Climate Justice I | People’s movements challenge UN Summit







Moderator’s Note: Returning from our farm in Colorado, loaded with our heritage crop produce
and churro lamb, I am able to comment
now on some very significant developments related to the global social
movements for “climate justice” – a term that has become almost as ubiquitous
as “universal human rights”. From an indigenous vantage point, the climate
justice movement requires withdrawing from the position of human ecological
dominance involving control over all other organisms and “natural” processes;
this includes “environmental managerialism”.





This is the first in a
series of documents and sources related to the intensifying climate justice
movement. We start with a few introductory comments and a re-post of a press
release from the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA).





Sometimes the movement
discourse does little to clarify the meaning of concepts like climate justice.
The public needs to understand the meaning and I believe that it demands at
least two formative understandings about the quality of the coupling of society
and environment: (1) Climate justice is about ending the violent structured
inequality embedded in the capitalist corporate domination of planetary energy
systems that enrich the few at the expense of all life – human and other than
human. The low-income elderly, people of color, indigenous communities (e.g.,
Arctic and Pacific Islander peoples) are already dying or being displaced by
climate change. This is not a projected impact but a manifestation of the
current inequitable geographies of environmental violence associated with the
petro-capitalist global regime.  (2)
Climate justice is therefore above all a movement seeking to remake social and
economic institutions more responsive and compatible with ecological processes
and social justice demands of culturally diverse communities and nations.





This means the climate justice
movement is demanding that we reject the predatory extractive economy of
capitalism based on the law of property
as possession and instead embrace a solidarity/conviviality economy based
on property as relation and the principles
of mutual aid, cooperative labor, and reciprocity. The recovery of law of the
common – including autonomous ancestral indigenous homelands – is one of the
more profound principles underlying the climate justice movement. It is also a
largely unacknowledged legacy of the American civil rights, indigenous
autonomy, and environmental justice movements. We would do well to understand
this history if climate justice movements are to challenge and sublate the
global political economy of capitalism.





FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE






September 23, 2014









Contact:
 Marjorie Childress



505-410-8487





marjorie@ourpowercampaign.org
 





CJA to deliver key demands to world leaders gathered
at UN Summit on Climate 







While excluded from
substantive participation in the UN summit on the climate crisis, the
US-based Climate Justice Alliance will deliver Key Demands to world
leaders on September 23, between 2:00 and 3:00 pm.  CJA will deliver the
demands in the midst of the People’s Tribunal of our Climate Justice Summit at
both the New School and the UN Church Center.






Delivering the demands will
be front-line community members – those who are most affected by the climate
crisis. It’s time for world leaders to pay attention to the real expertise that
lies within our communities. 
 





LOCATION: UN Church
Center, 777 1st Ave. at E. 44th St.
Subway access: Grand Central Station





**IMPORTANT:
Press Pass Required.







In order to enter the UN
Church Center building for the People’s Tribunal, we will need to send you a
Press Pass (a letter allowing you entry through the UN security point). 
To receive a Press Pass, please reply to this email with “Press Pass” in the
subject line. 









Source: therealrevo


The Tribunal is part of a
two-day “People’s Climate Justice Summit” happening at the UN Church Center and
The New School, that will focus on the climate crisis as a symptom of a deeper
problem: an economy based on extraction and exploitation of resources and
people.





This economy benefits a few
at the expense of communities and the planet, and that will explore community
centered solutions based on clean community energy, zero waste, public transit,
local food systems and housing for all. 





For more information about
People’s Climate Justice Summit, go to: 


http://www.ourpowercampaign.org/peoples-climate-justice-summit/





Grassroots Global Justice Alliance


P.O. Box 610663


North Miami, FL 33261-0663


United States

































































































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