Extinction Rebellion is facing a crunch point. If it is serious about addressing the root causes of environmental crises, it must either concede that some (indigenous, poor, black) lives are disposable – or else adopt an explicitly anti-capitalist stance. Only when it does the latter will the struggle begin in earnest.
In the meantime, the climate justice movement is being used for greenwashing, and indigenous people are facing serious repercussions.
Take the example of mining company BHP Billiton. This month it announced it had a new purpose: to “bring people and resources together to build a better world.” The brief mentioned BHP’s “strong record” on responsible business practice, the “billions of dollars” spent on social investment, its status as the only company in its sector with an “A” rating for climate disclosures. BHP also emphasised “respecting indigenous peoples” as a renewed priority.
Alvaro Ipuana, an indigenous leader from La Guajira, Colombia, tells a different story. Ipuana lives in the shadow of Cerrejón, the largest open cast coal mine in Latin America, co-owned by BHP. Its expansion over the last 20 years has forcibly displaced the Afro-descendant Tabaco people. According to campaigners and academics, it has also decimated the capacity for subsistence agriculture for its remaining indigenous Wayuu communities and polluted the rivers that once provided drinking water.
The region has been drought-stricken for years, and a 2017 Human Rights Watch report described the Wayuu as being in the throes of a “humanitarian crisis”. The locals lay the blame squarely at the feet of the multinationals.
Cerrejón claims it has invested $19.6m to improve water access for affected Wayuu communities, and blames regional government for the continued plight of the Tabaco people displaced by its mine.
But, as Ipuana explains, “The resources that have been assigned to counter the impacts caused by the mining were not definitive solutions to the problem. Their concept of development isn’t functional for indigenous communities.”
This explanation cuts to the core of an emerging tension in the rejuvenated climate justice movement. While Extinction Rebellion’s focus on net zero carbon emissions is understandable, it ignores extractivism – the large-scale exploitation of natural resources for export – which often makes up the core of “green infrastructure” projects. This has fatal consequences.
Cerrejón is just one example of BHP’s “social investment” MO. The company is currently fighting one of the biggest legal claims ever filed in a British court over the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history. When a tailings dam burst at Samarco, whole villages were wiped out by the waste sludge from the iron ore plant. Rejecting all charges leveled at the company for accountability, co-owner BHP instead set up a foundation to dispense compensation at its own discretion.
Now BHP wants to wear the clothes of the climate activists. Its chair Ken MacKenzie even claimed at last week’s AGM that “mining is the locomotive of the future on climate change”. Minerals like lithium, cobalt and copper are key for many of the alternatives to fossil fuel-based infrastructure. But large-scale “greening” projects that rely heavily on unsustainable mining for finite minerals under indigenous land necessarily entail exploitation – of nature and of people.
As Extinction Rebellion protests drew headlines, Ipuana joined activists from Chile and Brazil in protest at that AGM in Westminster. The Latin-American representatives accuse the multinational of “greenwashing” – plastering over its exploitation of people and resources with buzzwords and empty gestures.
The briefing released of the meeting shows that companies like BHP recognise the need to placate investor concerns around climate breakdown, and so are trying to rebrand themselves as ethical companies committed to a transition towards green industry. It doesn’t seem to matter that black and brown communities have been fighting this battle for generations with their bodies on the line. The investor is the ultimate customer and, increasingly, today’s investors want to believe their money isn’t funding their grandchildren’s death warrant.
Across Europe, Extinction Rebellion has succeeded against the odds in making climate breakdown a public priority. Its broad-church approach of remaining avowedly “apolitical” (i.e. not anti-capitalist) made sense initially, bringing together a wide coalition from across the political spectrum. As the national conversation begins to move towards specific policy and infrastructure objectives, however, what I see as XR’s reluctance to tackle extractivism threatens to give carte blanche to governments and corporations who are happy to shift the burden of climate destruction onto poor and indigenous communities of colour in the global South.
In solidarity with those risking violence and incarceration on the front lines, XR needs to ensure that the relentless extractivism that damages lives, livelihoods and ecosystems in parts of the global South is not the basis of its fight for net zero carbon emissions here in the UK.
And yet extractivism is a necessary component of an economic model predicated on exponential growth. It is impossible to combat without identifying its roots in colonial capitalism.
This leaves Extinction Rebellion with a choice to make: either it ignores the ecological devastation wreaked by corporations, or it commits itself to tackling the root cause of that devastation. If it is truly internationalist, it must recognise that climate struggle is class struggle. If it values all bodies equally, it must denounce capitalism itself.
Fuente:https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/extinction-rebellion-climate-crisis-bhp-mining-coal-colombia-a9167601.html?fbclid=IwAR3nO9yZ_zsAdysdT6hTJatBpLWkr0hAOBBH8YUvkWgDigrV_CbIcxgZ2Uk
Al menos 15 personas murieron, 6 se encontraban desaparecidas y 16 fueron hospitalizadas tras el derrumbe de una represa ilegal de una mina de oro en Siberia. El hundimiento del dique tuvo lugar en el río Seiba, en la región de Krasnoyarsk, y provocó la inundación de las instalaciones para los trabajadores, en las que vivían las víctimas, según las autoridades rusas. Al parecer, la represa se construyó sin respetar la normativa y las autoridades no tenían conocimiento de la misma. Se abrió una investigación por violación de las normas de seguridad. Este hecho confirma, una vez más, la enorme cantidad de irregularidades que existen en todo el mundo en la actividad minera.
Antes del desarrollo humano en la región, había 1.8 millones de hectáreas de bosque de pinos rojos. Y se mantiene en total solo el 1%. El bosque de pinos rojos de Wolf Lake es el bosque de pinos rojos más grande del mundo y es tres veces más grande que otros bosques similares.
Las aguas del mar mediterráneo continúan recibiendo metales disueltos del depósito de residuos mineros de la bahía de Portmán (Murcia) 25 años después del cese de la actividad minera.
Moscú. Al menos 15 personas murieron y seis se encontraban desaparecidas tras el derrumbe el sábado de una represa ilegal de una mina de oro en Siberia, Rusia.
Hablar de “cambio climático” es una operación discursiva para naturalizar los efectos producidos por determinadas actividades de explotación intensiva del planeta como las extractivas. Se utiliza la idea de “clima” con la intención de asociar procesos que derivan de la agresiva intervención de las multinacionales extractivas sobre los territorios a fenómenos naturales. El uso masivo del concepto apunta a desresponsabilizar a quienes alteran las condiciones del planeta con total desprecio por la vida como la industria minera. La aceleración del calentamiento de la tierra por la producción de gases invernaderos y evaporación de aguas no tiene nada de natural.
Cuatro defensores ambientales de los derechos humanos viajan desde América Latina al Reino Unido para 
Valdeflórez es un paraje situado a unos tres kilómetros de Cáceres donde existió actividad minera hasta los años setenta. Ahora puede volver a operar si prospera el proyecto de explotación de litio desarrollado por la empresa Tecnología Extremeña del Litio (propiedad de la australiana Infinity Lithium, con un 75%, y el grupo español Sacyr, con el 25%). El plan lo sacó a concurso en 2016 la Junta de Extremadura tras verificar que el yacimiento era muy rico en litio. Sin embargo, ha tenido la oposición creciente de grupos políticos locales (incluido el PSOE, ahora al frente de la alcaldía, y el PP, que lo estaba antes), organizaciones vecinales y ecologistas, que han frenado que la corporación municipal otorgue el permiso de cambio de uso del suelo.
La sociedad moderna depende de metales como el cobre, el oro y el níquel para usos que van desde la medicina hasta la electrónica.
“El sector privado busca hacer el espacio más accesible, yendo más allá de lo que ha ido la NASA”, dijo en una entrevista a Efe el periodista y escritor Christian Davenport, en referencia a la agencia espacial estadounidense.