[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Jeremy Brecher - 'Climate Protection : The New Insurgency'

[Michel Bauwens]

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Date: Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 9:01 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Jeremy Brecher - 'Climate
Protection : The New Insurgency'
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From: Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net>
Date: 28 June 2014 14:08
Subject: [WSF-Discuss] Jeremy Brecher - 'Climate Protection : The New
Insurgency'
To: Post WSFDiscuss <WorldSocialForum-Discuss at openspaceforum.net>,
Post Social Movements Riseup <social-movements at lists.riseup.net>, Post
CJN! <cjn at lists.riseup.net>, Post India Climate Justice
<indiaclimatejustice at googlegroups.com>, Post WRI Cape Town 2014
<southafrica2014conference at lists.wri-irg.org>
Cc: Jai Sen <jai.sen at cacim.net>, Richard Falk <rfalk at princeton.edu>


Saturday, 28 June 2014

Resisting the War on Mother Earth, Reclaiming Our Home

Continuing my posts in solidarity with the theme workshops on
Resisting the War on Mother Earth, Reclaiming Our Home at the War
Resisters’ International Conference taking place in Cape Town next
week (July 4-8; http://wri-irg.org/southafrica2014), here is a classic
essay by Jeremy Brecher that looks at what ‘needs to be done’ in the
emerging context of climate-change-that-is-war – and that, the author
argues, is already happening – and crucially, the moral and political
principle underlying such action :

“Protecting our climate requires more than lobbying and more than
“civil disobedience.” It requires a new understanding of how we [can]
relate to the law–and how can enforce it ourselves when governments
fail.

“When 30 climate protestors from 18 countries protested drilling at an
Arctic oil platform operated by Gazprom, they represented the people
of the world taking a symbolic stand against climate destruction, the
corporate climate destroyers, and the governments that back them. But
the action of the Arctic 30 may be prophetic of something more : The
emergence of a global insurgency that challenges the very legitimacy
of those who are destroying our planet.

“Insurgencies are social movements, but movements of a special type :
They reject current rulers’ claims to legitimate authority.
Insurgencies often develop from movements that initially make no
direct challenge to established authority but eventually conclude that
one is necessary to realize their objectives. To effectively protect
the earth’s climate and our species’ future, the climate protection
movement may have to become such an insurgency.”

For a full presentation, see the Foreign Policy In Focus report, "A
Nonviolent Insurgency for Climate Protection?

Richard Falk, a US American professor emeritus of international law
and the UN Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, has the following
comment on the full report :

“I have just read your full discussion paper, ‘Global Nonviolent
Law-Enforcing Insurgency..’.  It is an exceptionally valuable
contribution to thought, feeling, and action on this greatest
challenge that has ever confronted humanity as a whole, and points to
the biological vulnerability of the multiple fragmentations (state
sovereignty, identity politics, nationalism, etc.) that structurally
and ideologically inhibit the capacity to address the most urgent
collective action problems.

“Along these lines, the one area that you might consider adding some
observations, that is, if you share my assessment is this : The
failure to respond to the climate change challenge so far suggests a
rather weak species will to survive. In other words, the human species
seems vulnerable from this bio-political perspective that has not been
previously at risk except possibly in relation to nuclear weaponry,
and the evidence there is also not encouraging.”

            In my understanding, the arguments put forward by Jeremy
Brecher in this paper and that underlie it – and, as above, as
developed in his full report - provide a vital basis for the
fundamental discussions that we need to have today of what we need to
do in the world that we live in : At the WRI Conference in Cape Town,
and elsewhere.

            JS

(As added information, Jeremy Brecher has now expanded his arguments
into a book due out later this year, presently titled ‘Climate
Insurgency : Taking Charge Of Our Planet’.)



Climate Protection : The New Insurgency

Faced with the failure of conventional lobbying, the climate
protection movement is now turning to mass civil disobedience—but we
can take it further still.

By Jeremy Brecher, December 10, 2013.

This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and
TruthOut. For a longer presentation, see the Foreign Policy In Focus
report, “A Nonviolent Insurgency for Climate Protection?“ -
http://fpif.org/nonviolent-insurgency-climate-protection/

When 30 climate protestors from 18 countries protested drilling at an
Arctic oil platform operated by Gazprom, they represented the people
of the world taking a symbolic stand against climate destruction, the
corporate climate destroyers, and the governments that back them. But
the action of the Arctic 30 may be prophetic of something more: The
emergence of a global insurgency that challenges the very legitimacy
of those who are destroying our planet.

The 2013 Fifth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
confirmed that humans are destroying the earth’s climate. But it also
revealed something even more alarming: Twenty-five years of human
effort to protect the climate have failed even to slow the forces that
are destroying it. On the contrary, the rate of increase in carbon
emissions from burning fossil fuels tripled between the release of the
first IPCC report in 1988 and today.

Scientists and climate protection advocates once expected that
rational leaders and institutions would respond appropriately to the
common threat of climate change. As Bill McKibben said of Jim Hansen
and himself, “I think he thought, as did I, if we get this set of
facts out in front of everybody, they’re so powerful — overwhelming —
that people will do what needs to be done.”

It didn’t work. Those who are fighting to save the climate need a new
strategy. One such strategy to consider is a global nonviolent
law-enforcing insurgency.

A nonviolent insurgency

Insurgencies are social movements, but movements of a special type:
They reject current rulers’ claims to legitimate authority.
Insurgencies often develop from movements that initially make no
direct challenge to established authority but eventually conclude that
one is necessary to realize their objectives. To effectively protect
the earth’s climate and our species’ future, the climate protection
movement may have to become such an insurgency.

The term “insurgency” is generally associated with an armed rebellion
against an established government. Its aim may be to overthrow the
existing government, but it may also aim to change it or simply to
protect people against it. Whatever its means and ends, the hallmark
of such an insurgency is to deny the legitimacy of established state
authority and to assert the legitimacy of its own actions.

A nonviolent insurgency pursues similar objectives by different means.
Like an armed insurgency, it does not accept the limits on its action
imposed by the powers-that-be. But unlike an armed insurgency, it
eschews violence and instead expresses power by mobilizing people for
various forms of nonviolent mass action.

After closely following the massive strikes, general strikes, street
battles, peasant revolts, and military mutinies of the Russian
Revolution of 1905 that forced the czar to grant a constitution,
Mohandas (not yet dubbed “Mahatma”) Gandhi concluded, “Even the most
powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” Shortly
thereafter he launched his first civil disobedience campaign,
proclaiming “We too can resort to the Russian remedy against tyranny.”

The powers responsible for climate change could not rule for a day
without the acquiescence of those whose lives and future they are
destroying. They are only able to continue their destructive course
because others enable or acquiesce in it. It is the ordinary activity
of people — going to work, paying taxes, buying products, obeying
government officials, staying off private property — that continually
re-creates the power of the powerful. A nonviolent climate insurgency
can be powerful if it withdraws that cooperation from the
powers-that-be.

Why a law-enforcing insurgency?

Faced with the failure of conventional lobbying and political
“pressure group” activity, much of the climate protection movement is
now turning to mass civil disobedience, as witnessed by the campaigns
against the Keystone XL pipeline, mountaintop removal coal mining,
coal-fired power plants, and Arctic oil drilling. Such civil
disobedience, while generally recognizing the legitimacy of the law,
refuses to obey it in specific instances.

Civil disobedience represents moral protest, but it does not in itself
challenge the legal validity of the government or other institutions
against which it is directed. Rather, it claims that the obligation to
oppose their immoral actions — whether discriminating against a class
of people or conducting an immoral war or destroying the climate — is
more binding on individuals than the normal duty to obey the law.

A law-enforcing insurgency goes a step further. It declares a set of
laws and policies themselves illegal and sets out to establish law
through nonviolent self-help. Such insurgents view those who they are
disobeying as merely persons claiming to represent legitimate
authority — but who are themselves violating the law under what’s
known as “color of law,” or the false pretense of authority. So “civil
disobedience” is actually obedience to law and a form of law
enforcement.

Social movements that engage in civil disobedience often draw strength
from the claim that their actions are not only moral, but that they
represent an effort to enforce fundamental legal and constitutional
principles flouted by the authorities they are disobeying. And they
strengthen a movement’s appeal to the public by presenting its action
not as wanton law breaking but as an effort to rectify governments and
institutions that are themselves in violation of the law.

For the civil rights movement, the constitution’s guarantee of equal
rights meant that sit-inners and freedom riders were not criminals but
rather upholders of constitutional law. For the struggle against
apartheid, racism was a violation of internationally guaranteed human
rights. For war resisters from Vietnam to Iraq, the national and
international laws forbidding war crimes defined civil disobedience
not as interference with legal, democratic governments but rather as a
legal obligation of citizens. For the activists of Solidarity, the
nonviolent revolution that overthrew Communism in Poland was not
criminal sedition but an effort to implement the international human
and labor rights law ratified by their own government.

These examples seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the movement
participants appear to be resisting the constituted law and the
officials charged with implementing it. On the other, they are
claiming to act on the basis of law — in fact to be implementing the
law themselves against the opposition of lawless states.

Law professor and historian James Gray Pope has developed a concept of
“constitutional insurgency” to understand such cases. A constitutional
insurgency, or what might be called a “law-enforcing insurgency,” is a
social movement that rejects current constitutional doctrine but that
“rather than repudiating the Constitution altogether, draws on it for
inspiration and justification.” Pope detailed how the American labor
movement long insisted that the right to strike was protected by the
13th amendment to the constitution, which forbade any form of
“involuntary servitude.” Injunctions to limit strikes were therefore
unconstitutional. Although courts disregarded this claim, the radical
Industrial Workers of the World told its members to “disobey and treat
with contempt all judicial injunctions,” and the “normally staid”
American Federation of Labor maintained that a worker confronted with
an unconstitutional injunction had an imperative duty to “refuse
obedience and to take whatever consequences may ensue.”

Why climate destruction is illegal

The Justinian Code, issued by the Roman Emperor in 535 A.D., defined
the concept of res communes (common things): “By the law of nature
these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea
and consequently the shores of the sea.” The right of fishing in the
sea from the shore “belongs to all men.”

Based on the Justinian Code’s protection of res communes, governments
around the world have long served as trustees for rights held in
common by the people. In U.S. law this role is defined by the public
trust doctrine, under which the government serves as public trustee on
behalf of present and future generations. Even if the state holds
title, the public is the “beneficial owner.” As trustee, the state has
a “fiduciary duty” to the owner — a legal duty to act solely in the
owners’ interest with “the highest duty of care.” The principle is
recognized today in both common law and civil law systems in countries
ranging from South Africa to the Philippines and from the United
States to India.

On Mother’s Day, 2011, the youth organization Kids vs. Global Warming
organized the “iMatter March” of young people in 160 communities in 45
countries, including the United States, Russia, Brazil, New Zealand,
and Great Britain. Concurrently, the Atmospheric Trust Litigation
Project brought suits and petitions on behalf of young people in all
50 U.S. states to require the federal and state governments to fulfill
their obligation to protect the atmosphere as a common property.
Speaking to one of the rallies, 16-year-old Alec Loorz, founder of
Kids v. Global Warming and lead plaintiff in the Federal lawsuit,
said:

Today, I and other fellow young people are suing the government, for
handing over our future to unjust fossil fuel industries, and ignoring
the right of our children to inherit the planet that has sustained all
of civilization. The government has a legal responsibility to protect
the future for our children. So we are demanding that they recognize
the atmosphere as a commons that needs to be preserved, and commit to
a plan to reduce emissions to a safe level.

Loorz concluded: “The plaintiffs and petitioners on all the cases are
young people. We are standing up for our future.”

A trustee has “an active duty of vigilance to ‘prevent decay or waste’
to the asset,” according to University of Oregon law professor Mary
Christina Wood, whose new book Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a
New Age lays out the legal basis for the suits. “Waste” means
“permanently damage.” If the asset is wasted in the interest of one
generation of beneficiaries over future generations, it is in effect
an act of “generational theft.”

Although so far the courts have turned down most of these atmospheric
public trust suits, the decisions are being appealed. On October 3,
2013, the Supreme Court of Alaska became the first state supreme court
to hear such an appeal.

A global climate insurgency

Compelling as the logic of the atmospheric public trust argument may
be, it is easy to imagine that many U.S. courts will refuse to force
governments to meet such obligations. In a brief to dismiss the Kansas
suit, lawyers called the claim “a child’s wish for a better world,”
which is not something a court can do much about.

The sad fact is that virtually all the governments on earth — and
their legal systems — are deeply corrupted by the very forces that
gain from destroying the global commons. They exercise illegitimate
power without regard to their obligations to those they claim to
represent, let alone to the common rights beneficiaries of other lands
and future generations to whom they also owe “the highest duty of
care.”

But protecting the atmosphere is not just a matter for governments.
Indeed, it is the failure of governments to protect the public trust
that is currently prompting the climate-protection movement to turn to
mass civil disobedience. Looked at from the perspective of the public
trust doctrine, these actions are far from lawless. Indeed, they
embody the effort of people around the world to assert their right and
responsibility to protect the public trust. They represent people
stepping in to provide law enforcement where corrupt and illegitimate
governments have failed to meet their responsibility to do so.

When the climate protection movement uses nonviolent direct action to
protect the public trust, it is often confronted by government
officials acting under color of law to perpetuate climate destruction.
The Arctic 30 were held at gunpoint, for example, and charged with
piracy. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said, “Concern for the
environment must not cover up unlawful actions.” A law-enforcing
climate insurgency will answer: Concern for oil company profits must
not cover up unlawful government complicity in destroying the
atmospheric public trust.

Jeremy Brecher is co-founder and core team member of the Labor Network
for Sustainability. He is the author of more than a dozen books on
labor and social movements and has received five regional Emmy awards
for his documentary film work. An updated edition of his labor history
Strike! (PM Press 2014) will include a new chapter on the working
class mini-revolts of the 21st century.
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