Surviving Climate Change: Producing Less and Enjoying it More

Panel 8: Overcoming Barriers to Environmental Sanity
Sunday, June 29, 2:00 — 3:30 pm

Zaki Baruti is an organizer of the petition drive to recall Francis Slay as mayor of St. Louis. He is President General of the Universal African Peoples Organization, Co-chair of the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression, and Co-chair of the Green Party of St. Louis.

Mary Ann McGivern is the Director of Project COPE, a prisoner reentry program. She is with the Sisters of Loretto, a board member of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis, and has spent most of her life work opposing military spending.

Where your treasure is, there your heart is also. Simply put, we won’t survive global warming if we keep making and using weapons. We cannot solve problems piecemeal. All the systems underlying our problems — human rights, ecology, military, economic, labor, energy, production, among others — work together. We must work on them together as we move toward solutions.

Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris’s new book is Gaveling Down the Rabble: How “Free Trade” is Stealing Our Democracy (2008). “Help, I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up” and other essays appeared in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. She has been an activist, teacher, and writer since the 1970s.

The current set of Constitutional Protections for Corporations are the “separate but equal” of our time. We must understand and surmount them if we are to make any progress toward our common goals. Jane Anne Morris will give an overview of Constitutional Obstacles that face those of us in the US seeking to fashion a sustainable world.

Though many people think of the US Constitution as something that protects human beings (that’s “natural” persons, in legalese), it has most often and most effectively been used to protect corporate persons — corporations.

Judges and corporate lawyers have worked out a series of Constitutional protections that shield corporations against laws that we the people pass to see to our general welfare. Though mostly unknown outside of the legal profession, these protections constitute substantial obstacles to any democratic, “green” project.

Long-time labor activist Kim Scipes has worked on domestic and global labor issues for two decades. He has written about the Green Party, the need to go beyond electoral politics, and the interrelationship between production and the environment. A Chicago resident, he is a sociology professor at Purdue University.

One of the strengths of the left/alternative movement in general is the myriad of projects/activities going on in this country and the world. Yet there is no overarching goal as to what we are seeking, so we are all scattered, not seeing how advances in one area advance us in others. So, I ask: What do we want to achieve? How can we achieve it? How do we begin putting together a plan?

We must consciously develop a goal, and then strategies that help us reach this goal, and then develop our tactics to achieve these strategies. Notice that I’m using the plural — strategies — not singular, since there many, many ways to move us toward a common goal. I’m going to suggest this goal: that we want to create a way of life that includes a standard of living that every person in the world could live at comfortably (not extravagantly), but which is both environmentally and economically sustainable over the long term. Three key questions can help guide our efforts to help us achieve the goal:

1. How can we organize production to achieve this standard of living for every person on the globe that creates minimum environmental damage?
2. How do we organize this production: will it be top-down, shit- roll-down-hill, or will it be decentralized, democratic and egalitarian?
3. And how can we most equitably distribute this production?