General Discussion

marmar

(77,081 posts) Fri Jan 11, 2013, 09:05 AM Jan 2013

Bill McKibben: Idle No More Rises to Defend Ancestral Lands—and the Planet

from YES! Magazine:

Idle No More Rises to Defend Ancestral Lands—and the Planet
Bill McKibben on the tradition of environmental activism he’s seen among members of First Nations, and the unique role of the Idle No More movement in the fight against climate change.

by Bill McKibben
posted Jan 10, 2013

I don't claim to know exactly what's going on with #IdleNoMore, the surging movement of indigenous activists that started late last year in Canada and is now spreading across the continent—much of the action, from hunger strikes to road and rail blockades, is in scattered and remote places, and even as people around the world plan for solidarity actions on Friday, the press has done a poor job of bringing it into focus.

But I sense that it's every bit as important as the Occupy movement that transfixed the world a year ago; it feels like it wells up from the same kind of long-postponed and deeply felt passion that powered the Arab Spring. And I know firsthand that many of its organizers are among the most committed and skilled activists I've ever come across.

In fact, if Occupy's weakness was that it lacked roots (it had to take over public places, after all, which proved hard to hold on to), this new movement's great strength is that its roots go back farther than history. More than any other people on this continent, Native Americans know what exploitation and colonization are all about, and so it's natural that at a moment of great need they're leading the resistance to the most profound corporatization we've ever seen. I mean, we've just come off the hottest year ever in America, the year when we broke the Arctic ice cap; the ocean is 30 percent more acidic than it was when I was born.

Thanks to the same fossil fuel industry that's ripping apart aboriginal lands, we're at the very end of our rope as a species; it's time, finally, to listen to the people we've spent the last five centuries shunting to one side. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/idle-no-more-rises-to-defend-ancestral-lands-and-fight-climate-change-bill-mckibben