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Resource Rebels | Excerpt
Introduction: A World Out of Balance
Roberto Pérez, chief of the U’wa tribe of Colombia, paid a surprise visit to the San Francisco headquarters of the Sanford C. Bernstein investment firm in December 2000. The purpose of the visit was to deliver a letter demanding that Bernstein, a large shareholder in Occidental Petroleum, stop profiting from the destruction of U’wa lands and culture, and sell its stock in the company. Since 1992, the 5,000-members of the U’wa Nation have been organizing to prevent Occidental from drilling on sacred U’wa land. Representing the strength of the U’wa’s international support, representatives from the Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, two of the many environmental groups that have worked to help the U’wa, accompanied Roberto Perez to the Bernstein headquarters.
This encounter between the U’wa and the investment community signals a major shift in public perceptions of threatened native cultures in modern society. Up until recently, the tendency in the mass media has been to stereotype native people as fighting a losing battle against the onslaught of industrial civilization. But after two decades of organizing local, national, regional, and international alliances, assisted by the technology of instantaneous communication through the Internet, native voices can no longer be ignored in powerful places. A recent article in Business Week notes with surprising candor:
Not long ago, the words of tribal leaders such as Pérez would not have been heard outside the forests where they were uttered. Now, they echo around the world—through myriad Web sites and Western protest campaigns. The plight of indigenous groups is penetrating the boardrooms of multinationals, which are being forced to respond as never before to protect their reputations and brand names. Nowhere are the issues more contentious than in investments, such as Occidental’s, that extract natural resources from developing nations. Many of these projects have long been marred by corruption, military atrocities, ecological damage, and social upheaval.(1)
While Bernstein chief executive Roger Hertog would not comment on the U’wa demand, the New York Times noted that after Mr. Pérez visited Boston-based Fidelity Investments in September 2000, Fidelity sold off more than $400 million of its Occidental stock.(2)
What the New York Times failed to mention was that Mr. Pérez’s visit coincided with ongoing demonstrations at Fidelity’s corporate headquarters and protests around the world involving thousands of people demonstrating at over 75 Fidelity offices, creating a public relations nightmare.(3)
However, a Fidelity spokesperson emphasized that the 60% divestment in Occidental was “based solely on the merits of the company, and was not connected in any way to the U’wa campaign.”(4)
An Occidental spokesperson reinforced the point: “The campaign of various activists, most of them centered in the U.S., has had absolutely no impact. The work is going on in Colombia.”(5)
As of this writing in 2001, Occidental is still hoping to reap billions of dollars in profit through exploitation of a potential 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil on U’wa land. Occidental and its allies are willing to risk the destruction of an ancient culture (ethnocide), a pristine ecosystem (ecocide) and 5,000 lives (genocide) for what amounts to no more than three months of oil for U.S. consumers. This is a powerful argument for putting the brakes on an energy addiction that is out of control, preventing us from taking the necessary steps to a sustainable energy future based on respect for the earth and the people who inhabit it.
The last thing either Fidelity or Occidental has wanted to admit is that a well organized campaign with a focused target could disrupt the financial lifeblood of a controversial oil project. The lesson of the militant protests against corporate globalization in Seattle in November-December 1999, where the U’wa issue figured prominently, was not lost on America’s corporate executives. An editorial by the dean of the Yale School of Management that appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the aftermath of the protests warned chief executives that many advocacy groups would become emboldened by the attention they received in Seattle and make global corporations an increasing focus of their activities. They will target more companies for public scrutiny about their activities abroad, from their environmental policies to their employment practices to their investments in local communities.(6)
Besides a higher level of organization and an ability to communicate their message to an international audience, there is also a greater acceptance of native traditional knowledge and prophecy in some scientific circles. Many native cultures share a belief in the idea of a delicate balance in the universe that must be maintained by reverence toward the natural world. Human actions that desecrate sacred lands or destroy entire ecosystems upset this balance. The U’wa believe that oil maintains the balance of the world and is “the blood of our mother.” Not so long ago the U’wa claim that oil maintains the balance of the world would have been dismissed out of hand by the scientific community. All this has changed with our new understanding of the causes of global warming. The world’s top scientists agree that the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the burning of oil, gas, and coal is a major cause of global warming or climate change. Primary responsibility for this global threat lies with the advanced industrial societies which contributed 76% of the world’s total carbon emissions since 1950. The single largest contributor was the United States, with 22% of the total.(7)
The respected United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a 2,500-member scientific body, states that no matter what we do now, the Earth’s average temperature will grow one to three degrees Fahrenheit hotter because of CO2 already in the atmosphere.(8)
Due to the excessive buildup of heat-trapping “greenhouse” gases, the planet not only gets hotter, the atmospheric and oceanic systems that regulate Earth’s weather become erratic. The non-governmental organization (NGO) declaration that came out of the Kyoto, Japan meeting of the Climate Convention in 1997 warned that climate change “will cause the greatest suffering to the poorest peoples and most pristine ecosystems globally.”(9)
The evidence for this claim is alarming.
Rising Seas, Melting Glaciers
Scientists have already documented warming oceans and melting glaciers. Rising sea levels have covered or are threatening low-lying islands in parts of the Pacific Ocean, including Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, and Palau. Meanwhile, Antarctica has experienced a dramatic warming where the average temperature of the Antarctic Peninsula has increased three to four degrees Fahrenheit since the mid-1940s.(10)
In 1995, a chunk of Antarctic glacier as big as the state of Rhode Island collapsed into the South Atlantic.(11)
The native peoples of the Arctic environment, including the Inuit, the Yupik, the Cree, the Dogrib, and others, have been the first to notice how this warming trend has affected the ice and the availability of the foods they depend upon: the caribou, seal, bear, goose, duck, and whale.(12)
“The global warming models are all consistent in one fashion in that they predict the Arctic is a very important place to feel global change,” says Michael Ledbetter, director for Arctic System Science for the National Science Foundation. “Some people have likened it to the miner’s canary.”(13)
Infectious Diseases
We have also seen an increased incidence of floods, droughts, fires, and heat outbreaks. These changing weather patterns can produce the right environmental conditions for an outbreak of infectious disease. While the victims of extreme weather events can be found in both advanced industrial and developing countries, the consequences are more severe in the poorer developing countries. For example, Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in November 1998 killing more than 11,000 people and causing more than $5 billion damage. Moreover, the public health systems of the region were unable to deal with the aftermath of the disaster.
The intense precipitation and flooding associated with the hurricane spawned a cluster of disease outbreaks, including cholera, a waterborne disease (more than 30,000 cases), and malaria and dengue fever, transmitted by mosquitoes that flourish under these conditions (more than 30,000 cases and more than 1,000 cases respectively).(14)
Mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and several kinds of encephalitis, are projected to rise in many parts of the world according to projections assuming a temperature increase of about two degrees Fahrenheit.(15)
(1) Raeburn, et al., 2000, p. 88.
(2) Gladstone, 2000.
(3) Rainforest Action Network, 2000.
(4) Valdmanis, 2000.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Garten, 1999, p. A 34.
(7) Johnson, 1999, pp. 22-23.
(8) International Panel on Climate Change, 1995, p. 5.
(9) Rainforest Action Network and Project Underground, 1998, p. 44.
(10) Berger, 2000, p. 36.
(11) Flavin, 1996, p. 23.
(12) Johnson, 1999. p.10.
(13) Ibid., p. 12.
(14) Epstein, 1999, p. 64.
(15) Epstein, 2000, p. 52.
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