Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [112]
Much of big business—embodied in the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Western Fuels Association, the International Petroleum Institute—pushes back hard against climate legislation. As London’s Guardian reported, by the summer of 2009 America’s oil, gas, and coal industries had increased their antigreen lobbying budgets by 50 percent, “with key players spending $44.5m in the first three months” of that year.20 Comprehensive climate legislation in the United States indeed failed. And that helped undermine the UNFCCC talks in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancún the following year.
In the face of these setbacks some US greens refocused on more local and confrontational strategies. Exemplary in this was the fight against coal during the first decade of this century led by the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, numerous local outfits, and, more recently, Greenpeace. These anticoal campaigns have used mass protest and direct action, like mountaintop occupations, as well as financial and political pressure to halt construction of 130 proposed new coal plants.21
Other, more media-oriented organizations also exist, like 350.org—the name refers to 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, beyond which dangerous climate change is likely. That group, started by environmental writer Bill McKibben and some of his students at Middlebury College, has done amazing work in educating the global public about the scientific realities of climate change and the idea of thresholds and tipping points. But as Henry Miller says toward the end of Tropic of Capricorn, “It is the essence of symbols to be symbolic.”22 Political power, like economic power, is ultimately made of thicker stuff—bodies, labor, nature, the things and places that bodies have built, and the physical violence that controls bodies.
Resistance South
Act One
It was late May 2005, and Bolivia was in the grip of massive multi-week-long protests—the people, most of them Quechan and Aymaran Indians, wanted Bolivia’s natural gas industry to be nationalized. A general strike had been called. And now, a huge march was descending from El Alto to La Paz. The protesters were trade unionists, miners, teachers, and landless peasants. Their destination was the Congress and Presidential Palace, in front of which stood serried ranks of riot police.
As they approached, the marchers smashed out the windows of the few minibuses that had ignored the movement’s strike order. When they met the police lines, some miners tossed small charges of dynamite. Windows shattered up and down the block; police fell back and blocked the blasts with their Plexiglas shields, then answered with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. Back and forth the battle went continued for three weeks. With La Paz and most of Bolivia’s other major cities blockaded, food and fuel ran low; buses and taxis sat stranded. Protesters occupied several gas fields and a pipeline station. It had been five hundred years of theft and abuse, the indigenous people of Bolivia wanted justice.
Act Two
Six months later I was back in Bolivia. Awakening in a shabby La Paz hotel after a long night flight, I turned on the TV. To my surprise, onscreen sat Raul Prada, a short, thickset Marxist intellectual with permanently bent eyeglasses. The last time I’d seen Prada he was in the streets dodging tear gas with the masses. Now an adviser to President Evo Morales—yes, president, what a difference a year makes—Prada was explaining why the government had nationalized a big part of Bolivia’s natural gas industry.
There were other changes as well. Morales had promised to go beyond gas, announcing plans to renationalize mining and forestry and to confiscate and redistribute unused ranch lands, boost the minimum wage,