S. civil society organized the \u201cWe Are Still In\u201d coalition, with over 2,500 elected officials, state and local governments, CEOs, businesses, universities, faith leaders and grassroots organizations committing to meeting the Paris Agreement\u2019s goals, since the Trump administration won\u2019t. It is a big coalition, and not without dissension. As California\u2019s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown was speaking in Bonn, protesters began chanting, \u201cCalifornia\u2019s fracking spreads pollution,\u201d and \u201cKeep it in the ground!\u201d Brown responded, addressing an indigenous activist: \u201cI agree with you. In the ground. Let\u2019s put you in the ground so we can get on with the show here.\u201d The grim imagery of a white governor threatening to put a Native American in the ground was not missed by anyone.<\/p>\n

Just one year ago, as families gathered in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday predicated on the wholesale whitewashing of the colonial genocide against Native Americans, the indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline on Standing Rock Sioux tribal territory in North Dakota was being subjected to increasingly intense state violence. Police and National Guardsmen unleashed so-called \u201cless than lethal\u201d armaments, with rubber-coated steel-ball bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, LRAD sound cannons and water cannons fired on crowds in subzero temperatures. The Standing Rock Sioux call the pipeline \u201cthe black snake,\u201d carrying fracked petroleum from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois, for transfer to another pipeline to carry it to the Gulf Coast. The black snake\u2019s arrival in Lakota territory has long been prophesied.<\/p>\n

Last Thursday, as COP 23 was wrapping up, a massive leak in the Keystone pipeline was discovered in South Dakota. At least 210,000 gallons of oil leaked from the pipeline, just as TransCanada, the pipeline\u2019s owner, was seeking final permission from Nebraska\u2019s Public Utilities Commission to build its Keystone XL pipeline. Despite the leak, the PUC granted the permit for the controversial KXL to carry toxic tar sands oil from Canada to the hurricane-battered U.S. Gulf Coast for refining. President Barack Obama, after years of resistance, finally killed the pipeline. Trump, as soon as he took office, boastfully greenlighted both KXL and DAPL.<\/p>\n

Back in the Hambach Forest, activists are bracing for RWE and German police to raid their treehouse villages, arrest them all and clear-cut the remaining 10 percent of the ancient forest. \u201cIt\u2019s time to resist against state power,\u201d a forest defender named Indigo told us. Commenting on the nearby COP 23, she added, \u201cIt\u2019s time that we take responsibility for our own lives \u2026 that we create a world which gives us the power to act, instead of hoping that other people will solve problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day before the climate summit opened, 4,500 people marched into the open pit and halted mining for the day. Nearby, in the remaining occupied forest, a banner was strung between two ancient oaks. It proclaimed, \u201cRespect existence or expect resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Nov 2017 – \u201cIt\u2019s time to resist against state power, it\u2019s time that we take responsibility for our own lives \u2026 that we create a world which gives us the power to act, instead of hoping that other people will solve problems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}