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The World Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights
By Nancy Romer, General Coordinator, Brooklyn Food Coalition
Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 19-22, 2010
plus the
Ten Year Celebration of the Bolivian Water Wars —
Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 15-18, 2010
The People’s World Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights was called by the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales. The conference, in Cochabamba Bolivia, confronted the realities of escalating climate change. How can we repair the earth? How can we get people and governments to take climate change seriously? How do we build the political will to act?
The Bolivians packed in two major conferences back-to-back. The first one, the Bolivian Water Wars 10th Anniversary Celebration, was more critical of the government of Bolivia and not officially sponsored by it; the second was an international phenomenon that lifted Bolivian President Evo Morales onto the world stage as a leader of the environmental movement. These two conferences told different stories, one inside, the other outside, each compelling and important in different ways.
The Bolivian Water Wars 10th Anniversary Celebration commemorated a movement started over the threat of privatizing the public water supply by a Bechtel subsidiary. Their guiding principle was: El Agua Es Un Derecho Para Todos—Water is a Right of Everyone. In 2000, trade unionists, indigenous folks, farmers, students and intellectuals organized to protect their dwindling and vulnerable public water system against the neoliberal Banzer government. This intensely democratic, grassroots coalition shut down the entire city of La Paz and inspired others across the nation to organize to protect not just water but natural resources in general, including gas. Their movement forced two governments to resign and finally elected socialist and indigenous Evo Morales to the presidency of this mostly indigenous nation.
The Water Wars Commemoration started on April 15th 2010 with a march of over 10,000 people through the streets of Cochabamba, and then offered panels of speakers for three days, including environmental, labor, indigenous, and women activists from many nations in the Western Hemisphere. While the event was celebratory, the subtext was critical of President Morales. Many criticized his flawed domestic policies: insufficient protection of dwindling and contaminated water, too much emphasis on “extractive” industries (e.g., gas, oil, iron, lithium) that contribute to climate change, lack of leadership on climate-friendly agriculture, and incursions on indigenous lands for mining and pipeline development. The mood was positive, but many stressed the importance of challenging the present Bolivian policies at the Climate Change conference.
On April 19th, all action shifted to the World Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights, located just a few miles outside of Cochabamba. Proposed by President Evo Morales after the comprehensive failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit earlier this year, the World Summit brought progressive thinkers and activists from all over the world to create an international plan to halt climate change. An estimated 30,000 people from 147 nations (mostly from the Western Hemisphere but also from Africa, Australia, New Zealand and South and East ) filled every hotel, hostel, and home available. Thousands of Europeans were unable to attend due to the ashes floating around Europe’s atmosphere from a recent volcano in Iceland. The presence and active participation of thousands of indigenous people was a powerful reminder of the tragically effective genocide against indigenous people in the Americas.
The most-repeated slogan was “System Change, Not Climate Change.” Over and over, presenters explained how the present economic and political system privileges corporate profit over the needs of the planet, and that if we don’t become better stewards of the earth immediately we will experience progressively mounting climate change that will make the lives of our grandchildren disastrous.
