BY JO BROWN
MELBOURNE — The North has an ecological debt to the South that must be paid, Friends of the Earth (FoE) International chairperson Ricardo Navarro told a public meeting here on April 18.
The meeting, "Global environmentalism in the twenty-first century", was organised by FoE and the RMIT Community Advocacy Unit. Its aim was to put the global environmental crisis into a social context and reframe it as a struggle for "climate justice", itself a process of "redressing inequalities of wealth, power and access to the earth's resources".
Given United States and Australian rejection of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the mood of the meeting was both angry and optimistic.
Ricardo Navarro, an El Salvadorian environmentalist and the new chairperson of FoE International, passionately argued for a global climate justice campaign which linked those in the North and South.
Navarro railed at the injustice of environmental resource use globally. "Why should a person in the United States have the right to dump more than 50 times the carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere than a person in Bangladesh?", he asked.
He also noted that exploitation of natural resources is more and more associated with violations of human rights. "For a country like Colombia, having oil reserves is a problem", Navarro said. An exploratory oil well opened there recently was protected by 5000 police and 500 soldiers; repression of the local population has increased.
Navarro described the current global order as a jumbo jet carrying first, second and third class passengers. "But if the plane crashes, then everyone dies. The challenge is to turn the plane around, to reverse the situation."
Climate change is already being felt in the Pacific islands, said Patrina Dumaru from the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre. Many Pacific islands are facing major problems of food security, coastal erosion and economic losses due to sea level rises, with a 10-20 centimetre rise already experienced.
The predicted rise of more than 30 centimetres over the next 50 years would be devastating for low-lying coral atoll islands, many of which are less then two metres above sea level, Dumaru said.
The response of the Australian government to the concerns of Pacific island states has been to downplay the seriousness of the problem, she said, and to undermine the Kyoto agreement.
"The Pacific Islands produce less than 0.06% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions" stated Dumaru, "so reducing our own emissions is not enough — we need action from the industrialised countries like Australia and the United States".
Nnimmo Bassey, chairperson of Nigerian organisation Environmental Rights Action, spoke of the environmental devastation wreaked on Nigeria by big oil companies like Shell. Drilling for oil produces waste which is dumped near villages, and the dozens of oil spills in the Niger Delta are not cleaned up, he explained.
Bassey also highlighted the connection between the oil industry and violations of human rights. "Oil is the reason why Nigeria has been under a military dictatorship for 30 out of its 40 years of independence", he said. Local opposition to their pollution has forced the big oil companies to rely on state repression.
Many Nigerian activists have been jailed and even executed for opposing the government and oil companies. Bassey himself was imprisoned in 1996 for his activities.
Closer to home, the growth of the movement against corporate-defined globalisation was helping to make the environment movement more outward-looking, Friends of the Earth Australia's Cam Walker noted. This new movement was helping the environment movement overcome its historical limitations, particularly its introspection, its seperation from community and union campaigns and its lack of international perspective.