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Tom Goldtooth - Voices for Climate Change
Tom Goldtooth

The climate bill, unfortunately, has been co-opted by the oil and coal industry. It’s a situation where we again have politics over science. And for our network and our constituency on the frontline of unsustainable energy policy, from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, to the indigenous people in Nigeria, it’s business as usual. We don’t see democracy in the process of decisions being made around climate policy, whether it’s domestically, like the Waxman-Markey bill, or globally. It’s business as usual. We had high hopes, and we still do, but it’s going to take the political will of the people, [not] discussions behind closed doors. That’s something that’s really a big concern for us here as American Indian and Alaska natives. Our communities and many of the people in America have been locked out of the process that’s happening between the big environmental organizations and big industry.

We are part of the 350 million indigenous peoples throughout the world. The [U.N. meetings concerning the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] mark the first time that 400 indigenous peoples came together from every region in the world to discuss the impacts of climate change.

We all agreed that we are at the frontlines with disproportionate impacts. There has to be a human rights framework to address this issue. We came out of this meeting in consensus: we’ve got to have aggressive emission targets. We agreed that we need to push the industrialized countries like America and Canada to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2020 using 1990 levels, and 95 to 100 percent by 2050. We have the technology to do that.

A well-financed and very powerful oil and coal industry is [in negotiations] with these large environmental organizations that don’t have constituencies. I think [support for the current climate bill] is a sellout position. I think the people of America are smarter than that. But America needs to have more understanding of where we’re at with climate change and what market-based solutions the government and corporations are developing.

Tom Goldtooth is the co-director of the Indigenous Environmental Network headquartered at Bemidji, Minnesota. This interview is excerpted from a transcript courtesy of Democracy Now. Photo courtesy of the International Institute for Sustainable Development.

The Need for New Coalitions

By David Brower

Our reckless use of energy is creating acid rain, global warming, endangering the ozone barrier, and we're not doing enough about it. What can we do to be more effective? We can try to build better coalitions among people, among nations, among organizations. We must recognize that environmental hazards affect people as well as wilderness. Toxics, pollution, and pesticides especially affect poor people and people of color. We as environmentalists must build bridges to people affected by those hazards if our movement is to succeed. We have begun to build such bridges in our Fate and Hope of the Earth conferences. We've had these conferences in New York, Washington, and Ottawa. Last June, we had 1,200 people from 60 countries at a great conference in Managua, Nicaragua. The next conference will be in Zimbabwe in the fall of 1991. We're trying to get something going in the Soviet Union, Japan, and in other parts of the world. We're trying to get as many different kinds of organizations into this whole act of keeping the earth a livable one. An enormous amount of good can be done if we have multicultural and multi-racial teams—cross-generational, male and female—going around to various spots in the developed nations, as well as the nations of the South, to help them recover from the damage done by the industrial revolution. Their work could focus on the out-of-doors, the soils, and the forest. But it could also help to put the cities back together again, to get the hearts of cities that are deteriorated fixed up. It's a great challenge, one of the most important there is, and also one of the most important opportunities. Building organizational bridges is exactly what the International Green Corps is about and Earth Island is doing everything it can to make this project succeed.

David Brower was executive director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute. He died in 2000.

 
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