Toward Freedom – Toward a Movement for Peace and Climate Justice

Toward a Movement for Peace and Climate Justice
TOWARD FREEDOM

by Brian Tokar

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

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Who is affected by global warming?

Since the first Earth Day, way back in 1970, there has been a serious divide between those who view environmental issues as fundamentally social and political, and those who choose to focus entirely on the technical aspects of individual problems and their narrow, status-quo solutions. In 1970, Earth Day was explicitly cast as an alternative to a continuing focus on the human and ecological ravages of the war in Vietnam, and today it’s no longer surprising to anyone that the day is sponsored by some of the very worst corporate polluters.

As social ecologists have argued since the mid-sixties, however, ecological problems both have serious human consequences, and are thoroughly social and political in origin.[1] With respect to global warming, this contrast is becoming central to understanding where we are and where we may be headed. An understanding of the science and politics of global warming is becoming increasingly central to how we understand issues of social justice, or war and peace, and to how such concerns will play out in the coming decades……………………………………..

……Probably the grimmest tale is contained in the [IPCC’s] report’s chapter on health consequences of climate changes:…………….From Bangladesh to Darfur, we are already seeing the ways in which increased climate instability is exacerbating conflict and even bloodshed among people…………………

False solutions

Over the past year or two, we have been inundated with a plethora of seductive, but ultimately false solutions to the threat of catastrophic climate changes. First, we face a well-orchestrated political push, from the highest levels of the US government, for a revival of nuclear power. Not only do we still, after 50 years, have no clue what to do with monstrous quantities of highly radioactive nuclear waste, but if our societies do commit the massive capital resources needed to build a new generation of nuclear power plants—at least tripling the present number according to many estimates—there will be literally no funds left to develop truly green, solar-based alternatives, even in the long run.

Further, a significant expansion of nuclear power would expose countless more communities to the legacy of cancer that critical scientists such as Ernest Sternglass have documented, and additional indigenous communities to the even more severe consequences of uranium mining and milling