At Climate Ground Zero Direct Action Training Camp in Montana, activists learn everything from tactical communications to creative campaigns, such as rappelling off rooftops for Greenpeace.

View photo slideshow.

Photo by Matt Leonard.

In early September 2006, Johann Hari, a columnist for the British newspaper The Independent, visited what was then an unusual gathering: a climate action camp. A village of tents had appeared in the shadow of Selby, England’s, towering Drax coal-fired power plant—one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Europe. Hari found some elements of a counter-culture festival, but he also witnessed what amounted to an “open-air science seminar, where 600 protesters discussed climate chaos with a level of knowledge that would shame our news broadcasters.”

The camp was also a launching pad for direct action, culminating in an effort to temporarily occupy the power station. “These protesters,” Hari observed, “were tired of praying the world’s scientists have made some unprecedented collective error, or waiting for a political Messiah to solve the problem.”

Like earlier mass movements in their infancy, the campers had plenty of knee-jerk detractors. The right-wing Sun newspaper dubbed them “naïve beyond belief.” Hari saw it differently. He pointedly asked in his column, “isn’t the real naïvete coming from people like them who say we should just sit back … and continue to drastically change the chemical composition of the atmosphere?”

Leaving the camp, he declared “the birth of a new protest movement to force action on global warming.”

Climate-change activism has been taking place in some form for decades, but in recent years the ripples created by events like the Selby camp have been swelling into something larger—something that is attracting ever-greater numbers of mainstream environmentalists, gathering support from top climate scientists and prominent public figures, and starting to look a lot like a mass movement.

This movement is set to produce a broad wave of dissent this fall in the United States and internationally, and it is not afraid to think big. “The Civil Rights Movement, the suffragettes, India’s movement for independence. That’s the sort of scale we need to be thinking on when we’re thinking about climate change,” says Abigail Singer, an organizer with the environmental group Rising Tide and co-coordinator of the Mobilization for Climate Justice coalition.

A Global Uprising

While nothing of historic proportions has yet materialized in the United States, environmentalists elsewhere are providing impressive models for climate disobedience. “You’ve got activists in Italy doing multiple day-long sit-ins at coal-fired power plants that actually shut them down,” says Jennifer Krill, a forest and climate campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. “And in Australia you’ve got massive blockades of coal trains, as well as the coal plants themselves.”

CLIMATE HERO

Kumi Naidoo chairs the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the group behind TckTckTck, a diffuse and colorful campaign for worldwide mobilization whose name evokes a countdown for climate action.
Meet all YES! Magazine Climate Heroes

Since Selby, climate camps have become recurrent events in the United Kingdom and have also popped up in Germany, Holland, Ireland, and Australia. They have made the names of major coal-fired plants, such as Drax and Kingsnorth, synonymous with militant protest.

And they’ve had an impact on policy. Public pressure compelled Britain’s energy and climate minister, Ed Miliband, to rethink previous plans to allow plant expansion and declare in April that “The era of new unabated coal has come to an end.” Facing concerted opposition, the E.ON power company announced in October that it was shelving its plans to build a major new coal-burning facility at the infamous Kingsnorth site.

For activists from the Global South, the December 2007 U.N. climate summit in Bali was a landmark of coalescing resistance. There, a broad network of grassroots NGOs such as the Third World Network, the farmers’ coalition Via Campesina, and representatives of communities directly affected by the early impacts of global warming came together under the banner of “Climate Justice Now!” The network has maintained a visible presence at international negotiations, pressuring advanced industrialized countries that, in the words of one network statement, “have refused to live up to their own legal and moral obligations to radically cut emissions and support developing countries’ efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts.”

The lesson Krill draws: “We need to turn up the heat in the United States.”

Bringing Home the Heat

Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen risked arrest during a protest last March blockading the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. “There were a massive number of people willing to commit civil disobedience on climate change. That just hasn’t happened before,” said Abigail Singer, a march participant.

© Pete Muller for Greenpeace.

“In the U.S., historically, [large-scale mobilization] has tended to work best when there’s a progressive leader in power and some kind of mass awareness of the problem,” argues Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. “We have both of those things now,” he says of the climate crisis, “we just don’t have people taking to the streets.”

The Yes Men, pranksters famous for impersonating corporate spokespeople at high-profile events, are part of one coalition working to change that. They helped create BeyondTalk.net, where visitors can sign a pledge of resistance, vowing to be one of 10,000 willing to risk arrest at protests that will take place simultaneously in major cities before the December U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

While the United States lags behind some other parts of the world, activity has proliferated here in the past two years. This is particularly true in Appalachia, dubbed “Climate Ground Zero” by organizers who are challenging the ghastly practice of mountaintop-removal mining. The CoalSwarm website keeps a running tally of protests, and its swiftly growing list of events in West Virginia and North Carolina includes civil disobedience marches onto mining sites, tree sits to halt mountaintop blasting, and an action in which climbers scaled a dragline excavator to stop its use.

On the other side of the country, in the Navajo Nation, ongoing resistance at the Desert Rock coal-fired power plant contributed to the EPA withdrawal of its air quality permit this summer. Indeed, CoalSwarm cites more than 75 coal plants canceled, abandoned, or put on hold countrywide in 2007 and 2008, owing in large part to organized community opposition.

In early March, a coalition effort to channel local actions into a national mobilization produced crowds demanding closure of the Capitol Power Plant. The plant, one of the dirtiest coal-burning facilities in the country, sits in downtown Washington, D.C., and helps heat the chambers of Congress. The protest took place immediately after the massive Power Shift conference, which drew over 12,000 young people to the nation’s capital to attend workshops on climate activism and lobbying techniques. Thousands of people—including many Power Shift participants, as well as movement luminaries such as writer Bill McKibben and world-renowned climate scientist James Hansen—risked police reprisal when they blockaded the Capitol Power Plant’s entrances.

It worked: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid preemptively announced that they would instruct Capitol officials to shift the plant to natural gas. Activists regard this as only a partial victory, citing natural gas, along with nuclear power and “clean coal,” as among the “false solutions” currently being promoted for climate change. Nevertheless, the mobilization served as a promising sign for future resistance.

“There were massive numbers of people willing to commit civil disobedience on climate change,” says Singer. “That just hasn’t happened before.”

The Road to Copenhagen

Environmentalists almost universally agree that the upcoming Copenhagen conference represents a critical moment for the planet, and thus a key time for the public to exert pressure. Groups in NGO offices, church basements, and action camps are contributing to major climate organizing campaigns—including citizen lobbying, public awareness, and direct action—each of which could be the largest of its kind in history.

On October 24, environmentalists throughout the world joined creative demonstrations that drew attention to 350—what McKibben calls “the most important number on Earth.” He writes, “A NASA team headed by James Hansen reported that the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can safely hold is 350 parts per million, at least if we want a planet ‘similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.’ Since we’re already at 390 ppm, the message was clear: we don’t need to buy an insurance policy to reduce the threat of future warming. We need a fire extinguisher, and we need it now.”

350.org was coordinated by the same organizers who created the Step It Up campaign in 2007, which produced 2,000 demonstrations spread across all 50 states to demand that Congress cut domestic carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050. This time, they worked internationally, and they were awed by the growing momentum.

HOW WILL YOU GET INVOLVED?
We don’t have to tell you to switch your light bulbs and carry a cloth bag to the grocery store: You already do. But saving the planet is going to take more than a reusable mug. So how do you take your beliefs from private home to public square?

Tell your friends. Your neighbors. The guy next to you on the bus. Talking to others about climate change may feel awkward (“So, how do you feel about greenhouse gases?”), but it helps spread the word that climate change is real, and that we can still do something about it. Talk about how you’re giving up your car, or how you’ve been writing your congressperson.

DIY. Join the No Impact Project or organize your neighbors around the Transition Towns movement. When you change the way you live, and help others change the way they live, momentum builds for legislative change.

Become a local advocate.
Send letters to the editor, work for climate-friendly policies (bike lanes, public transit), and join up with others to amplify your voice. Plug in to action-oriented organizations. Then donate, and demonstrate.

See our Climate Action Resource Guide for a list of activist groups to join.

“I can’t really believe it,” says organizer May Boeve of the events in more than 180 countries. “We have scuba divers off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and we have monks in the Himalayas, and we have musicians in all different corners of the world.” Photos or video from each site were sent to world leaders, she says, “to communicate this sense that the public is not only paying attention to Copenhagen, they know what the outcome needs to be. They know we need to get to 350.”

Another day of action, taking place on November 30, a week before the start of the Copenhagen summit, will be more likely to result in jailed activists. The Mobilization for Climate Justice, Rising Tide, and other allies will be coordinating events that target major polluters, interfere with carbon-emission-as-usual, and demand strong regulation. “For people who feel they can’t get arrested because they have too much at stake right now, the BeyondTalk.net site has an ‘action offsets’ program,” Bichlbaum explains. “Just like you can buy carbon offsets, you can buy action offsets” that will pay for training or bail for someone who can risk arrest.

“Seattle” the Summit?

A significant precedent for this fall’s protests is the 1999 mobilization against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. Not accidentally, the November 30 events fall on the 10th anniversary of Seattle’s pivotal day of action. With tens of thousands of people rallying outside the WTO sessions, Seattle brought together an unlikely coalition of trade unionists, environmentalists, indigenous rights advocates, anti-sweatshop campaigners, and small farmers who recognized that the exploitative model of corporate globalization championed by the WTO cut across diverse causes and communities. The success of those groups in working together to derail the WTO talks is routinely forgotten by those who depict Seattle as a mindless riot.

Drawing inspiration for the present, a Rising Tide statement argues, “This year we have the opportunity to construct a movement of movements around climate, and find common ground in struggling for our collective survival.”

Regardless of the final shape that Copenhagen protests take, the crucial role that citizens must play in forcing better solutions is clear. “In order to get any sort of climate policy that even resembles something good,” says Singer, “we’re going to need massive amounts of people to get involved in these sorts of mobilizations.”

Bichlbaum adds, “We have the technology that we need right now to stop climate change. The technology we need is a pen and a piece of paper. All we need is to sign the right laws. And the demand for that goes through the streets.”

Mark Engler wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Mark is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this article provided by Sean Nortz.

Any solution to climate change will require all nations to act together to reduce global emissions. But the fact is, countries around the world are not entering a “post-carbon future” on a level playing field. Poor countries have had the smallest role in creating the climate crisis, and they have fewest resources available to change and adapt.

The climate policies we pursue will have to support poor communities and developing nations. Everyone, whether they live in industrial or developing countries, has fundamental rights to decent levels of food, housing, health, and clothing, and many nations in the Global South will not get behind a climate solution that doesn’t allow their citizens these rights.

In the United States, we need to push for solutions that equitably distribute the burdens of the coming transition between rich and poor nations. If residents of industrialized nations don’t pressure their governments to share wealth and technological capacities with the Global South, extreme poverty will inevitably aggravate the planet’s ecological stress. Poor communities that are left out of the post-carbon economy and robbed of resources by corporations will be forced to strip the diminishing amounts of clean water, forests, and land just to survive.

So what does an equitable approach look like? There is a growing international consensus around a core set of principles called “climate justice.”

Share the responsibility
for emissions reductions fairly.

A fair and workable international approach must be based on the historical responsibility wealthy industrial countries bear for causing climate change as well as the capacity of these countries to finance the necessary transition.

Over the past 100 years, the United States has been the largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases, according to data from the World Resources Institute. Together, the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Russia account for nearly 70 percent of the global build-up of atmospheric CO2 between 1850 and 2004. In the past two years, China has surpassed the United States as the largest CO2 emitter, but China’s population is four and a half times larger. U.S. per capita emissions are still much higher.

CLIMATE HERO

Indigenous people around the world are among those most affected by fossil-fuel development, and Clayton Thomas-Müller is organizing those communities to make sure they have a voice in the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
Meet all YES! Magazine Climate Heroes

Industrialized nations became rich at the expense of the Global South. The development and industrialization of the North has come about through the continual, and often forced, extraction of minerals, plants, fossil fuels, food, and human labor from the Global South, and through corporate globalization. Oil, extracted primarily from the Global South, has been the life-blood of globalization. Along with its sister coal, it has made industrial capitalism hum at a feverish pace for the past 200 years. By exhausting the capacity of the atmosphere, land, and ocean to absorb carbon, industrialized nations have left countries like India, China, and Brazil little room to create industrial economies that establish decent standards of living for their populations.

The prevailing proposals for financing the transition to a low-carbon economy involve distributing funds from North to South through entities like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While financing from the North is needed, these institutions are the wrong choice. Both have track records of saddling poor countries with debt, requiring government spending cuts that undermine national economies, and handing lucrative contracts to transnational corporations.

The mechanisms set up to distribute and allocate these funds should be transparent, democratic, and accountable to civil society in the Global South. People’s movements around the world and a growing number of countries—including Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and the entire African Union—have proposed requiring industrialized nations to pay their “ecological debt” through a United Nations entity. Wealthy countries would pay into the fund according to their level of responsibility for climate change, and the money would be used to finance clean technologies and adaptation strategies in poor countries.

Recently, India and China jointly called on the Global North to take the lead in reducing emissions and providing money and green technology to developing countries. And Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva recently told the press that at Copenhagen he will urge the Global North to “pay for the damage that they have already caused to the planet.”

The only way for an international climate agreement to become politically, economically, and ecologically feasible is for rich countries to resolve their ecological debt.

End overconsumption
and resource depletion.

Climate change is merely one of the most obvious symptoms of a consumer economy that is pushing our ecological and human systems to the brink. “Global economic growth is the major cause of rising emissions,” writes British journalist George Monbiot. “Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat, and animal feed to rich consumers.”

If rich communities move toward a “clean energy” paradigm but continue to depend on the natural resources and cheap labor of the Global South to feed their huge appetite for stuff (even “green” stuff), the climate crisis will only worsen.

In China, for example, “green industry” is displacing rural farming villages. A new industrial zone west of Shanghai will span 98 square kilometers and include a “Solar Valley” to produce photovoltaics and other green technologies for export. Ironically, this development zone’s energy needs will be fed by multiple coal power plants.

Reaching the aggressive carbon reductions demanded by science will require ramping down overproduction for overconsumption by the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Give communities control
over their food, land, and energy.

Place-based, democratically run communities that have a reflective and responsive relationship with their ecosystem are more capable of adapting to ecological transition.

Supporting local control, among other things, means standing with communities that are resisting fossil-fuel extraction. These communities are bearing the worst brunt of our pollution-based economy and articulating one of the simplest solutions to the climate crisis: Keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Homegrown Solutions

In Copenhagen, the question of climate equity will be contentious. But communities in the Global South aren’t waiting for an international agreement. They are turning to sustainable, climate-friendly solutions to address a problem they did little to create, but must nonetheless help to solve.
Read more.

Two years ago, the indigenous Huaorani people of Ecuador won the provisional support of the Ecuadorian government in their campaign to keep the oil in the rainforests of Yasuní National Park untouched. Rainforests store carbon and prevent it from entering the atmosphere, so the move is a big win for our planet. It’s also an expensive option for the Ecuadorian government—Yasuní’s estimated 850 million oil barrels constitute 20 percent of Ecuador’s proven oil reserves. Yet Ecuador is willing to abandon the development of an oil field in Yasuní if other countries help it recover $350 million annually—50 percent of the income it would have obtained from extracting crude oil. As of this writing, the government of Germany has committed an initial $50 million a year, and the leaders of France and Spain are considering a pledge. If successful, this initiative will be a watershed moment in the struggle for climate justice—the first time that a community on the front lines has succeeded in keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and one of the first times a developing nation has negotiated compensation for ecological service it’s providing to the world.

Here in North America, there are also inspiring struggles resisting fossil fuel extraction that merit our immediate attention and support, like the campaigns to end mountaintop removal in Appalachia, stop tar sands extraction in Alberta, Canada, and halt ­Chevron’s heavy crude oil refinement in Richmond, California. A win on any of these fronts would build momentum for a “leave it in the ground” movement in industrial countries and tell the world that the people of the United States care deeply about climate justice.

Creating a Green Economy for Everyone

It is exciting to see a multiracial movement within the United States calling for a just climate transition that helps save the planet while producing jobs, wealth, and economic stability for marginalized communities. We need to seek the same kinds of solutions internationally.

We can learn a great deal from inspiring international networks such as Oilwatch International and Via Campesina, the international organization of rural farmers and peasants. The false dichotomies of economy versus environment or race versus environment don’t exist for many of the vibrant and sophisticated movements in the Global South. Indigenous and land-based peoples’ movements understand that our collective survival is deeply dependent on our relationship to the Earth.

Communities throughout the South are resisting resource exploitation and creating their own solutions, from the indigenous U’wa people in Colombia who are campaigning against oil development on their land to Indian farmers who are organizing seed banks to protect the cultural and biological diversity that has enabled them to weather drought and flood for thousands of years.

Groups like these have an integrated vision for how food, land, and energy sovereignty will help create a resilient society.

“A global economy that takes ecological limits into account must necessarily localize production to reduce wasting both natural resources and people,” says Vandana Shiva, the celebrated Indian author and activist. “Reclaiming democratic control over our food and water and our ecological survival is the necessary project for our freedom.”

Restoring our planet’s health will require a lasting redistribution of power and resources. Recognizing our common heritage of water, food, and energy should be at the heart of a new framework for global resource management. Natural resources need to be conserved for the common good, not privatized and unsustainably exploited. We must plan and execute a just transition to a sustainable, low-carbon, resource-balanced society that promotes people’s rights, honors their work, and protects the well-being and integrity of all life on the planet.

Gopal Dayaneni and Mateo Nube wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Mateo is director for the Movement ­Generation Justice and Ecology Project, movementgeneration.org, a group that coordinates organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area working for economic and ecological justice. Gopal is an organizer with Movement Generation and a trainer with the Ruckus Society.

"The struggle for the environment is the struggle for our own survival."
Ricardo Navarro

Photo by Chris Bray.

I happened to be in New York City in September on the day the Yes Men (no relation to YES! Magazine) pulled off their latest newspaper hoax, this one devoted to the climate crisis. All over the city, young people were on street corners hawking free copies of a phony New York Post, with a banner headline pronouncing “We’re Screwed!!”

Shortly after, the Yes Men held a press conference in Washington, D.C., passing themselves off as representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They announced that the Chamber is dropping its “erroneous” opposition to climate legislation—a story quickly picked up as fact by major news outlets.

As news of glacial melts, storms, fires, and droughts gets more dire, the strategies of climate activists like the Yes Men are getting more creative and more insistent. The data coming in show actual climate impacts are at the worst end of the range of possibilities predicted by climate models.

Policymakers, however, are working from models that may be unduly optimistic—in part because they leave out the wildly unpredictable tipping points that historic climate data show can lead to rapid jumps of Earth’s climate to profoundly different states. On a crowded planet, where our food and water only barely meet the needs of billions, we are extraordinarily vulnerable to these climatic shifts. One estimate suggests that over the next 50 years, 1 billion people could become climate refugees.

Many policy observers say we are optimistic to think we can keep CO2 levels below 450 parts per million (ppm), much less the 350 ppm NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen says is necessary “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” Instead, they say we must adapt to a world of extreme heat waves, spreading deserts, flooded cities, and mass extinctions.

We dispute that. The 2008 Climate Solutions issue of YES! Magazine showed how we can avert disastrous climate change. These shifts do require us to mobilize ourselves beyond business-as-usual, but they don’t mean we have to give up on civilization. In fact, unless your definition of a good life includes a mandatory Hummer, you are likely to be as happy, or happier.

The question isn’t whether we have the off-the-shelf technologies, the proven policies, the funds, and the social stability to avert disastrous climate change—we have all that, and it is enough. The question is whether we can overcome the power of obfuscating corporations and anti-government ideologues, and their hired media and politicians to mobilize ourselves and our elected officials in time.

This issue of YES! Magazine reports on those who are stepping up to the challenge:

• The people who are taking direct action, risking arrest, building powerful climate justice movements across generations, national borders, and races.
• The people from the world’s poor countries and poor communities who are stepping up to help solve a problem they didn’t create—while insisting the solutions be fair ones.
• Those who are creating new, sustainable economies that provide livelihoods and meet our needs, running on renewable energy.
• Those pioneering ways of life that are deeply satisfying without requiring massive amounts of energy and “stuff.”

It’s going to take all of these efforts ramping up, plus technical know-how, design genius, smart policies, and global diplomacy to make the needed shift. This will not be easy, but what purpose could be more inspiring than saving the world? It beats the hell out of the alternative.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is executive editor of YES! Magazine.

Photo by Mac Urata

Kumi Naidoo learned early in life what mass movements of ordinary people can accomplish: At age 15, he organized youth and neighborhood groups to push for an end to apartheid in South Africa. Nearly 30 years later, Naidoo is building a global movement to force world leaders to adopt a binding agreement on climate change. He chairs the Global Campaign for Climate Action, the group behind TckTckTck, a diffuse and colorful campaign for worldwide mobilization whose name evokes a countdown for climate action. All of TckTckTck’s actions, from civil disobedience and street protests to a celebrity music video, send the same message to global ­policymakers: The time has come for urgent, decisive steps to curb climate change. In November, Naidoo became executive director of Greenpeace International, a partner in the TckTckTck coalition.

What is the role of direct action in shaping the debate on climate change?

History shows that we are only able to effect change when decent men and women are prepared to put their lives on the line, go to prison, take risks, and do it all peacefully. That’s what happened in the civil rights movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.

If we are brutally honest with ourselves about the response of our governments to petitioning, dialogue, and other normal campaigning, we’d see that such methods have not delivered the kind of results we need. I think you will be seeing more and more civil disobedience.

What one message do you want the TckTckTck campaign to send to world leaders?

That the cost of failing to agree to a fair, ambitious, and binding deal in Copenhagen will be devastating for every single country on this planet. If we don’t act now, the world will pay a very high price in the future, both financially and socially.

What lessons do you draw from your experiences working to end apartheid?

It’s important to build as much unity as possible. We must encourage people to focus on the considerable number of areas where they agree and to respect where they have differences. We also need sacrifice, courage, commitment, and strong leadership across all sectors of society—faith, trade unions, NGOs, and the business community. And we must always look for allies within the government.

Kate Sheppard conducted this interview for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Kate covers energy and environmental politics from Washington, D.C. She currently writes for Mother Jones and was previously the political reporter for Grist.

Meet all our Climate Heroes:

Kumi Naidoo

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Rev. Sally Bingham

Marcus Ryan

Sharon Hanshaw

Lorelei Scarbro

Clayton Thomas-Müller

Clayton Thomas-Müller is working to keep corporations from privatizing the atmosphere, as they have privatized the land and exploited the natural resources that once belonged to  the First Nations of Canada. As an activist with the Indigenous ­Environmental Network, Thomas-Müller campaigns against the multinational oil companies that are stripping crude oil from the Alberta tar sands and leaving behind toxic heavy metals and carcinogens that pollute nearby native lands. Indigenous people around the world are among those most affected by fossil-fuel development, and Thomas-Müller is organizing those communities to make sure they have a voice in the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

What is the impact of the fossil-fuel economy on indigenous communities?

Thirty-five percent of North America’s fossil fuels and around 80 percent of its uranium are underneath native land. Native communities face incredible pressure to enter into the industrialization game.

What influence has tar sands development had on the communities you work with?

The five First Nations in the region of the tar sands rely on traditional food sources, like moose, fish, beaver, and muskrat, all of which have become contaminated by mining pollution. We’re talking about a community of just 1,200 that’s seen more than 100 deaths in the last decade from rare cancers and autoimmune diseases. The tar sands leases also violate aboriginal treaty rights; they were sold by the provincial government without the prior informed consent of local communities.

Based on the experiences of indigenous people, what should a climate agreement at Copenhagen include?

Focusing only on market-based solutions, most of them voluntary, will lead to further privatization of the commons, like the forests in the Global South and here in northern Canada. The strategy will commodify the Earth’s atmospheric carbon-cycling capacity. Privatization has serious implications for those living in communities near big emitters, and for everybody on Mother Earth who uses these commons to sustain life.

For example, the number one reason why Canada has never ratified the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples or made a Kyoto commitment is because Canada’s economy is based on extracting raw resources and selling them to our biggest trading partner, the United States. The only way to stop the tar sands extraction is through aboriginal and treaty rights negotiation strategies, led by First Nations in Canada.

Going into Copenhagen, we’re saying, let’s not lose sight of binding mechanisms—laws. Let’s have the governments of the world take back their sovereignty from corporations. Let’s stop subsidizing corporations with public funds. When corporations violate their emissions caps, let’s fine the hell out of them and divert those resources to the renewable energy economy.

Kate Sheppard conducted this interview for Climate Action, the Winter 2010 issue of YES! Magazine. Kate covers energy and environmental politics from Washington, D.C. She currently writes for Mother Jones and was previously the political reporter for Grist.

Meet all our Climate Heroes:

Kumi Naidoo

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Rev. Sally Bingham

Marcus Ryan

Sharon Hanshaw

Lorelei Scarbro

Clayton Thomas-Müller

We don’t have to tell you to switch your light bulbs and carry a cloth bag to the grocery store: You already do. But saving the planet is going to take more than a reusable mug. So how do you take your beliefs from private home to public square?

• Tell Your Friends

• DIY: Change the Way You Live

• Take Direct Action: Amplify Your Voice and get involved

• Tracking Progress

• Research and Data

• Climate Action Library (books and films)

Tell your friends.

Your neighbors. The guy next to you on the bus. Talking to others about climate change may feel awkward (“So, how do you feel about greenhouse gases?”), but it helps spread the word that climate change is real, and that we can still do something about it. Talk about how you’re giving up your car, or how you’ve been writing your congressperson.

The Story of Stuff is Annie Leonard's fun and fact-filled look at our production and consumption patterns. Watch the video here and find more info at www.storyofstuff.org

350.org is an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis. The site has many creative ideas on how to spread the word. www.350.org

A Climate for Change is a news and social networking website similar to Facebook. You can join a fun and active community centered on climate action and discussion. www.aclimateforchange.org

World Wide Views on Global Warming conducted a worldwide deliberative survey with surprising results. Check out what people think and find compact information on climate change at wwviews.org

DIY: Change the Way You Live

 Join the No Impact Project (noimpactproject.org) or organize your neighbors around the Transition Towns movement (transitionus.org). When you change the way you live, and help others change the way they live, momentum builds for legislative change.

The No Impact Project, founded by Colin Beavan, offers a one week experiment in impact-free living and the chance to connect to others along the way. www.noimpactproject.org

Center for a New American Dream offers guides and resources to help Americans consume more responsibly and to protect the environment, enhance quality of life, and promote social justice. www.newdream.org

Co-op America is a great resource for environmentally and socially responsible consumers, with information on sustainable products, companies, and investments. Their Take Action page features causes and easy suggestions of what you can do. www.coopamerica.org

Climate Counts is a collaborative effort to bring consumers and companies together in the fight against global climate change. They score the world's largest companies on their climate impact. www.climatecounts.org

GreenerChoices.org is a Web-based initiative to inform, engage, and empower consumers about environmentally friendly products and practices. www.greenerchoices.org

Brighter Planet is a website where you can measure your carbon footprint, discover simple ways to reduce it, track your progress, and share your experiences.
www.brighterplanet.com

The Transition Network helps towns and neighborhoods to lower their climate impact by adopting and implementing a transition model. The Transition Network offers materials, training courses, events, tools, and resources for your community. www.transitiontowns.org

The Personal Climate Change Calculator helps you measure your climate-affecting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. www.americanforests.org/resources/ccc/

The Regeneration Project is a religious response to climate change. The Interfaith Power and Light program helps congregations promote renewable energy, energy efficiency, and conservation. interfaithpowerandlight.org

Take Direct Action: Amplify Your Voice and Get Involved

Send letters to the editor, work for climate-friendly policies (bike lanes, public transit), and join up with others to amplify your voice. Plug in to action-oriented organizations. Then donate, and demonstrate.

Greenpeace USA (Greenpeace, Inc.) is dedicated to protecting the environment through research, advocacy and lobbying.  www.greenpeace.org

1Sky is a major initiative to unite climate change activists into a collective movement calling for green jobs, emissions reductions, renewable energy, and an end to coal plants. Mobilizes people around the country to push elected officials for climate-change legislation. www.1sky.org

TckTckTck is a global alliance made up of leading international, national, and local organizations, faith-based groups, youth groups trade unions, and individuals. The campaign calls for a fair and binding climate change agreement in December 2009 in Copenhagen. www.tcktcktck.org

The Ruckus Society trains and assists activists in the use of nonviolent direct action. Their website provides links to more information on what they do, upcoming events, blogs, and resources for activists.  www.ruckus.org

The WE Campaign is a place where thousands come together online to voice their concern over climate change and to call for bold action. It's an opportunity to participate in the climate movement in a new way that takes us beyond ourselves as individuals. www.wecansolveit.org

The Climate Project focuses on educating the public about climate change, featuring personal trainings by Al Gore. www.theclimateproject.org

Focus the Nation is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to a clean energy future. Their programs support young people through climate education, engagement, and action. www.focusthenation.org

Stop Global Warming is a virtual march of hundreds of thousands of citizens calling on political leaders to put freezes on greenhouse gas emissions. www.stopglobalwarming.org

Earth First! is an international movement based on environmental action and the belief that life comes first. Their website offers links to other resources, blogs, and ideas to help you take action for the planet. www.earthfirst.org

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action www.ran.org

Green for All works to establish green jobs and a green economy, aimed especially at disadvantaged communities. www.greenforall.org

Live Earth seeks to leverage the power of entertainment through integrated events, media, and the live experience to ignite a global movement aimed at solving the most critical environmental issues of our time. www.liveearth.org

Climate Solutions works to accelerate action on climate change by generating investments and political movement in the region. www.climatesolutions.org

The Energy Action Coalition is a youth effort of some 50 environmental and social justice organizations, organizing around climate change. energyactioncoalition.org

The Indigenous Environmental Network  is empowering Indigenous Nations and communities towards sustainable livelihoods, and taking action for environmental justice. www.ienearth.org

Beyond Talk invites you to take the Climate Pledge of Resistance and participate in actions this fall leading up to November 30 and beyond. www.beyondtalk.net

The Mobilization for Climate Justice is preparing for the November 30 Day of Action to send a clear signal to elected officials in advance of the Copenhagen Climate Negotiations. www.actforclimatejustice.org

Tracking Progress

The websites below can keep you up to date on developments in climate legislation and will closely track the climate negotiations in Copenhagen. 

The Natural Resources Defense Council is one of the nation's most effective environmental action group, combining the grassroots power of 1.3 million members and online activists with the courtroom clout and expertise of more than 350 lawyers, scientists and other professionals. www.nrdc.org

Bioneers holds workshops and conferences focusing on biological and cultural diversity, as well as ecology, sustainability, traditional farming, community-building, and social justice. www.bioneers.org

Climate Progress provides links to blogs, articles, and websites by climate experts offering a variety of progressive views on climate solutions and policy. www.climateprogress.org

The Copenhagen Climate Council is a global collaboration to create awareness of the importance of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP15, in Copenhagen and to ensure support and assistance to global decision-makers when agreeing on a new climate treaty. 

COP15 is the official site of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Includes calendar, facts, blog, forum, and more. cop15.dk

Desmogblog provides up-to-date discussions on climate change and policy. www.desmogblog.com

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration works to keep citizens informed about environmental change. Their website provides news, links, and blogs about the latest environmental changes. www.noaa.gov/climate.html

CoolPlanet2009.org is part of the U.N.-led Seal the Deal Campaign that aims to galvanize political will and public support for reaching a comprehensive global climate agreement in Copenhagen in December. www.coolplanet2009.org

The World View of Global Warming Project documents climate change through science photography from the Arctic to Antarctica, from glaciers to oceans, across all climate zones. www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org

Current TV offers independent coverage of climate actions and negotiations as well as practical green living tips. current.com/green

Legal Planet, a collaboration between the UC Berkeley School of Law and UCLA School of Law, provides insight and analysis on energy and environmental law and policy. Their blogs respond the global challenge of climate change and seek out solutions. www.legalplanet.wordpress.com

EcoEquity is focused on developing and promoting climate solutions that are just enough to actually work.  www.ecoequity.org

Economics for Equity and the Environment: E3 Network is a network of economists who are developing and applying economic arguments for active protection of human health and the natural environment. www.e3network.org

Research and Data

Resources that will take you through some of the more in-depth research and science on climate change.  

The U.S. Global Change Research Program coordinates and integrates federal research on changes in the global environment and their implications for society www.globalchange.gov

The Climate Change Resource Center is a reference website for resource managers and decision makers who need information and tools to address climate change in planning and project implementation. www.fs.fed.us/ccrc/

Post Carbon Institute  is a megaphone for some of the world's best thinking on the 21st century's global sustainability crisis. www.postcarbon.org

The World Resources Institute encourages people to live in a way that protects the earth. Our environmental challenges are complex and therefore require well-thought solutions. To this end, the institute organizes its work to answer these challenges and help people create their own solutions by offering environmental news and links to additional resources. www.wri.org

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the nobel Peace Prize winning body for the assessment of climate change, established by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, provides a clear scientific view on the current state of climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic consequences. www.ipcc.ch

The American Wind Energy Association works to promote wind power through advocacy, communication, and education. The association's website provides information on wind energy policy, legislation, news, and ways to educate yourself in this area. www.awea.org

EPA Climate Change offers comprehensive information on climate change in a way that is accessible and meaningful to all communities, individuals, businesses, and governments. www.epa.gov/climatechange

The Climate Ark is an Internet search tool that provides access to climate change and renewable energy conservation news, information retrieval tools, and original analysis and action opportunities. www.climateark.org

The Climate Institute website offers basic information on climate change, rising sea levels, and human health impacts. www.climate.org

The US Climate Emergency Council is a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping climate change. The council provides information, links, and resources for global warming activists.  www.climateemergency.org

The Hadley Centre is the most prominent research center on climate change in the U.K. and is part of the U.K. Meteorological Office. Their website maintains a guide with facts on climate change and the effect it has on our lives and our planet. www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/hadleycentre

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is one of the leading institutes studying climate change. Their website links to studies, discussions, and articles on climate change. www.ldeo.columbia.edu

EnergyBoom is a global leader in news information about the renewable energy sector, offering expert analysis to keep readers on the cutting edge of the renewable energy world. www.energyboom.com

Climate Action Library

The Age of Stupid: a climate change film from Franny Armstrong. www.ageofstupid.net

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore (St. Martin's Press, 2006) ties into the documentary film of the same name, which rallied public interest in climate change. Here, Gore presents evidence that climate change is not question and outlines the possible outcomes of climate change if we sit idle and fail to act.

Carbon Detox: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Real About Climate Change by George Marshall (Gaia Books, 2007). A psychologist offers a provocative and entertaining approach to climate change, and looks at why we find it so hard to believe that climate change is real.

Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free by Arjun Makhijani and in partnership with the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER Press and RDR Books, 2007), is a road map for an energy policy that will lead the U.S. away from climate disaster and toward a sustainable future.

The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming by Guy Dauncey (New Society Publishers, 2009) draws on working solutions from around the world, and lays out the best actions for students and scientists, musicians and mayors, policy-makers and presidents, showing how it is possible to reduce our carbon footprint to almost zero by 2040.

Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan (Greystone Books, 2009) indicts climate change deniers and parses out the confusion over climate change created by deniers and media coverage of climate change.

Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse by David W. Orr (Oxford University Press, 2009) calls for a change in our deepest values and from there describes what we need to change and that we need to do so now.

High Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis by Mark Lynas (Picador 2004) underlines the importance of America's role in taking decisive climate change action.

Less is More: Embracing Simplicity for a Healthy Planet, a Caring Economy and Lasting Happiness by Cecile Andrews (New Society Publishers 2009) presents a new version of happiness that is based on human connections and relationships rather than the consumption of material goods. Andrews explains what simplicity means, then looks to solutions and policies that work toward embracing simplicity.

Local Action, by Tommy Linstroth and Ryan Bell (University of Vermont Press, 2007) looks at the power of small, local actions in addressing global warming and bringing about positive change.

Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity by Tom Crompton and Tim Kasser (Green Books, 2009) is a publication of WWF-UK’s Strategies for Change Project that intends to stimulate wide and critical debate--not just among the environmental movement, but more generally.

No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process by Colin Beavan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) takes you through a family's one year experiment of living impact-free in an apartment in New York.

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore (Rodale Books, 2009) follows up on the film An Inconvenient Truth gathers the most effective solutions to the climate crisis.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas (National Geographic, 2008) compiles global-warming information from an array of authoritative scientists and describes his findings in six chapters representing the consequences of a one- to six-degree shift in temperature rise.

The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change is a 20-minute film by Annie Leonard that transforms how we think about our lives and our relationship to the planet and offers hope that change is within reach. The film is available online at www.storyofstuff.com

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries and has consequences that will endure for all time—and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next five to 10 years. A bigger rise of three to four degrees Celsius—the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction—would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the U.S. Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's U.N. climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided—and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tons of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

No Fairness, No Deal
Equity is the only way to break the climate stalemate between the Global South and the North.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere—three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialized world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down—with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe," must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance—and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature."

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial was published by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved.