10
September 2013
CATALYSTMAGAZINE.NET
CHANGE AGENTS
Action Camp! CATALYST’s favorite catalyst shares her week-long experience learning about climate justice. BY NAOMI SILVERSTONE
Editor’s note: Naomi Silverstone’s activism goes back to 1964 when she was an exchange student to Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. After Bobby Kennedy was killed, she worked on the presidential campaign of Hubert Horatio Humphrey and has been campaigning for progressive candidates ever since. (Factual text comes from the Canyon Country Action Camp welcome packet.) s a longtime activist I did not expect to be blown away by the Canyon Country Action Camp held for a week in July at Swasey’s Beach in Green River. The purpose of the week-long event was to empower and educate people to become regional organizers and leaders in the fight for climate justice and a livable future.
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Climate justice means recognizing and working at the intersections of environmental degradation and the racial, social, and economic inequalities it perpetuates. First, there were the young people —those in their 20s and 30s who understand that climate justice is the human rights struggle of our time and that it is inextricably linked to global economic justice. They were looking for new ways to impact not only individual behavior but also the fossil fuel industries that are at the center of the global economic system. There were a handful of elders— those of us who have been through many campaigns over the past five decades and are grateful for youthful and middle-aged compatriots. We are still learning, active, and
People stopped work at the Seep Ridge Road public highway project, which is intended to accelerate destruction of the East Tavaputs Plateau for extreme extraction projects, including tar sands strip mining.
wanting to be involved in the most important issue of our time. There were the big thinkers, such as our local gem of a historian, lawyer Rebecca Hall, who searched social movement history for lessons to be learned in the fight for climate justice. While we rely on strategies and tactics from the Civil Rights movement, Rebecca suggested that what we are attempting in disrupting the fossil fuel industry has more in common with the movement in the late 1700s and early 1800s to abolish the slave trade. Our goal is fundamental systems change in the world economic order, much like the challenge faced by those for whom slavery was intrinsic to their economic system. Today the stakes are the short-term profits of large corporations and a small group of individuals vs. the air, water, land and food that are the ultimate infrastructure of human civilization. The 100-plus attendees included 14 members of indigenous nations —those who have known that in this web of life we are all connected and from whom we continue to learn. Representatives from the Dineh (Navajo) and Lakota Nations graced us with their wisdom, knowledge, commitment, singing, prayers and drumming. Information-packed teaching sessions were led by professionals from nongovernmental (NGO) organizations and others who are in for the long haul in this defining worldwide struggle. Their expertise was both deep and wide, ranging across issues from land and water management, fossil fuel extraction, techniques of community organizing, legal rights and media management. The veteran experts built a solid foundation, helping attendees connect the dots among power, inequality and climate change; introducing concepts and practical applications of nonviolent direct action; and explaining technical issues related to tar sands, oil shale and energy development in our region and, in particular, our state. US Oil Sands, a subsidiary of the Canadian company that wants to build the Keystone XL Pipeline through the middle of the U.S., holds roughly 32,000 acres of leases of state public lands at PR Springs (north of I-70 along the Colorado border), and the BLM